Idea free to good home: Kahani

[Proginoskes]

Kahani
Base hull: large asteroid
Source work: Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie

They haven't gotten Story Water working yet, so the stories are (extensively indexed, cross-referenced, and otherwise linked) records in a more ordinary database farm.

Quirks:
P2C2E House: Kahani's drives are as inexplicable as raw Handwavium, though they seem to include large numbers of highly unusual moving parts. The official documents call them "Goldberg-Robinson Drives", but everyone calls them M2C2D: Machines too Complicated to Describe, and running with the source, insist that they operate on P2C2E: Processes too Complicated to Explain.
Goo Goo G'joob: Everyone calls Kahani's propulsion engineers and Handwavium researchers (of which it has something of a surfeit) Eggheads. The chief Egghead is called the Walrus. These terms creep into the speech of visitors quite quickly.
That most essential of qualities: Tooling around the Solar System, Kahani is a bit slower than other semi-mobile stations. Closely orbiting a planet, however, gives it Ludicrous Speed. Like, Blackbird-level Speed. Not much use for getting around, though, since all that Speed simply vanishes the moment Kahani's orbit deviates from nearly-circular.

Thoughts?

[Black Aeronaut]

*blink-blinks* That'd have to be one helluva big orbit. Like a planetary orbit - and even then!

[HRogge]

*blink-blinks* That'd have to be one helluva big orbit. Like a planetary orbit - and even then!

Orbital speed get lower with distance to the central object you are rotating around.

But I think a "maximum orbital distance" could be added to the drive quirk. Otherwise it can get anywhere VERY quickly, just by redefining its orbit "I am orbiting around a star 20000 lightyears away".

[Proginoskes]

The source Kahani's orbit around Earth is quite vague, but implied to be cislunar, and explicitly fast enough to completely evade human detection. It doesn't escape Earth's gravity due to P2C2E.