Freelance Traveller - In a Store Near You - The Showroom

Kerala-class House Grav

This article originally appeared in the March/April 2017 issue.

The Kerala-class House Grav was originally designed as a one-off holiday home for the CEO of Christchurch Corporation, Rebecka Kerala, and her family to enable them to take vacations anywhere around Home planet and allowing Rebecka to stay in touch with the corporation. After the Keralas had entertained in it a couple of times, Christchurch Corp realised there was a market for the House Grav catering as holiday homes to the rich relieving them of the necessity of maintaining multiple properties at multiple locations as the house grav could be flown to any location on the planet. Following the initial sales of the House Grav an additional market has materialised and that is of the well off families using it as a primary residence locating it anywhere on the planet. Families with children usually locate their House Grav within a short distance of the children’s schools; however those owners without ties can locate their House Grav anywhere.

The Kerala can be customised to the owners requirements, however a “standard” configuration usually combines the two full-sized staterooms into a master bedroom with an en-suite bathroom, and fits out the smaller staterooms as 3 bedrooms, 2 offices, a bathroom, a kitchen, a living room, a dining room, and a games room with the seats and additional space worked around the craft to the owners specifications. Furniture, fittings and appliances can be installed at the clients request or can be provided by the Christchurch interior design team. The 8-displacement-ton double garage can hold up to 13 tonnes of vehicles allowing the owners to live in one area of the planet and use high-speed high-altitude grav vehicles to commute to work hundreds if not thousands of kilometers away form their home’s current location.

One of the radios is normally programmed to connect to the planetary communications network to allow for the normal audio, visual, and data communication requirements, while another is used for contact to Home Planet COAC (Close Orbit and Airspace Control) to ensure normal airspace requirements are met. The last radio is normally used for positional co-ordination with other grav vehicles in the area, predominantly to allow for easy landing and takeoff from the garage, however an unintended consequence has been that groupings of House Grav communicate with each other in order to allow for each Kerala to have uninterrupted views out of each of their respective windows. One such unusual grouping of Keralas is 1000km north of the Esyie continent over the middle of the ocean.

The Met Office has released a small data gathering program that can be installed easily into the main computer to enable samples form the environmental sensor to feed data back to their main offices in Landing via the normal data feed, and while this data is anonymized as much as possible it does pass the House Grav’s GPS co-ordinate position along with the sensor data. This small innovation in data gathering combined with the generally unusual positioning of the Keralas around Home has provided greater insights into Home planet’s weather patterns.

CraftID:  Kerala-class House Grav, TL10, Cr 4,543,679
Hull:     45/113, Disp=50, Config=4USL, Armour=4E,
          Unloaded=58.8126 tons, Loaded=80.20296 tons
Power:    1/2, Fusion=5.2 Mw, Duration=1 year
Loco:     1/2, LowPwrHGrav=93 tons
          Top=180kph Cruise=135kph NOE=40kph MaxAcc=1.16G
Comm:     Radio=Planetary x3
Sensors:  ActEMS=Region, PasEMS=Continental, Mag=V Dist,
          Environ, Headlights x4
          ActObjScan=Diff ActObjPin=Diff PasEngScan=Form
Off:      Hardpoints=1
Def:      DefDM=+2
Control:  Computer=0 x2, Panel=Dynamic link x8,
          Special=HeadsUp disp Env=basic env basic ls
          extend ls,
Accom:    Crew=1 (Operator), Staterm x2 SmStaterm=10
          Seats Roomy=8, Vehicle Bay=8 tons
Other:    Cargo=16.60737kl Fuel=68.328kl ObjSize=Small,
          EmLevel=Faint,
Comment:  Construction Time=24wks sing 20wks mult