Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, has said that rocket engineering is mostly a lot of plumbing. In the details (many not visible, I'm afraid) of this newest spaceship model, I've done a lot of work to make sure the plumbing for the fuel and radiator systems actually connect. This view at least shows a some of that detail. It was a big complicated model. I had fun with it. Thanks as always for all of your comments and favorites. --- CCS Copernicus was the Colonial Bureau's solution to transporting a large number of colonists to Mars at every favorable launch window. The ship's VASMIR engines could only push the vessel at a hundredth of a gravity, but that was still enough thrust to make a sixty day crossing possible. With a sixty-sixty-sixty day flight plan, the colonial transport could make the crossing, fully loaded at 45,000 tonnes, unload passengers and cargo at Phobos over a two month period, and then return to Earth for maintenance and refueling. At the time, Copernicus was the largest interplanetary vessel ever built. Each of the one hundred meter rings was designed to house a thousand colonists in Spartan comfort. Crossing every twenty-six months throughout the 60s, the Copernicus and its growing fleet of companions transported thirty thousand colonists to Mars during the 2060s. They accounted for two thirds of the settlers to arrive in that decade. The 2061 crossing was a discontinuity in the colonization of the red planet. The two thousand settlers on Copernicus nearly doubled the population of Mars, leading to a widely resented emergency effort to house and transfer the newcomers to the surface. For Martians, whether you or your ancestors were "pre-Cop" became the equivalent of Americans tracing their roots to the Pilgrims. When Copernicus and sister ship Ptolemy arrived with four thousand more settlers in 2063, the "pre-Cop" and "First-Cop" alike nearly rioted, but after that passage, the "Phobos Express" became adept at handling the influx of colonists. The five Copernicus-class ships proved to be short-lived, at least as built. Their relatively low velocity VASMIR plasma engines were nearly obsolete even in 2060, and their reliance on argon propellant required refueling from Earth, not lower cost lunar or asteroid sources. It took nearly three dozen Orca shuttle runs to refuel, refurbish and reload Copernicus between runs and the twenty month loiter time in Earth orbit made it uneconomical as the Colonial Bureau sought to lower costs by privatizing operations. And the Deuterium-Tritium reactors were maintenance nightmares; their containment shields were gradually worn away by neutron radiation, and their Tritium fuel required replenishment every five years. In the 80s, the Kepler and Newton were rebuilt with CNO-Hydrogen fusion power plants and multi-segment water-propelled microwave engines and they continued service to the end of the century. The other three ships were dismantled in Earth orbit, their habitat rings and superstructures forming the backbone of the Komarov receiving station. Great Big Book of Spaceships (Eight Edition), Public Information ePress, 2180