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The CV-Hoffnungsschimmer is a Corvo intitially constructed at Lividia Station in 817 A.S. under the name CV-Eclipse. Comissioned by OS&C, the ship was intended to serve as a more exclusive and more contained variant of the usual cruise liners that usually handled OS&C's prodigious array of offers in the region of luxury tours around Sirius. As such, it was equipped with the usual comfort that was and still is the trademark of the company up until this day. Another advantage that this vessel held was that its improved shielding and armor if compared to luxury liners made it an ideal choice for more long-lasting trips into the edges of space, for example the Omega regions — only for those with the connections and credits to pay for these efforts, of course.

During one of these underhanded trips to the Omega-9 system whose planetary accretion disks being immolated by the scorching heat of the sun were a rather popular view to behold for many, there was an incident with the life support systems, and the vessel promptly returned back to where it had started, with thankfully no losses. Still, the incident had diminished the vessel's overall worth, and it was thus stripped of its position and sold to a private interest on Curacao, which, all in all, had been a rather good deal for OS&C.

Bought by Ezrael Vertiga in the year 819 A.S., it was first utilized as a means of personal movement whenever it became necessary to leave Curacao, which he did not do often. After all, why would one want to leave Eden? To not let it fall into disarray from underuse, the vessel quickly found itself turned into a 'stabbin' cabin', a place to host an array of sexual debaucheries that even some of the more loose establishments upon Curacao's already pretty lenient surface would have had their problems with.

With the death of his parents and the decision to leave for the Core, the vessel was taken with him, mostly staying near Yaren Base in Omicron Delta, which was not the optimal place for it to stay, Vertiga would think in hindsight, but there had been no major Corsair incidents during his time, although there could have been. During his stay with the Core, Vertiga met a woman by the name of Maren von Westefeld, a skittish girl he would sometimes run across while in Omicron Delta and the surrounding systems. Charming, a bit clumsy, and quite clever, the woman soon managed to conquer his heart, and due to her Rheinland origin, Vertiga renamed the Corvo to Hoffnungsschimmer, the Rheinland word for 'glimmer of hope', a gesture committed as a reminder that he would like to one day have a living with this woman. There was, however, the problem of the Core. Given their unwillingness to let their minions leave, Vertiga feigned his and his Core vessel's, the Apahanta's, disappearance in order to regain his freedom. Given that his own priorities lie more within the maintenance of the Apahanta and its crew from this point on, the Hoffnungsschimmer has since then more and more fallen into the responsibilities of Maren, who had started living on the ship shortly before Vertiga left the reach of the Core. Together with Nancy Sweetwater, an ex-Reaver, and Dr. Thallia Thorn, an Ingenuus xeno-archeologist, Vertiga and Maren live on this vessel up until this day.

Located at the front of the vessel on the main deck, the canteen is rather miniscule compared to the amount of people that could potentially be housed on the vessel. While the ship had initially been intended to utilize twice the space for canteen and kitchen than it now does, this seemed quite wasteful after the vessel swapped ownership and Vertiga had it refitted. Now, the canteen is a rather cosy place, but for only four people regularly inhabiting the ship, it is more than enough. The other half of the front that had been part of the canteen before is now walled off, and serves as a quasi lounge, or a place where one can watch movies on a quite large screen.

Located on the main deck, there are exactly thirty six crew quarters, enabling the ship to, in theory, be populated by at least twice that number. Connected by a single corridor of approxinately four meters in width, it would probably become rather crowded if the ship were to become this full. Currently, only a handful of quarters are actually in use, one for Maren and Ezrael, one for Leon, Nancy, Thallia and Pimakhova, although the latter seems to have disappeared without a trace, leaving only a crate of tobacco in the room. The rest of the quarters are completely untouched, and have been so since the rather indulgent lifestyle of the ship and its visitors stopped with Ezrael's falling-out with the Core.

While usually, it would be necessary to have at least ten people maintaining the ship, there are Kishiro Service and Maintenance Robots (KSRs) that look after the primary functions of the ship, barring the engine section, where the Cloaking device is. When not in use, the KSRs are either stored in the unused quarters or in the cargo section.

While the actual medlab is located on the lower deck and had initially been little more than a small infirmary for scratches, bruises and the occasional broken bone, it has been taken over and substantially advanced by Thallia Thorn during her stay on the Hoffnungsschimmer. This also included bringing some pretty heavy machinery over to the ship, most of which did not have enough space in the small medbay, thus, being no woman for half measures, Thallia simply punched holes into the ceiling to make the devices fit. How exactly she did that, nobody knows to this day, but what is known is that this treatment made two of the crew quarters above inhospitable, since one could literally see into the medlab below and fall.

Luckily, no water or energy conductors were damaged, and an examination by the KSRs revealed that no major risk besides for one's bodily wellbeing was impending from the damage. Up until this day, nobody had bothered to actually try and fix these holes. Not that the crew of the Hoffnungsschimmer would really have another place to store these devices, let alone move them there.

Actually just an empty room with a fairly large window, the room was quickly dubbed observation deck by Nancy. The frontal, unobstructed view made it perfect for appreciating the beauty of space around the crew, and given that the ship often stayed in Cayman or Omega 49, it was also immensely bright. Maybe not the perfect place to host a dinner due to the proneness to excessive light intake, it still remains a rather idyllic place to simply appreciate nature, as far as that was possible, being that one was still standing in the result of multiple millions of years of selective breeding, plus human inventiveness.

Prior to Thallia Thorn moving to the Hoffnungsschimmer, the medlab was merely a small infirmary for minor injuries. After she moved to the Corvo, many of the amenities have been replaced by more state of the art and also more complex machinery. After all, Thallia was medically literate, and so it would be rather easy for her to capitalize on extended equipment. Now being able to host even complex surgeries if necessary, it was also equipped with an array of scanners designed to identify and analyze physical maladies within patients. These devices, however, come at a cost, which in this case would be space. To fit the devices into the medlab properly, there have been holes made into the ceiling that render the quarters above inhospitable until such a time comes in which the problem is being looked into or the medlab is maybe moved to the cargo hold, where there is more place. With no means to really move these devices, let alone use them without Thallia, this day seems to be in the far distance.

Nobody on board currently really knows what is inside, since this had been Thallia's domain, and since she only sporadically visited the Hoffnungsschimmer at best and had left the door locked with a pretty complicated password, there was no getting in there. Not that the crew is really trying, of course. Its location in the middle of the ship also places it where it is essentially in plain view but everybody just does not pay attention to it, and so it remains sealed with whatever is held within, maybe until the day the ship is put to rest.

The medlab and the laboratory are also directly adjacent to the airlocks of the ship, the only place where one could board or leave the ship.

The gym had been mostly Ezrael's idea. Seeing as how the crew sometimes couldn't move much on the vessel during deep space journeys, it became necessary to prevent his fiance Maren from eating too many donuts, or at least force her to train off the additional calories afterwards. There are additional showers adjacent to the gym, although the water sometimes simply knows no in-between of scalding and freezing.

The engine room is the confluence of most of the Hoffnungsschimmer's mechanical workings. Contrary to what the name might suggest, it does not just house the giant deuterium-mox engines that could effortlessly also be installed on any ship the size of a cruiser, but it also houses life support, water purification, waste disposal, and energy systems.

While usually supplied with power by a thorium-mox reactor, it has been replaced largely by a Nomad Power Cell that Ezrael had acquired during a Nomad invasion within the Manchester system. While usually, incompatible with human technology, Maren, who is infected, offered him to add the power cell into the ship's systems, thereby removing it from his direct possession, as it couldn't be removed anymore without causing a catastrophic failure in the ship's systems, and thereby assure that it could not be used against the Nomads in any way anymore. For further reading, refer to the next page.

For now, the power cell is supplying only the engines and the cloaking device with power.

Initially only a private ship in the hands of a private individual, Ezrael Vertiga, the Hoffnungsschimmer had no need for further protection than the standard security equipment that came with the Corvo class. However, with his precarious relationship to the Core after leaving their ranks, it became apparent that the ship, albeit sturdy, was not going to withstand the assault of even two bombers, and given that the Hoffnungsschimmer is the home of both him, his fiance, and a couple of friends, this simply wouldn't do. The ship contained some of the most precious things in his life, not only speaking in terms of possessions. Whether as flaw or virtue, he cared too much for his infected fiance as that he could let her live on a ship that was big and easy to find.

Spending a sinful amount of money, Ezrael procured a cloaking device from the modular Zoner installation orbiting Gran Canaria and had it painstakingly fitted onto the Corvo. Given its rather big hold, it was able to store enough fuel to allow the ship to turn invisible for approximately fifteen minutes, which he figured was better than nothing. While a state of the art device, fifteen minutes in space were not actually a lot, since in the uncharted systems of the Omegas and Omicrons, it often took longer than that to traverse sectors. It was a precaution, and little more, and Ezrael was aware of that. At first, it was unneeded, but with increasing pressure from both Auxesia and the Lane Hackers, who both suspected Ezrael to be hiding something, a certain kind of protectiveness, maybe even paranoia took hold of Ezrael. Evil people were encroaching upon them, and Ezrael would be sure to have something in store for them. Being fully aware that he could never fight them, being only one man and one battleship, the only option was to find a way to withhold the Hoffnungsschimmer from their view, as this was the only thing the prey could do when hounded by predators way stronger than them.

Given that there was, however, no way to work the cloaking device into lasting longer, the answer would come from his infected fiance, Maren, who proposed to use the Nomad Power Cell that had fallen into Ezrael's hands by accident during a Nomad incursion into Manchester. The benefits of this were twofold: Firstly, it would deprive Ezrael of the means to use the power cell for anything else, since while it would power the Hoffnungsschimmer's systems, it couldn't be removed, and therefore not be used for anything that Maren could not account for. Secondly, she herself would be better protected as well, given that a degree of suspicion was cast upon her as well. The following day, a contraption was built to simply keep the power cell suspended within a vacuum, which was subsequently infused with Nomadic matter that Maren provided. Over the course of the next couple of weeks, the matter ate through the metal and appropriated it. As of now, it hardly looks like anything human-made anymore, as crystalline matter similar to, but not quite like, the hulls of Nomad ships started to organically grow from the infected device and spread through the engine section. Attempts were made to control the spread, though given that it ate directly through the material the ship was made of, everything short of cutting away the infected parts proved to be insufficient. While the infection currently seems to have stopped its advance through the ship's systems after taking over engines and cloaking device, it stands to reason that it will continue to spread once these systems have been sufficiently appropriated.

Given the lacking combat capabilities of a Corvo, there needed to be some way to identify threats before they could get too close, and to this end, the usual sensor dish below the Corvo was significantly overhauled by APM tech while the vessel was with the Core, together with Ezrael. The biggest problem that the normal design faced were exorbitant energy consumption, while the hardware itself could actually bring far more to the table than it was allowed to due to this limitation. Streamlining the energy systems of and around the sensor dish, it was originally intended to fit an APM power core onto the vessel, but this plan was discarded once it became obvious that most other ship systems were simply too old to guarantee a flawless operation. At the end of the day, constructing a whole new vessel around the APM power core would have been easier than trying to make the current vessel fit around it.

Some sort of compromise had to be made between the theoretical capabilities of the new APM hardware and the realistic limitation of the old hardware, and so, while theoretically just as powerful as a Mako's own scanning system, the Hoffnungsschimmer's age prevented the implementation from ever being used the way it was originally intended to.

Needing the necessary horsepower to propell a ship that was more than twice the size of a gunboat, the engineers at Lividia who initially constructed the vessel needed a way to create the necessary propulsion in order to make the ship actually viable in the harshness of space, lest it fall victim to the forces of nature, priates, or even more sinister elements within the Omegas and Omicrons. Thus, a compromise between price and performance was made. Given that Bretonia did not simply give away its propulsion systems for ship sizes of cruiser and upwards, something new would need to be created. Using three gunboat sized engines, the engineers of Lividia put the fusion chambers in series, effectively reducing the size needed for the fusion reactors and also reducing the amount of fuel that would be needed for the reaction by one third. While still a rather wasteful solution, it worked, supplying the vessel with enough power to be as agile as could be expected of its size.

Still, given that it was a fusion engine, there needed to be some way to deal with the eventual residue that would be left over from the fusion process. While fusion is considered to be one of the most clean methods of generating energy, at least if compared to thorium-mox reactors that were commonly found on capital vessels, it still created an end product that needed to be gotten rid of: molten iron. While the reaction inside the fusion reactors is started with hydrogen fusions, the process is accelerated to continue with the heavier elements as well, up until iron is created, which becomes too heavy and needs to be expelled from the fusion reactor. This was solved by expelling the refuse within the exhaust flame of the engine, thus burning it and reducing it to plasma. With the Nomadic matter having eaten into the engine, this process has become more volatile, especially during cruise charge, where the different elements within the fusion reactor started leaking, spilling into space while being heated well beyond their boiling point. Miraculously, though, the engine still works, even though the cruise charge tends to make the ship tremble violently.