The Val'ta Class Long-Range Exploration Ship is a large scouting vessel designed to operate under isolation at extreme distances from known space independently. It is capable of holding additional smaller vessels inside itself and serves as a mother-ship; supporting drop-ships, shuttles and fighters.

Its ability to independently explore strange spaces is further supplemented with manufacturing systems and a quantum node data transmission system, meaning the Val'ta is able to upgrade and alter itself to suit its specific mission as time goes on. As such, no two Val'ta's would truly ever be alike after launching and returning after an extended tour of duty.

Originally constructed in a different universe with strange materials, the only built and maiden LSDF Val'ta vessel was transported along with the rest of the Lorath Fleet, pending some very quick refits to ensure the vessel would not destroy itself upon arrival. Once successfully transposed, the Val'ta underwent a further series of refits using local materials to return to an operational state.

At its roots, the Val'ta was designed to survive far away from support or friendly units, operating deep inside of unknown territory. To this end, the Val'ta can not only survive and be adapted for harsh conditions, but features a means of recovering resources, manufacturing replacement parts for itself and crew, and constructing a group of support vessels and units based on transmitted schematics in order maximize its capabilities.

As a result, the Val'ta should be thought of as a moving base of operations, being much larger than most common gunships but smaller than outright battle-ships. Many sensitive parts, usually only seen in factories or materials refinement operations are volatile or delicate, and for this reason¹⁾ the components are stored in a volumetric compression to reduce the exterior profile of the Val'ta.

It is further supplemented by DENDRITE, a specialized implementation of the apparition wake array, able to act as an enormous plasma antennae that can be reshaped adhoc to perform specialist sensor sweeps, create special fields and perform a wide variety of scientific operations, replacing otherwise very large and specialized equipment.

Unrelated to the motto of individual units deployed in the field, the overriding drive or 'soul' of the Val'ta. Val'ta is a Lorath word for Nomad, and comes from the phrase Ib Bur'surm Val'ta, meaning The Tireless Nomad. Ib Bur'surm Val'ta is a common archetype appearing in classical Lorath plays characterised by endless wanderlust, resourcefulness, and mobility, knowing many people and places, but at the cost of never staying with them for long.

• Sausade - An immense melancholy or longing for a place (eg; to look upon the moon and know one cannot walk upon it, and to feel sad and unsatisfied with this but to find warmth and comfort in the fantasy that others have been there and that you too might some day
• Wanderlust - The all consuming urge to always be moving, to lust the sense of going to new places
• Fernweh - To resent stillness, to fantasize about how much better the next destination will be, to fixate on the idea that relocating will solve all problems, that a person might find what they're looking for in that future
• Nomad - A person who is unable to settle, who lives by travel and exists purely through relocation - often indigenous to a given space and adapted to survive in that environment.

The shape of the Val'ta is almost fighter-like with a distinct nose section resembling a curved sword, extruded fusalage, and what resemble nacelles either side merged into the main body. Long wing-like pylons are extruded behind the hull, splayed out like fingers or horns. A pair of shoulder-blade like extrusions sit over the body while an under-hull similar to that of a yacht is supported beneath the body.

Originally, the Val'ta was commissioned by counselors of the Lorath Matriarchy for the purpose of exploring and expanding Lorath territory. The Lazarus Consortium won the bidding process to design the vessel, and undertook building the ship with a great amount of oversight and control from the clients - in return for funding and exotic resources. A great amount of research was also taken by the Lorath Xenotechnical Research Team (LXRT), an improvised evaluation group who studied the first Sourcian vessel to interact with the Lorath beforehand.

In the end, the Consortium handed over all files and data relevant to the vessel to the LSDF and Lorath Matriarchy. The ship was then fitted with its armament, vehicle complement, communications suite, an artificial intelligence, and a captain and crew willing to do the job.

After the relocation, the Val'ta lost one of its primary attractions designed and built previously: A blade of nigh-invulnerable material, reinforced with shock-absorbing, ablative Cultured Structol.

Width: 172 metres
Length: 516 metres
Height: 80 metres
Decks: 10

Crew Needed: At the bare minimum, the Val'ta needs a total of 36 crewmembers to move from place to place, without being able to perform its intended mission.

• 1 captain/commanding officer.
• 3 bridge crew, consisting of communications, navigation and weapons.
• 8 engineers.
• 4 medical personnel.
• 20 enlisted personnel.

Crew Recommended: For optimum planet exploration, probing and scanning capability in addition to combat capability in space, the following crew of 81 is recommended. It can be expanded upon, and an ideal number to deal with shifts is up to 100 personnel:

• 1 captain.
• 3 commanding officers, working in paired shifts.
• 6 bridge crew including communications, navigation, weapons, signals intelligence and AI handlers. Shifts of 3.
• 15 engineers including armourers, aerospace, and vehicle maintenance crew (8 per shift)
• 6 medical personnel (4 per shift)
• 9 general science personnel, working alongside the following specialised professions:
  • 1 Head of Research
  • 2 xenobiologists
  • 1 archaeologist
  • 1 language expert
  • 1 geologist
  • 1 cartographer
  • Shifts are taken as necessary.
• 30 enlisted personnel including marines, pilots, and drivers, who may be called upon to explore planets with the science team. Shifts are taken as necessary.
• A custodian and a chef, who may appoint enlisted personnel to clean up. Shifts are taken as necessary.
• 1 quartermaster.

Maximum Capacity: The Val'ta can support 150 passengers comfortably, while 300 passengers can fit into the vessel's corridors in an emergency. Life support will last for 14 days before conditions degrade, and in 28 days conditions will become unsuitable for habitation.

The interior of the Val'ta is pleasantly eclectic and smooth, with rounded squares being the main design motif in addition to modification by personnel. Due to the long distances this ship travels, the designers figured that personnel will find ways to personalise their rooms, and circumstances may necessitate interior structural changes dictated by command. The walls are easy to take apart or repair in the advent of maintenance, and the maintenance passages have ample room for tools, and can even be taken apart and redirected themselves.

The Val'ta features an atmosphere rescrubbing system that uses a series of high energy vacuum ultraviolet laser forcing CO2 to skip its minimum energy path and split into oxygen and carbon separately via roaming. Radiation is handled by layers of picojelly carbon suspense built into the hull and walls of individual chambers, acting as an ultra-dense trapping system that while it does not stop gamma radiation, sufficiently slows it down to levels which are entirely manageable by modern species which are augmented for space-faring.

This layer doubles as a cooling system, with a quasicrystalline liquid hydrogen micro-cycling radiator system which dumps the excess heat using casimir cooling systems similar to those found on LSDF frames. This allows the LCOV to enter and leave very dense atmospheres.

An optimization of the life-support systems allows the Val'ta to rapidly cool any given chamber to reduce any fire, then cycle oxygen into CO2 to remove oxygen to stop a chemical fire from burning. Once the reaction has stopped, a blower and cycling system fires, thawing then warming the room back up to a normal temperature using the conversion system, cycling hot air and replacing CO2. It should be noted this environment is incredibly dangerous if personnel are not evacuated from it unless personnel are wearing temperature resistant atmosphere environment suits.

Reserve oxygen tanks store hydrogen and oxygen together as water, using the high energy vacuum ultraviolet lasers to crack the hydrogen into oxygen and water for crew consumption which are then recycled via waste management systems. In this way, the Val'ta can keep several “backup atmospheres” per chamber or create more atmosphere if a source of water is available. This water can also be used as emergency fuel for the primary powerplant of the vessel.

The chambers themselves are self-sealing, through the use of stone-thread and picojelly which chemically attempt to seal any punctures or penetrations of the hull while inert gas chambers in the hull limit the spread of fire and in an emergency serve as a means of directing an explosion out through a compartment without compromising the hull strength of the entire vessel. The hull itself is also laminated in structol, sealing any gaps in the primary armor of the vessel.

In the event of a combat situation, doors automatically reseal to improve structural integrity.

The floor of long corridors (being so long and unobstructed) are designed so if gravitational constants change and the length of the deck becomes depth, gaps are present for locking hands into for the purpose of climbing or preventing falling into other parts of the ship. In this way, if the “up and down” of the vessel changes suddenly, the crew have something to grab onto or grapple with to prevent them falling to their deaths.

Along most walls are guard-rails. While large enough hands, they are designed for a locking hook (a sort of catch-hook on a short wire) to be fitted – as so if the atmosphere of the ship is vented into space, the crew hooked in place are not blown out of the ship.

In addition, a hook-rail is also present along the wall which can be driven akin to a stair-lift to safely ascend or descend major corridors which become tall elevator-like shafts in this scenario. They also double as a means of moving in the event gravity fails, pulling crew through corridors.

The locking-grate also doubles as magnetic decking, and can support most common climbing hooks.

The systems of the Val'ta are largely bespoke, designed and engineered especially for it. There is an emphasis on ruggedness, modularity and ease of construction with the resources available to the ship. Importantly, many of these systems are able to feed resources through each-other, allowing energy, plasma or temperature management to be shunted to a wide variety of different systems and equipment, improving its performance in specialist ways.

The Val'ta makes extensive use of both conventional consoles and hard-light “data strips” found throughout the vessel as lighting strips in rooms and corridors. The vessel's ARIA is able to both see through these strips and project hard-light created via the use of a inflection for response and reaction, including combative response if necessary as well as containment procedures for possible contamination, harmful radiance and atmospheric decompression in order to protect the ship and her crew.

The strips themselves contain structol channels, moving gellatine and hard crystal like circuitry through the entire ship in a unique logistical system of piping akin to arteries, allowing for limited automated repairs of digital systems and rapid reconfiguration of the ship's sensor arrays and power systems - an essential requirement of a long-range explorer.

The following weapons systems are present on the Val'ta.

This ship includes a starship gade unified_field_manipulation_suite, providing a package of equipment which allows for manipulation of gravitational, magnetic, strong, and weak forces, allowing for the manipulation of materials within the guidelines indicated for a starship grade equipment package.

It is able to alter the expressed weight of objects, manipulate gravity over great distances and express a wide variety of different electromagnetic actions: it is an ideal scientific tool for stimulating and testing events at a distance. It doubles as a field booster for primary communications and a means of moving debris, gas and atmosphere either away or toward the Val'ta. It doubles as a backup propulsion system, can generate a defensive shield and is also capable of acting as a weapon by emulating a a particle accelerator.

All of this essentially makes it a swiss army knife, a field projector designed for action at a distance that can be configured and calibrated to perform a wide variety of complex tasks usually too precise or distant for other dedicated systems.

Arrayed in lines on the hull on Deck 1 and Deck 8 are lines of sixteen Packet Rifle enhanced Lorath Plasma Arc Disruptors, in Cannon configuration pointing in 360 degrees. The Point Defence serves as a dedicated, reactive countermeasure against incoming torpedoes, missiles, and for swatting enemy powered armour, frames, or shuttles containing boarding teams.

There are three main batteries of torpedoes. One on the bow, one on port, and one on starboard. All of them mount the arrays of R-88 Subspace Enhanced Railguns, with eight each on the port and starboard, and four to either side of the nose facing the front.

When on standby, the guns rest inside the hull to be reloaded as necessary by the launcher magazine. When activated, they slide on rails onto the exterior of the hull through the structol, able to point outwards from the Val'ta, take aim at targets, and to a limited extent move around the hull for a better shot. If severely damaged, they return to their original position inside the hull for repair by technicians.

The Val'ta has a vehicle compliment both stored internally inside volumetric compression and following the vessel as escorts in many cases. While early on this group might seem small, as time goes on these craft and units (often automated) will serve as extensions of the Val'ta's base capabilities as it manufactures them to suit its needs.

When the Val'ta enters FTL, these units are generally pulled along via proximity, meaning they don't have to land or dock with the craft or be capable of the same feats of FTL as the Val'ta itself.