Little Big Bang Labs

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Spacecraft Registry
Little Big Bang Labs
Spacecraft Characteristics
Base HullModular Battlesteel hull
Drive TypeMass Effect Field Drive
Drive RatingMax velocity 0.01c
Armamentmultiple point defense lasers and light coil gun turrets
OwnerCatgirl Industries
Flag of RecordFenspace Convention
Registry NumberCI-101
Launchedmid 2019
PurposeEezo Research, construction and living space
Primary Crewseveral catgirls and AIs
Other CrewA lot of Exocomps
Operational StatusActive
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Its a little bit lonely out here, but the starry sky looks beautiful

—Jenny, Little Big Bang Labs, Mid 2020

Good to know the base at Nostromo as a pit stop on the way the back home.

—Unknown Starfleet Captain

The Little Big Bang Labs (LBBL) were founded in late 2015 on Jenga, when an accident in one of the labs resulted in the creation of the first batch of Eezo. Catgirl Industries quickly recognized that they need a place for ‘physics experiments’, which resulted in a new Jenga Module for the Little Big Bang Labs. While the labs were successful in reproducing the creation of Eezo, the space needed for the experiments quickly outgrew the Module. In late 2016, shortly after the battle of Jenga, Catgirl Industries built a new complex of Modules which house the labs today.

The new labs are built around a large cube of 24 meters edge length, which has six standard Jenga Modules of 24 meters length attached to it. Each of the attached Modules houses a waved particle accelerator that can fire a beam right into the central experimentation area. Each opposing pair of accelerators are mounted slightly aligned of axis, so that their beams do not hit the machine on the other side.

In the following years Catgirl Industries began to add other Modules for smaller experiments to the Labs complex.

When the labs are not busy in creating more Eezo, they are running all kinds of physics experimentation, most of them with some Handwavium involved. The whole experimentation area is heavily armored and shielded to prevent that accidents and explosions damage other parts of the station.

History (post move-out)

In Mid 2019 Catgirl Industries decided that they had to step up their efforts to explore the effects of Handwavium in physics and their applied research in Eezo. After a fierce discussion they decided to upgrade the accelerators of the Little Big Bang Labs with small Mass Effect cores to increase the speed of the particle beams. It didn’t took long until a catgirl asked an important question.

“What if we move the accelerators out of the limit?”

Everyone at Jenga was excited about the idea, but quite a few catgirls were also a bit worried. Smashing waved and unwaved materials together faster than the speed of light was an ‘Out of Context’ problem. Nobody had any experience what to expect, how much energy this collisions would produce.

A month later, a cargo ship departed from Jenga, taking the Modules of the Little Big Bang Labs and some Modules for living space with them. The complex was reassembled in deep interstellar space, lightyears away from any kind of known star system. The next month was a very exciting time for everyone at the labs, starting with some small remote controlled tests with a single accelerator up to a full powered tests of the whole upgraded lab complex.

When the catgirls were sure they would not trigger an extinction level explosion, they started to think about where to place the Little Big Bang Labs in the future. Keeping the lab that far away from home wasn’t necessary and complicated logistics and travel quite a lot. In late 2019 the complex was moved again, this times into a distant orbit around the gas giant Nostromo in the Inner Oort Cloud.

The position of Nostromo far outside the Limit and its own smaller Limit makes it a good place for Faster Than Light technology research. The planet gives the Little Big Bang Labs a place to anchor themselves around, moving into and out of the Limit easily.

Catgirl Industries is already working on an extended drone base to mine Nostromo for Helium-3 to fuel their fusion reactors. It would still take the labs more than a year to deliver a first new breakthrough.

The Nostromo Base

The new Little Big Bang Labs are built around the existing particle accelerator complex and the attached Physics labs. This is were most of the catgirls are spending their time, looking for new insights about waved materials and Mass Effect technology.

The rest of the base is a split between living space and infrastructure areas. The new Little Big Bang Labs have two hangars, one of them equipped for large supply trucks. There is also a Hive for a growing number of space drones, which are the primary defense of the base.

Despite the distance of ~ 1/4 lightyear to the Inner System and Jenga Cortana and Serina are still present in the lab complex, helping the catgirls to keep the base running. The Little Big Bang Labs have their own Interwave transmitter, directly connecting it to Jenga. There is also space for a second emitter, which has not been built yet.

The base has some additional free rooms for the crew of any ship that wants to make a stop at Nostromo. There also have been discussions about adding a hangar large enough to house a Space Shuttle or a Normandy Class.

Trivia

  • The six particle accelerators in the Little Big Bang Labs have a fixed focus point ~20 meters in front of the accelerators end. Because of this they are not useful as weapons
  • The one-way delay of the Interwave to Jenga is nearly 15 minutes.
  • The CI Interwave node acts as a relay for a number of drones the Artemis Foundation put around Nostromo even before CI moved their labs there.
  • The Labs of course has its own instance of the Grid.

Quirks

  • Defect toy? The efficiency of the station does not drop if the station is not changed or modified every few days. Despite this, the catgirls are still doing it regularly.
  • Big Boom! The explosions that happen every few days, which normally don’t do much damage at all, can sometimes be felt even on close spaceships. The record for ‘close’ in 2020 is 43 lightseconds.
  • Commence primary ignition! Every major experiment in the Little Big Bang Labs has to be started with the operator quoting Tarkin and pressing a large red button.