A/N: Hello there, thank you very much for clicking on my story! This is an idea I've had in my head for many years, and I hope to share a bit of it with you. I will be sticking largely to canon, though a number of things have changed in the several hundred years since the end of the Ninth Pass and the beginning of these events. I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I've enjoyed writing it, and I'd very much like to hear what you think.
Prologue: A Brief History of Pernese Space Travel
Pern began as a colony mission for settlers who wanted to escape the more complex life of the main galactic civilizations. The end of a major interplanetary war left plenty of people tired and longing for a new beginning on a new world, the Pern mission was far from the only colony ship to leave at the time. The fall of Thread and subsequent dismantling of old technology left the young colony completely cut off for hundreds of years, far too concerned with its own devastating problems to worry themselves with the rest of the universe.
After the rediscovery of the original Landing site and the heroic mission that saw the planet finally freed from Thread, the people of Pern suddenly found themselves with access to archives that would allow them to rebuild everything they had lost and more. A general consensus was reached through the Holds, Crafthalls and Weyrs to keep their agrarian society as the Colonists had intended, but redevelop some technology that would help them improve quality of life and medical care. Dragons and their riders, now free from their protective duties, proved an invaluable aid in maintaining this balance between pastoral life and technology. Rather than congregating in large settlements to facilitate assembling complex devices, work could be spread out over the entire planet and finished pieces teleported around as needed. Power needs were kept to a minimum through the use of this organic transportation, allowing advanced technology and medicine to reach those who needed it instantaneously without a planet-wide infrastructure being required.
The new devices being redeveloped, however, soon started to run up against Pern's natural mineral scarcity. Some remnants of the ancestral space technology was used to scout the surrounding solar system for mineral-rich asteroids, and dragons trained to safely teleport them down from the sky and directly into the yards of the Miners, Smiths and Technicians who would make best use of them. This technique proved so effective that the colonists began to work on space probes of their own, using teleportation to skip the hugely difficult steps of launching and reaching escape velocity. Probes were sent out in various directions to scout the solar system and nearby star systems, needing only very minimal power to travel through space and send back data about their locations to Landing Central Command. Dragons could then use this data to plan long between jumps to a probe's location, arriving within minutes and getting back home in time for dinner. To facilitate even longer jumps, airtight space platforms were constructed and teleported into place, allowing for brief rests between the huge distances. They could be brought back to the planet for maintenance and refuelling, then reused on new jumps.
In exploring their galactic neighbourhood, Pern sent out messages on every available frequency and began scanning for incoming transmissions, hoping to re-establish contact with other colonies. No one wanted to accidentally start a war through mining or exploring the wrong asteroid or planet. To their surprise, and then alarm, they received no transmissions in return. What had become of the huge city-planets spoken of in their Landing's archives? What had become of all the other colonies?
Weyrship One is the planet's attempt to answer those questions, and peacefully explore the universe they have still so recently rediscovered. A vast spaceship capable of housing two hundred dragons and their riders, built to be teleported around the cosmos by its own inhabitants and survive autonomously for turns on end. It represents Pern's culture and people as a mobile base, facilitating long-jumps to a wider and wider world. Though still in contact with the main planet, the jumps to and back will get longer and longer as they travel, and its crew will be expected to operate largely under their own power. The Weyr format was a matter of necessity: over the centuries since Threadfall's end, several attempts at establishing smaller format dragon colonies have proven unpleasant for the dragons involved, who seem to be most content in groups of 100 or more with representation from all colours and a natural breeding/Impression cycle. The crew of Weyrship One was chosen from amongst the very best and brightest across the entire planet, but includes a great number of younger professionals with high enough EMP rating to Impress, for the sake of the two Queens the ship plans to take along and their expected clutches.
Weyrship One begins its mission heading towards the closest known colony planet on record, on the way to their eventual goal of reaching the capital planet of their ancestors' seemingly abandoned civilization. Perhaps the answers they seek will lie somewhere along the way, scattered amongst the stars in the vast universe they have set out to explore.