Kringle 4000

The Kringle 4000 is a class of spaceship used by Santa's Workshop, a charitable foundation which distributes gifts throughout Starweb space during the Christmas season. These ships are the workhorses of its fleet, private mail carriers which are loaded up with goods and then dispatched.

Design

Approximately one hundred meters long, Kringle 4000 ships have a cross-section like a rounded square tapering down to fore and aft. At the ship’s bottom is the flat plate of its torch drive heatshield, with fusion pellet injectors at the center and rings for magnetic field coils around it. The lower half of the hull’s volume is taken up by fusion fuel and reaction mass tanks for the engines, and of the upper half most of it is given over to a payload bay with a large set of cargo doors. At the top is the crew cabin, capable of accommodating a dozen-odd people. Radiators for life support and engineering systems run down the sides.
Maximum acceleration is limited to about one gravity and the class, rated as a civilian cargo and passenger transport, has no dedicated weapons.

History and Use

When it first started out, Santa’s Workshop simply purchased gifts and had them mailed to needy children and other recipients; later on as it grew in popularity it was able to establish a habitat modeled after old Terran stories about the mythological Santa Claus and his workshop at the planet’s north pole, drawing on the appeal of shipping out handmade items. At first it bought or hired existing cargo vessels for this purpose, but as it continued to grow in stature it eventually commissioned its very own class of ship.
The Kringle 4000 was designed to fill this role, as a transport to move Workshop gifts and in some cases a few very lucky passengers along for the ride. Individual ships are named after Santa’s reindeer, and each year they are assigned to particular routes which they travel, dropping off their gifts as they go.