Normandy

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Spacecraft Registry
Normandy
Normandy Renderer.png
CI-200 Normandy
Spacecraft Characteristics
Base HullCustom built stealth frigate
Length63m (53m mainbody)
Width30m at wingtips (10m mainbody)
Height19m at wingtips (8m mainbody)
Mass830 tons fully loaded
Drive Type4 waved ion drives plus Mass Effect dark energy drive
Drive Rating0.06c with ME drive alone,
0.11c with together with ion drives
Armament88mm spinal mount Mass Effect coilgun,
2 anti missile Guardian Lasers
Primary ManufacturerCatgirl Industries
OwnerCatgirl Industries, loaned to Space Patrol
Flag of RecordFenspace Convention
Registry NumberCI-200 Normandy
Launched24.12.2018
Primary CrewJohn Shepard (Captain), 8 catgirls (crew), EDI (AI), 24 CI Exocomps
Other Crewup to 6 space patrol members (Shepards team)
Auxillary Vehicles2 Oculus combat drones, 2 Argus recon drones (replaced by 4 similar sized Exocomps in 2025), waved compact van
Operational StatusActive
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The Normandy is not the submarine or tin can shown in the first game, but its still a tight ship for fiveteen people on a long mission. Its a warship, not a cruise liner!

—John Shepard, captain of the Normandy, 2019

Some Fen are worried about the direction the catgirls are heading since the battle of Jenga. The Normandy is a product of their new mindset, it does not even pretend to be a ‘slightly armed Fencraft’. It is a warship, with a combination of speed, firepower and stealth that is not often seen outside Great Justice aligned fleets.

—Jeff Patson, Space Patrol section 7, 2019

Space is huge, even within out solar system it can take hours or even days to get to remote places. If you plan to leave the well traveled inner system, consider that it might take Space Patrol several hours to react to any call for help. If you are in trouble out there, you have to outrun it or punch it on the nose yourself.

—Cathy, Catgirl Industries, 2019

Spinal mount? What were the cats about to do. Fight a war?

—Andy ‘Nanoha’ Cramers, Space Patrol, 2018

Normandy

History

Catgirl Industries began working on the Normandy shortly after Shepards first ‘visit’ on Jenga in Summer 2016 . It was the first large spacecraft ever built by Catgirl Industries, which delayed construction until December 2018.

The ship was first designed as a virtual model on the Grid of Jenga, until Catgirl Industries had built a hangar large enough to assemble the ship. The ships design is a mixture of the Normandy seen in the first two Mass Effect games, larger than the first one but not as large as the second one.

Shortly after the first flight of the Normandy the ship was borrowed to Space Patrol to be used as the personal vessel of John Shepard (see Quirks). Catgirl Industries provided the core crew of the Normandy and is still using the ship as a testbed for technological upgrades from time to time. Catgirl Industries is working on a second ship of the ‘Normandy Stealth Frigate’ class.

The crew

The Normandy can be controlled by two people: a pilot and an engineer.The ship carries four full shifts (early/late/night/free) for the two core crew slots. At the launch of the Normandy, the core crew were just a group of catgirl engineers looking forward for big adventure in the rest of the universe (spelled ‘outside of Jenga’) and some talent piloting spaceships. They assumed that it would be a fascinating journey with a lot of free time for them, but things developed different.

Shepard told his crew that it was unacceptable to have crew members that did not know how to defend themselves and the ship. He talked about the danger being boarded while he and his team was away and that even in the original games the whole crew was kidnapped just because they could not stop the bad guys from boarding the ship. The catgirls are still discussing between each other if Shepard was reasonable or just a sadistic slave driver with his excessive training exercises.

In addition to the core crew the ship has a captain and space for up to six other people. Shepard and his small Space Patrol team have taken these slots and have been living more on the ship than at the White Tower since.

EDI is the artificial intelligence of the Normandy, she is in control of the central computer network and supervises the Exocomps of the ship. She usually handles communication, help with maintenance and controls the drive field of the Normandy, which doesn’t take up much of her attention. During combat she is in charge of both electronic warfare and defense lasers. The daughter of Cortana and Serina was born in late 2016 and lived the first years of her life in Jengas Grid, growing up and learning anything her parents could teach her about Fenspace. She trained a lot with a simulated version of the Normandy until the real ships computer systems were finished and she could move over there.

The ship

Internal layout

The Normandy is a military ship, designed for independent actions far away from support infrastructure. It can carry supplies for multiple months of operations, carries its own repair crew of Exocomps and has remote sensor capability to watch multiple parts of a solar system at once.

Small enough to land on some planet based spaceports, the Normandy was designed to bring its crew quickly to any place its missions requires and get them safely out again.

The Normandy has been built around its two Whistler Fusor reactors and the Mass Effect drive. The ship has two decks. The upper deck contains all the living space of the Normandy including bridge, working rooms and cabins. The lower deck is smaller because of the profile of the Normandy and is made up from cargo space and a room for the two fusion reactors of the ship. Behind the two decks is the engineering part of the ship, which contains the ships Mass Effect core.

The Normandy is coated with a radar absorbing material, which helps to reduce its signature to that of a large Fencar. While not a true stealth ship like the Blackbirds, it helps to conceal the existence of the ship a lot.

In addition to an anti-radar feature off its armor, the Normandy has an active IR-masking system. A series of ‘waved lithium heat sinks’ built into the ship can store the waste heat of most systems for a few hours, allowing to emit a much smaller IR signature. It cannot disguise the heat signature of the two ion drives, so the ship is restricted to Mass Effect engines only while under stealth.

Interior rooms in the ship

  • bridge room
  • armory
  • medbay
  • laboratory/workshop
  • kitchen and recreation/meeting room
  • person airlock
  • captains cabin
  • brig
  • six crew cabins
  • elevator (two decks high)
  • cargo area with drone racks
  • cargo airlock
  • engine room (two decks high)

Combat systems

The Normandy has a waved armored hull, but relies more on its Mass Effect shield to protect the ship from weapon impacts.

The primary weapon of the Normandy is a spinal mount Mass Effect coilgun between the first and second deck. The weapon is normally hidden behind a retractable part of the Normandy’s tip, it has been used by Shepard during testing trials and maneuvers in the Kuiper Belt, but not in duty up to 2020. The coil gun typically fires solid projectiles, but the crew is already experimenting with a special spaceburst rounds (similar to airburst ones from Earth).

The Normandy’s secondary offensive weapons are two Oculus combat drones, similar to the models developed by Catgirl Industries and the Roughriders for their Veritechs. The two drones give the ship an agile weapon platform, but the combat endurance of the drones is limited.

There is a small turreted laser cannon on the left and right side of the Normandy, which is used to shoot down incoming missiles or fight small and agile attackers closing in on the ship.

Trivia

  • The Normandy can keep its stealth system active for up to several hours. The exact duration is ‘classified’ and depends on the energy consumption on the ship and the incoming solar radiation.
  • Using the guardian lasers or the spinal mount cannon creates enough heat to overload the stealth systems capacity within a few minutes.
  • The Normandy has no real windows in its hull, looking outwards is done with multiple cameras and other sensor systems.
  • The four catgirl pilots of the Normandy are Maya, Samatha, Quin and Christin. The four engineers are Ellie, Carmen, Tia and Kira.

Quirks

  • Yes Captain! As Catgirl Industries discovered during dock testing, the Normandy seems to be specially built for Shepard as the commanding officer. Ship systems efficiency will drop by ⅓ if commanded by someone else unless the person has been told by Shepard to do so as part of a mission.
  • Thats a joke, right? The pilot of the ship should be called Joker, otherwise orders to the pilot might be overheard.
  • Lightball. The Normandy has a sophisticated holographic communication system. Unfortunately it cannot display an AI avatar differently than shown in the 2nd Mass Effect game. (see http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/EDI).

Stories

The Normandy is featured in the following stories:

Normandy Class

After Catgirl Industries finished the Normandy and got over the fact that they needed to lend the ship to Space Patrol, they began working on the next ship of the Normandy stealth frigate series. Equipped with the experience the Normandy Class has a few minor differences to the prototype ship.

Size comparison of a Normandy class ship and a Bolitho class ship.

All Normandy Class ships except the Normandy itself can open floor of the storage area completely to space. This allows Catgirl Industries to add mission specific modules into the storage area. Catgirl Industries has built a passenger transport module for each series Normandy, which allows the ship to transport up to 30 passengers on seats and 120 Exocomps, but little cargo. Plans to upgrade the Normandy with this have been delayed until the first major maintenance of the ship.

PEPPER treaty

The energy output of the Normandy Classes spinal mount gun is high enough that it became a problem when Catgirl Industries signed the PEPPER treaty.

Unable (many Fen say unwilling) to remove the weapon from the ships, Catgirl Industries began to deploy a new type of ammunition for the Serenity Valley and later ships. The scatter ammo is a coilgun shot that is not stable enough to survive the acceleration process of the weapon and breaks apart into a cloud of smaller pieces moments after leaving the barrel. While the cloud of pieces can still be very dangerous at close range, they lack the penetration power of the normal shots.

When a Normandy Class participates in Great Justice fleet exercises, it is supplied with the normal (and other kinds) ammunition. The Normandy itself always carry both solid and scatter shots in its magazines, experimental ammunition is normally put into the storage hold.

Trivia

  • Opening or closing the storage bay to change a module takes a few hours for the crew. Doing it within a support bay at Jenga just takes minutes.
  • The original Normandy sometimes uses the transponder codes of her sister ships.
  • The second Normandy class (finished in mid 2020) is named ‘CI-201 Serenity Valley’.

Class Quirks

  • Lightball. The Normandy class has a sophisticated holographic communication system. Unfortunately it cannot display an AI avatar differently than shown in the 2nd Mass Effect game. (see http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/EDI).
  • This is no cruise liner! The ship and its AIs expect a military organized crew. Forgetting the proper uniform signs or skipping the (at least) weekly combat exercises drop the efficiency of the ships systems by 50%.

References