UES Elysium

The UES Elysium is a generational ship that, like many of its other sister vessels, was set to land on a designated habitable planet thousands of lightyears from Earth. It is notable for the fact that it never actually reached its intended destination.

History

Due to a mathematical error that was never caught early in the ship's journey, the UES Elysium was sent completely off course. The exact issue is believed to be a rounding error in calculating the ship's trajectory caused by a floating-point number being multiplied incorrectly. Because of this, the ship effectively approached its destination at a slightly incorrect angle, causing it to miss it by over 5,000 lightyears.

Because the generational ships were designed as one-way vessels with only enough fuel to divert to a nearby star system upon arrival, the UES Elysium no longer had a way to get to its destination. With the lives of thousands of human passengers at stake, the ship's onboard computer systems redirected the ship to orbit a nearby red dwarf with no planets around it. Using the star's energy, the UES Elysium could at least sustain its critical systems such as power and life support. But having run out of fuel for propulsion, the ship was effectively stuck where it was.

With the lack of nearby planets, the inhabitants had no means of converting the UES Elysium into a proper, permanent artificial habitat as they had no means to conducting mining operations to construct new areas or conduct extensive maintenance on the ship. At that point, with the thousands of colonists risking starvation, it was decided the most ethical course of action was to put all of them into an extended cryostasis, using virtual reality worlds to keep their minds active.

Status

Due to the UES Elysium's position within a nebula of dense clouds and dust, they went completely undiscovered even by the Valerian Empire who had thoroughly surveyed the galaxy to reunite with all the other generational ships that were sent out. They had long believed that it has completely vanished, given that it never reached its original intended destination. Not even the Oracle was able to locate the UES Elysium during the Singularity War, meaning the ship missed the entirety of the Valerian Empire era.

Some believe that the UES Elysium is still accessible, positing that if people like John Veer could be recovered from the ancient past, then the UES Elysium might also still exist.