Mr. Russ’s Holoship Collection 03 - FSV Dark Was the Night (Patreon)

FSV Dark Was the Night

Type: Long-Range Manned Exploration Vessel

Origin: Neo-Petrograd Traveling Shipyards, Free Space Union

This ship, operated by the venerable consortium of loosely-governed human worlds known as the Free Space Union, was named for a song by early blues musician Blind Willie Jackson.

During Earth’s 20th Century, “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground” was one of a limited number of sound recordings encoded on a golden disc and then launched into interstellar space on probes known as “Voyagers.” It was honored this way along with other sound and image data deemed able to tell the story of Terran life up to that point.

A note on the selection by Professor Timothy Ferris, who assisted Dr. Carl Sagan in the planning of the golden disk, has survived. He stated:

“Johnson’s song concerns a situation he faced many times, nightfall with no place to sleep. Since humans appeared on Earth, the shroud of night has yet to fall without touching a man or woman in the same plight.”

Although many ships have been given the name in the intervening eras, the present Dark Was the Night is the most sophisticated manned long-range exploration vessel ever built by human hands.

Its purpose is to chart distant, obscure regions of space and make peaceful contact - either with new life forms, or with the little-seen remnants of early stages of human colonization, many of which have completely lost contact with their place of origin.