TEXT: 1
  
  2
  The only thing you cannot do with a bayonet is sit on it.
   
   
   
   
   
  - Tallyrand
  In the decades before the Scream, the Bruxelles class of battlecruiser 
  was a common sight on the borders of the Terran Mandate’s core 
  worlds. Whereas most fleet cruisers struck a balance between armor, 
  range, and weaponry, the Bruxelles class was intended for extended 
  cruises along the periphery of Mandate space and occasional strikes 
  outward into some unruly sector of the frontier. Much of the ad-
  vanced armor and ECM systems that protected other ships of the 
  line were sacrificed for greater speed, endurance, and weight of fire. 
  The Bruxelles was intended as an implement of discipline, a tool to 
  correct those border polities or alien invaders who imagined that 
  the insular Mandate was unable to defend its interests.
  By the time of the Scream, the Bruxelles class was no longer a 
  cutting-edge warship. Its armament, engines, and shielding systems 
  were over a century old, and many of the cruisers had been in active 
  service for almost as long. Still, even their dusty guns could wipe the 
  sky clean of any civilian ships turned raider and smash the defensive 
  orbitals of hostile frontier worlds. A single Bruxelles was amply able 
  to enforce the Mandate’s peace on any stellar polity that lacked 
  military-grade pretech shipyards. The fragile battlecruisers wouldn’t 
  last long against a modern Mandate dreadnought, and still less 
  could they withstand the experimental mindships that the forges of 
  Old Terra were fashioning toward the end of the Second Wave, but 
  they were sufficient to deal with border rabble.
  The Scream caught many of these ships far from port. No one can 
  be certain how many thousands of these battlecruisers were left to 
  die in vain attempts to reach the dead worlds that were their homes, 
  or how many were made into candles of metallic vapor by the blind 
  rage of Terra’s autonomic defense grid. Even those who managed 
  to find shelter on some frontier world soon found their precious 
  ship stripped to her deckplates for the priceless pretech parts she 
  contained. A few polities tried to keep their prizes running long 
  enough to plunder their neighbors, but in the end, virtually all of 
  these ancient guardians were torn to pieces and scavenged for parts 
  that young worlds could not hope to craft.
  Still, every so often, a Bruxelles is found deep in the cold void of a 
  system’s outer rim or hanging silently in orbit around a dead world. 
  Most of these ships are crippled in some way, either wounded in 
  battle or worn down too far to make drillspace under her own 
  power. Her crew is almost always long since silent in the perfect 
  preservation of airless, icy night, and her engines are dead or sleep-
  ing the long sleep of centuries. But with the right parts, the right 
  help, and the right mad ambition, these ships can rise again to cut a 
  red road through the stars.
  Operational Parameters
  The external hull of the Bruxelles class occasionally varied from 
  shipyard to shipyard, particularly as the design aged and the Terran 
  Mandate began to fit military components into salvaged and 
  retrofitted civilian hulls. Without the omen shields and bleedplate 
  standard to more balanced Mandate warships, the Bruxelles class 
  could afford to use the softer-skinned shells of civilian craft, and 
  budgetary constraints increasingly pressed on the later run of bat-
  tlecruisers.
  The original Bruxelles was approximately three hundred meters in 
  length, seventy meters in depth, and fifty meters in width, the shape 
  forming a rounded wedge with blisters along the ventral side for 
  her planetary bombardment armament and shuttle docking bays. 
  Three hundred personnel formed her standard complement of 
  crew, though her life support systems were rated for up to sixteen 
  hundred before her atmosphere and consumables started to fail 
  under the strain. Gengineered plant and fungal life was designed to 
  maintain the ship’s complement indefinitely while under way, with 
  biological atmosphere scrubbers and edible force-grown organics 
  that could be cycled for years before needing an infusion of external 
  biomass. The Bruxelles could theoretically stay in space with sixteen 
  hundred humans aboard for up to five years without resupply. In 
  practice, even pretech maintenance technology could not keep a 
  warship flying that long under combat conditions without some 
  sort of repair. Those captains who pushed their ships to the limit 
  usually found themselves dead in space, alone and helpless in a 
  frontier system unable to provide the necessary parts to revive a 
  crippled warship.
  The Bruxelles was intended to be a fist, and while its armor was 
  weak by pretech military standards its enormous weight of gunnery 
  could make it a threat to any ship of a comparable class. Engaging a 
  Bruxelles was a bad exchange for even the most bloodthirsty frontier 
  raider or alien invader. While it might be possible to cripple the 
  human battlecruiser with sufficient firepower and gunner’s luck, 
  any attacker was very likely to be mortally wounded as well. Most 
  troublemakers found it better to seek softer prey in a different 
  system, assuming the Bruxelles didn’t run them down first.
  The Bruxelles was a particular threat to hostile space stations, orbit-
  als, and asteroid bases. The Ramrod weapons system it carried was 
  optimized for penetrating the hulls of stationary, drill-incapable 
  targets. Very few frontier worlds had access to the sophisticated 
  omen shields necessary to nullify such a bombardment, and still less 
  did pirates and border raiders. The Bruxelles could crack the shell of 
  the toughest renegade orbital, and after the sky had been cleared of 
  defensive stations there was little to stop an orbital bombardment 
  beyond the few surface defenses and braker guns the world could 
  manage to muster. These simple defensive arrays were no match for 
  the grav-shear munitions the Bruxelles carried, massive bombard-
  ment missiles capable of cutting through the defensive screen of 
  braker guns and AA lasers sported by most worlds. A single hit was 
  sufficient to erase a city.
  Mandate archive: Bruxelles-class Battlecruiser
  an iron Ghost of a dead aGe
  
  3
  The Culture of the Ship
  Unsurprisingly, the presence of a Bruxelles-class cruiser in a frontier 
  world’s star system was unwelcome to most locals. A few border 
  polities had the strength to keep these Mandate enforcers outside of 
  their claimed space, but most frontier worlds were forced to simply 
  tolerate the presence of the ship and acquiesce to any demands the 
  Mandate might make through it. Mandate rules of engagement 
  theoretically prohibited the planetary bombardment of civilians, 
  but in practice, any border world that dared to present a serious 
  threat to the Mandate could expect to find its population centers 
  reduced to ash and bitter memories.
  The officers and ratings of a Bruxelles were often separated from 
  the core worlds of the Mandate for years on end, and the Mandate 
  Navy went to exceptional lengths to select dedicated, loyal men and 
  women for the crew. It was not impossible for such ships to be years 
  away from the nearest naval base or significant fleet support, and 
  the crew had to be capable of maintaining the Mandate’s interests 
  even when far outside the reach of its mandarins. In many cases, 
  this dedication curdled to a kind of blind chauvinism, a contempt 
  for the savage “colonials” and a casual indifference to the lives of 
  frontier dwellers. Fellow crew became precious reminders of the 
  more civilized worlds they had left behind, and the preservation of 
  the ship and her crew became infinitely more important than the 
  lives of a few hundred thousand half-feral colonists.
  Some such ships became indistinguishable from the pirates they 
  were intended to combat. They levied “Mandate taxes” on the worlds 
  they encountered, skimming the best the planet had to offer to keep 
  the ship in fighting trim and fill her holds with plunder for their 
  distant masters. They razed military shipyards and flattened “excess 
  military construction” in order to ensure that the world could not 
  trouble its neighbors or the Mandate, and if such exactions left the 
  planet vulnerable to raiders or aliens, it was a regrettably necessary 
  price to pay for interstellar peace. These ships often made contact 
  with remote Perimeter agencies, taking on their enigmatic spies and 
  operatives to strike at some well-hidden maltech development lab 
  or burgeoning abomination. They scourged the worlds that they 
  passed.
  A few Bruxelles-class ships followed a different path, however, 
  captained by officers with more sympathy to the frontier or crewed 
  by men and women more willing to see the primitive colonials as 
  equals rather than sheep to be sheared. These ships often became 
  the unofficial arbiters of peace in frontier sectors, ensuring peace-
  ful trade and diplomacy among their charges and defending them 
  against outsiders who would seek to prey on them. Some of these 
  ships gradually passed out of the reach of the Mandate navy entirely, 
  reliant on unofficial parts requisitions and friends at headquarters to 
  obtain vital spares and taking on new generations of crews from the 
  local worlds. So long as their sectors remained quiet and a reason-
  able flow of taxes came in to the nearest Mandate collection depot 
  the brass were willing to let certain unorthodoxies pass without 
  comment.
  Ship’s Complement
  A Bruxelles could be flown with as few as fifty spacers, though only 
  a desperate captain would take her into battle with such a mini-
  mal crew. Three hundred spacers filled out its complement under 
  ordinary conditions. For further details on the organization, crew, 
  and daily operation of a warship and its departments, a GM may 
  consult the Skyward Steel supplement for naval campaigns.
  The ship’s commanding officer was usually an O-6 Captain, and the 
  executive officer was commonly an O-5 Commander. During the 
  waning years of the Second Wave, these ranks sometimes lessened a 
  grade as the Mandate grew stretched for manpower and experienced 
  officers.
  Each department was headed by an O-4 Lieutenant Commander, 
  with an O-3 Lieutenant department executive to help oversee the 
  crew in the department and to season the lieutenant up for their 
  own eventual department command. The senior enlisted in each 
  department usually qualified as an E-7 Chief Petty Officer at the 
  least, though on very long cruises it was not unknown for warrant 
  officers to serve in the more technical departments.
  Each department had its own complement of ratings, usually leav-
  ened with a few O-1 Midshipmen getting in their training cruise. 
  Given the very long tours that most Bruxelles-class ships encoun-
  tered, their midshipmen tended to be those unlucky enough to 
  draw the ire of their academy instructors or those reckless enough 
  to crave the excitement of the frontier even if it cost them four or 
  five years of humble rank.
  coMpleMents
  Department
  Crew Minimum/Normal
  Administration
  0/10
  Astrogation
  1/12
  Chaplaincy
  0/1
  Communications
  8/21
  Deck
  21/88
  Engineering
  8/21
  Intelligence
  0/6
  Marine
  0/25
  Medical
  0/15
  Science
  0/6
  Supply
  0/6
  Training
  0/6
  Weapons
  10/60
  Minimum crew totals give the absolute minimum necessary to pilot 
  the ship through a spike drill or fight her with all weapons firing. 
  Only absolute necessity will force a captain into operating with such 
  a feeble crew, however, as casualties during a hot battle or difficult 
  drill can render his ship utterly unable to drill or defend herself. 
  Even without battle losses, attempting a seven-day drill with a single 
  amphetamine-pumped astrogator is not something conducive to a 
  ship’s good health.
  
  4
  Using The Ship
  For a GM, a Bruxelles-class cruiser is largely useful as a macguffin. 
  Included here are a number of different groups who might all be 
  eager to get their hands on such a ship.
  Expansionist planetary governments would be ecstatic at the 
  chance to get a cruiser capable of smashing their neighbors’ defense 
  orbitals and bombarding their population centers. The braker guns 
  and defensive lasers used in the post-Scream era are no use against 
  the Bruxelles’ grav-shear munitions, so a world with one of these 
  cruisers in their fleet is an unstoppable threat to any but the most 
  powerful and advanced polities.
  However, the spare parts and replacement munitions for the 
  Bruxelles are probably unavailable to any such expansionist group. 
  Combined with the enormous cost of keeping the cruiser flying on 
  postech spares and maintenance, this means that any such would-
  be conqueror must use the ship quickly, before it breaks down or 
  exhausts the world with its maintenance costs. The longer it takes 
  for the ship to subdue a foreign world, the bigger the chance that 
  something irreplaceable will break down and render the entire war 
  machine useless as anything but spare parts.
  Governments that intend to use a Bruxelles for conquest also cannot 
  afford to let their neighbors realize what’s going on until the ship 
  is ready to attack. While the cruiser can effortlessly crush most 
  ships that a post-Scream polity might field, it remains vulnerable 
  to treachery and sabotage. If enemies can get agents into its staging 
  base or worse still, aboard the ship itself, the entire warship can be 
  taken out before it’s had a chance to fire its first shot.
  Ambitious researchers would all love to get their hands on a 
  Bruxelles, even one incapable of combat. While most of the pretech 
  components of the ship cannot be replicated by postech engineer-
  ing, enough remains to fuel decades worth of examination on most 
  technologically advanced planets. Even the hope of being able 
  to reverse-engineer a device into components that could be built 
  using local resources is enough to set scores of local academies and 
  universities off on a race to obtain the ship.
  Not all of these researchers are going to be inclined to share. Par-
  ticularly with those institutions controlled by a world’s government, 
  there is going to be a powerful inclination to ensure that no one else 
  gets access to the ship’s technology. Even an ostensible shared re-
  search expedition is going to be colored by schemes to get exclusive 
  access to the juiciest technology.
  Beyond this, what happens if these researchers discovery that they 
  can repair the Bruxelles and get it into fighting condition? Not every 
  scientist is going to be willing to lead a pinch-credit existence of 
  wrangling for grants and laboring in obscurity when such a marvel-
  ous tool of social control is placed within their grasp.
  Zealous separatists or religious extremists are also going to be eager 
  to seize a Bruxelles. These groups are liable to have even more dif-
  ficulty keeping the ship running than would a full-fledged planetary 
  government, but few of them have any interest in foreign conquests. 
  They’re more likely to use the ship as a threat, demanding conces-
  sions from the local government and using the ship’s guns to coerce 
  obedience. Simply keeping the ship in orbit around a world leaves 
  minimal maintenance demands, and what local ruler can afford to 
  test the ship’s condition when a single grav-shear munition could 
  wipe out his capital?
  These extremists tend to be vulnerable to infiltration and sabotage 
  from below. While many such groups have led clandestine existences 
  long enough to have good internal security against ordinary infiltra-
  tors, they aren’t spacers, and they don’t instinctively understand the 
  thousand and one ways that a warship can be reduced to so much 
  scrap. Properly-trained saboteurs can hope to get close enough to 
  something vital to disable the ship’s weaponry and leave it vulner-
  able to boarding attacks from local naval forces. Of course, such 
  saboteurs must then stay alive long enough for the cavalry to arrive.
  Hostile aliens can also find use for a Bruxelles. Some races still 
  nurse old, bitter grudges against humanity for their centuries of 
  dominance in this section of the galaxy, and others are younger races 
  who see no reason not to push these hairless apes back from stars 
  that ought rightfully to belong to them. What better irony than 
  using one of their own warships to drive them out?
  Very few alien races were as sophisticated as Terran humanity before 
  the Scream, but those without substantial numbers of psychics often 
  weathered the disaster better than mankind. These surviving alien 
  polities can sometimes muster the sheer volume of resources neces-
  sary to get a Bruxelles back into fighting trim, making up on volume 
  and excess what they lack in refined technology. Such ships are an 
  ungainly mass of accretions and secondary systems crusted over the 
  original hull and are usually much more vulnerable to enemy ships. 
  Still, they have the guns to serve their purpose, and neither orbitals 
  nor planetary settlements can withstand their ancient anger.
  While alien crews are usually impossible to infiltrate in the same 
  way human extremists might be deceived, their ignorance of human 
  engineering often opens up vulnerabilities in the ship’s systems. A 
  group that manages to lay hands on the refit plans and modification 
  specs for an alien-restored Bruxelles can often spot flaws that are 
  susceptible to a boarding attack or a deep-space hull sabotage strike 
  by a team in shielded suits.
  Interstellar pirates, perversely, have less use for a Bruxelles than 
  many other possessors. Using such a ship as a commerce raider is a 
  losing proposition, as there is no hope of seizing enough plunder to 
  actually keep the ship flying. Precious few pirate kings have enough 
  wealth and technical expertise to actually keep a pretech warship 
  in fighting trim, and trying to hold on to it for long would simply 
  invite the desperate attention of every stellar polity within drill 
  range of the pirate base.
  For some raiders who stumble across such a ship, they have no 
  intention of keeping it flying for long. They’ll ride the ship like a 
  suicide boat, slashing apart the local navy and defensive orbitals in a 
  blaze of blind violence before the ship finally stutters to a halt or is 
  crippled by a lucky shot. After they’ve torn loose the more valuable 
  salvage inside, they’ll flee in their old ships, now with a fresh, help-
  less system to plunder at their leisure. Like all their parasitical kin, 
  they have no interest in building anything better. They are glad to 
  burn down the past for the sake of a little temporary warmth.
  
  5
  The Ship’s Interior
  The interior of a pristine pretech-maintained Bruxelles is a smooth, 
  elegant space of white passageways with colored and patterned wall 
  striping to indicate departments and other technical information. 
  Compartments are square-cornered and neat, with holographic 
  control panels and smart seating that both conforms to the user and 
  automatically bubbles them in a pressure field that will maintain air 
  and temperature even if exposed to raw vacuum. Additional kinetic 
  and thermal dampers protect against shrapnel and flame, subtract-
  ing 1d10 damage from any such incoming peril.
  Life support is distributed throughout the ship in “green lines” of 
  gengineered plant life and fungal colonies that purify and recycle 
  the atmosphere and water used aboard the ship, with solar inputs 
  and waste recycling feeding stocks of edible fungi. While several 
  devices in the ship’s galley exist to turn this putty-like, flavorless 
  mass into more palatable forms, it can be eaten raw at necessity. If 
  severe atmospheric poisoning or strain kills off this plant life, new 
  colonies can be cultured from stocks within four to six weeks. In 
  the meantime, the ship will be forced to rely on conventional stores 
  and a backup mechanical system that can sustain no more than four 
  hundred crew at a time.
  Hatches are plasteel irises that clamp shut to deny access to boarders 
  or contain damage. Passing a locked hatch on a pretech ship requires 
  a properly-coded acknowledgement from a Net implant. As no one 
  has been wired with implanted Net technology for approximately 
  six hundred years, modern crew are often forced to leave the hatches 
  unlocked simply to move through the ship. Individual hatches can 
  be locked and unlocked from the bridge, and passing through one 
  without the correct implant code requires either an hour with a laser 
  cutter or a multitool, one round and a successful Int/Security test at 
  difficulty 9. Failed checks can be re-attempted after fifteen minutes 
  of further effort, but checks failed by more than 2 points will light 
  a warning on the bridge.
  Much of a Bruxelles’ command system is reliant on Net implants. A 
  fully-operational ship allows its Net-wired captain an almost living 
  awareness of everything going on within the hull, and allows him or 
  her to perceive any point inside or on the surface of the ship with 
  no more than a moment’s focus. Individual crewmembers share 
  this awareness in the zones of their own responsibility. Engineers 
  physically feel the rightness of their fusion plants, and astrogators 
  can sense the heat and strain of their spike drive components. The 
  holocontrols and duty stations are simply backup tools in case of 
  systems failure due to battle damage or mischance.
  Of course, since Net implants are now impossible to acquire, 
  modern possessors of the ship are forced to make do with these 
  backup controls. Internal awareness and security tends to be ex-
  tremely patchy as a consequence, and intruders who keep to the 
  machine spaces of the ship or stow away in little-used nooks might 
  well escape the notice of even an attentive and professional crew.
  Modern owners are also often forced to make repairs with postech 
  components and equipment, often marring the elegant simplicity 
  of the passageways and compartments with bulky support gear 
  or ungainly, ozone-crackling patches. These obstacles can crop up 
  almost anywhere in the ship as some vital coupling must be bodged 
  together or some ancient pretech equipment reinforced and coaxed 
  back to half-adequate life.
  In most cases, the interior layout of the ship won’t be vital to a GM’s 
  adventure. Setpiece engine rooms, bridges, living quarters, or other 
  important areas can simply be sketched out as the adventure is likely 
  to require, keeping in mind the ship dimensions of 300m x 70m 
  x 50m and about five decks running the length of most Bruxelles 
  hulls.
  Shipboard Glossary
  Aft - To the rear of the ship.
  Bulkhead - Any vertical wall or divider within the ship.
  Compartment - A space within the hull, usually dedicated to a 
  particular purpose. Aside from a few traditional names, such as 
  “engine room” or “wardroom”, ships have compartments, they do 
  not have rooms.
  Deck - The floor, or more generally, any horizontal working 
  surface.
  Dorsal - The top side of the ship, as determined when it is in 
  flight.
  Hatch - A door or hatch that can be pressure-sealed. On a war-
  ship such as the Bruxelles, all doors are hatches.
  Fore - Toward the front of the ship.
  Ladder - Whether stairs, zero-gee climbing rings, or an actual 
  ladder, such muscle-powered means of changing decks are all 
  called “ladders”.
  Passageway - A passage between compartments. Ships don’t have 
  corridors, they have passageways.
  Port - Toward the left side of the ship, if facing fore.
  Starboard - Toward the right side of the ship, if facing fore.
  Ventral - The bottom side of the ship when it is underway.
  
  6
  Bruxelles-class cruiser
  Power: 120/13 free
  Mass: 65/0 free
  Cost: Priceless
  Hit Points: 60
  Crew: 50/1,600
  Speed:
  3
  Armor:
  20
  AC:
  4
  Weaponry Implosion Field Projector (+4 to hit/4d20+2, AP 25, Phase 2), “Ramrod” Warp-line Gun (+4 to hit/2d20+42, AP 25), 
  “Antaeus” Siege Missiles (Special)
  Defenses Hardened Polyceramic Overlay
  Fittings Spike Drive-4, Armory, Lifeboats, Cargo Lighter, Ship’s Locker, Workshops, Hydroponic Production, Fuel Bunkers, 
  Fuel Scoops, Extended Life Support x3, magazines for 15 Antaeus rounds and 600 tons of cargo space.
  Operating Cost 65,000,000 credits a year to feed the ship the enormous amounts of postech maintenance necessary to keep it flying. 
  Worlds without significant shipyards and experience in astronautics may have to spend even more.
  These statistics represent a perfectly functional pretech warship, with the original parts and effective maintenance. Very few Bruxelles will 
  be found in such a state. Even leaving a ship to float untouched in the void of the outer rim for six hundred years can result in a craft 
  unable to spin up its spike drives or fire its weaponry without extensive maintenance work. Letting a battle-scarred or travel-worn ship 
  rot in the dark will result in even less cooperative behavior.
  starship Weapons
  Weapon
  Cost
  Damage
  Power
  Free Mass
  Hardpoints
  Min.Class
  TL
  Special
  “Antaeus” Siege Missiles
  *
  Special
  15
  5
  3
  Cruiser
  5
  Ammo 5
  Implosion Field Projector
  *
  3d20/Special
  15
  10
  3
  Cruiser
  5
  AP 25, Phase 2
  “Ramrod” Warp-line Gun
  *
  2d20+40
  55
  10
  3
  Cruiser
  5
  AP 25
  * These weapons are priceless. Anyone who finds a functional weapon system or Antaeus ammunition can expect the nearest 
  planetary government to stop at nothing to confiscate it for their own benefit.
  ship statistics and Weaponry
  Imperfect Flight
  Almost every Bruxelles is going to be found suffering severe limita-
  tions on its successful operation. Millions of credits worth of repair 
  work might be necessary before the ship can even take flight. 
  Beyond that, however, there are likely to be serious maintenance 
  issues that can’t be resolved simply by throwing credits at them. 
  These problems will require specific spare parts from pretech naval 
  bases and other long-lost caches, and it’s not impossible that PCs or 
  other adventurers will be tasked with acquiring them.
  To determine what serious flaws exist in a given Bruxelles, roll one 
  or more times on the adjacent table.
  ship flaWs
  Roll
  Problem
  1
  The Ramrod weapon system is nonfunctional
  2
  The spike drive doesn’t work, though the ship 
  can maneuver normally in-system.
  3
  The armor has been compromised; effective 
  Armor is 0.
  4
  Maneuver jets are offline. Speed 0.
  5
  The implosion field projector refuses to fire.
  6
  All life support systems are crippled, with a 
  maximum crew of 75.
  Starship Weapons
  “Antaeus” Siege Missiles: Each siege missile is equipped with a 
  sophisticated array of grav-shear technology designed to shake off 
  the grip of conventional braker gun defenses. Standard ECM from 
  any orbital station or spaceship is sufficient to put the missile safely 
  off course, but against planetary targets, a few kilometers of wobble 
  means nothing.
  The siege missile is an air burst weapon that tears a brief metadi-
  mensional hole over the target zone, subjecting it to a lethal barrage 
  of heat, impact, and radiation. Every civilian structure within fifty 
  kilometers of the impact point will be flattened and any hardened 
  military bases within ten kilometers will share their fate. Only 
  deeply-buried bunkers hardened against orbital bombardment will 
  survive.
  Implosion Field Projector: One of the more common pretech 
  cruiser-class weapons, the implosion field generator briefly inverts 
  certain cosmological constants at the focal point of its triple align-
  ment beams. Any frigate-class or smaller ship struck by an IFP must 
  have the pilot save versus Tech or be instantly destroyed.
  “Ramrod” Warp-line Gun: A relative of the implosion field pro-
  jector, the Ramrod system sacrifices the precision and agility of an 
  implosion field to create a much larger conversion zone. Ramrod 
  systems function only against orbital stations or immobile asteroids, 
  as their range is insufficient to harm planetary surfaces, and any 
  ship with a Speed rating can get clear of the inversion zone before 
  it breaks open.
  
  7
  Stars Without Number is on its way to your friendly local 
  gaming store- and it’s brought a little something extra 
  with it. All the daring interstellar adventure and polished 
  GM tools you find in the free edition are in there, plus 40 
  more pages of bonus content!
  	
  •	The	history	of	artificial	intelligence	before	the	Scream
  	
  •	Rules	for	playing	AIs	and	robots
  	
  •	The	history	and	use	of	advanced	combat	mechs
  	
  •	GM	tools	for	building	vibrant	planetary	cultures
  Get it now at your local store, or pick it up from our
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  Ship Plot Seeds
  Careless explorers power up a Bruxelles, only to discover that this 
  particular ship was equipped with large banks of concealed cold 
  sleep pods in which the crew awaits rescue after a serious drive fail-
  ure. The explorers might be PCs, or the PCs might be in a position 
  to negotiate with the Bruxelles’ captain to bring him necessary spares 
  from long-lost naval supply caches. Alternately, the captain might 
  be able to cannibalize the explorer’s ship to get the Bruxelles back in 
  action, and now plans to carve out his own restored Mandate from 
  the surrounding worlds.
  The PCs discover a half-ruined Bruxelles in an remote sector of 
  space. The ship shows signs of horrific damage, but likely holds 
  a king’s ransom in salvageable tech. Yet the crew appear to have 
  vanished, and there are no worlds within lifeboat reach that they 
  could have reached. What happened to them? Were the crew taken 
  in a boarding operation? Did they flee in the lifeboats even without 
  hope of a safe landing? Did a horrific alien contagion drive them all 
  into a madness of sabotage and murder? And will the ship continue 
  to hold together as the PCs salvage it, or will that last component’s 
  removal set off a chain of collapses certain to slaughter them all if 
  they can’t escape the crumbling passageways in time?
  A crippled Bruxelles maintains orbit around a dead world, its en-
  gines worn out and its guns scavenged by the crew. Inside, the last 
  inbred remnants of the crew have divided into warring factions, 
  each department a tribe of its own with traits ranging from canni-
  balism to tech-worship to religious zealotry. Outsiders will be hailed 
  as “the relief” by the first tribe they find, but will be expected to lead 
  them to ultimate victory over their hated foes and the restoration 
  of the ancient ship. The natives have only a ritualized grasp of the 
  technology of the ship, but several ancient pretech weapons still 
  remain functional in each tribe.
  On a remote lost world, the PCs discover a primitive native cul-
  ture focused around the ancient wreckage of a crashed Bruxelles. 
  Much of the ship was scavenged by the first survivors- including 
  the powerful pretech armor and weaponry used by the culture’s 
  rulers- but there still remains a priceless trove of salvage within for 
  any advanced postech society. The natives, however, revere the ship 
  as their ancestor’s salvation and will not tolerate any meddling with 
  it. Some among the natives are willing to be less doctrinaire about 
  letting the strangers into the hull, provided the PCs give them the 
  help they need to become the new ruling class.
  What appears to be a perfectly intact Bruxelles orbits around a 
  remote, airless world in a minor backwater system. Countless 
  polities have sent expeditions to seize the ship, but boarding parties 
  immediately lose contact with the outside world as soon as they 
  enter the hull, and those that don’t pull back are never heard from 
  again. Every few years a new batch of rebels, raiders, or adventurers 
  try to take the ship, but none of them emerge again. A few polities 
  have tried to destroy the cruiser rather than risk letting it fall into 
  other hands, but the first signs of violence bring a withering answer 
  from the ship’s implosion field projector. What is lurking inside the 
  ship? Is it some vengeful alien life form, seething in the dark amid 
  the ship’s active self-defense protocols? Is the ship infested with a 
  maddened AI, at war with itself and its terrible urges to destroy? Or 
  could it be some ancient arch-psychic, the last survivor of the crew 
  driven mad by the Scream and the relentless press of years on his 
  artificial longevity?
  The PCs never believed the old prospector was right, but he was 
  paying up front for this wild goose chase. And now here they are, 
  deep inside the hull of a crippled Bruxelles out in the asteroid field, 
  a king’s ransom in tech around them. It’s a shame about those pirate 
  corvettes that picked up their ship on the way in. The PCs have 
  24 hours to get the Bruxelles into fighting trim, overcoming the 
  cargo of hostile security bots and dealing with the lethal dangers of 
  a half-dead warship. If they don’t, they’ll be facing the pirates in a 
  struggle to the death in the depths of a dead engine of war.
  It’ Is WaItIng For You there
  
SOURCE: textdata/thevault/Stars Without Number/Stars Without Number (osr)/Mandate Archive/SWN - Mandate Archive - Bruxelles-Class Battlecruiser.pdf