The Bat'leth

## Background

Definitely not a junker. Yes the paint job is supposed to look like that.

Currently 'owned' by Xe'anna who is still making payments.

The ship’s computer, Oxana, is a character in its own right, and even more so after merging with the AI knows as Morva.

## Description

In Lauren's terms:

> *Essentially, it looks very similar to the Firefly, kind of the ship is a little offset like this. The top portion is, like, Helm and then all of the crew's rooms and the canteen and then underneath it's the cargo bay and so the engine is, like, that section that overlaps.*
>
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And:

> *You kinda bought a lemon [...] It's a used lemon. And when life gives you lemons...*
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>

## Trivia

Kika got the name of the ship painted on it when the crew took advantage of the extra money they got for the unexpected trouble they met in their first mission to get it fixed by ICA workers.

This lettering got scraped off in the battle against spirates that took place when they returned to Tsarin. Only *The Bat* remained after that.

Kika and Theea wisely used the time the Bat'leth was docked inside Tsarin to fix it... the paint job, that is. It only took them two tries to get the name right, and they added racing stripes on a section of its belly. The duo also signed their better than terrible, less than average, middle-school level, oeuvre.

    The weapons system remained fragile and likely to be the first to fail if stressed too much after Kika's hour-long repairs in space, and this despite her impressive performance. Kika's explanation: the crystals in the lasers had cracked and were likely to crack again under strain. At some point <reference needed>, they installed a button to control both of the ship's guns, a flak sand thrower and a clumsy multi-focal-laser, from one place.

Its front camera has the best DPI going on. Oxana put a lot of effort into this front camera, and it really shows.

The Bat'leth is half as fast in thread space as Tsarin and has spent several jumps docked inside Tsarin for this very reason. Around Gennus Landing and in ICA space, though, the Bat'leth is seen as more discreet and Tsarin remains safely away.

## Galley

The crew sometimes need to eat and sometimes they need to talk. The galley is the place where both can happen simultaneously.

Ludwig finds, after realizing that he won’t be given meat for his services, that the galley *doesn’t have a wide variety of different foods, but it does have a wide variety of flavors of the same food*. There are plenty Meat-o-stik'ko to be found there. There are also strange powders in jar containers, cans of third vegetable, and Rachel's Spoylent in the fridge. There is also an alarming number of cans of Space Mountain Dew.

The galley accommodates crew of all heights, from 1m up to 2m.

The Bat'leth has a breaker system. Kika uses it to turn off the fridge, but not the microwave, during a particularly intense bout of space combat.

## Oxana and the Bat'leth

After her merge with Morva, Xe'anna gives Oxana permission to leave the Bat'leth. This didn't make any sense before, when Oxana was just a personality program. This is how Xe'anna explains it to Ludwig:

*The ship is the Bat'leth. But Oxana is the AI attached to it. They're, at the moment, one and the same, but separable, possibly, in the future.*

## Notes

1. ↑ See Ep 29. There were other descriptions earlier.
2. ↑ See Ep 29, after Kika explained that the ship's engines have worked at 3/4 capacity from the start and Lauren added that there are 4 turbines, one of which has never worked. Fortunately, when life gives you lemons, *You find a Kika* ... *And a Theea*.
3. ↑ See Ep 4.
4. ↑ See Ep 5.
5. ↑ As suggested by @Fogsight in chat, and made unofficially official by chat. See Ep 5. It became officially official at the start of Ep 6, and some paint job happened.
6. ↑ See Ep 6.
7. ↑ Claudia rolled a 13 at Fix + Intelligence.
8. ↑ See Ep 7.
9. ↑ See Ep 11, Ep 23, and possibly others.
10. ↑ See the conversation between Kika and Oxana in Ep 9.
11. ↑ See Ep 22.
12. ↑ See Ep 22.
13. ↑ See Ep 23. The reason for the difference in treatment between both devices? In one word: popcorn.
14. ↑ See Ep 23. This prompted a comment from @PaladinHulk: we can't lose Oxsana! She's the most developed NPC!!!