Crashed Space Station

The Valiant-1, known as the crashed space station in-game, was a United States Space Administration space station that once orbited Earth before the Great War.

Background
Sometime prior to entering deep sleep in 2070, astronaut Sofia Daguerre spent some time on the station, though little is known about her time there. Left in orbit after the nuclear holocaust, orbital decay and lack of thrust maintenance led the space station to fall back to Earth and crash in the former state of West Virginia, in the area known as the Toxic Valley.

In 2103, the station's wreckage was fortified by Meg Groberg's Raiders and used as their headquarters, renaming it to the Crater. One of the raiders, Caleb Fisher, managed to access the station's computers. According to his analysis of surviving documents from the wreckage, they were building a device in the space station. Dubbing it the "Space Beam" project for lack of better words, Fisher doesn't know if it was some kind of weapon or communications system, since there was a lot of missing information, and it will probably take him years to figure it out.

Characteristics
Valiant-1 is a circular space station designed like an orbiting wheel. At the center was the command core (which was later converted into a raider encampment), where the main base of controlling the station was present. The module is then connected via connection tubes towards the rotating ring. These rings, such as Airlock C7, contained cargo and pressurized doors to allow spacecraft to dock on Valiant-1.

Appearances
The crashed space station appeared in Fallout 76, and was expanded in the Wastelanders update.

Behind the scenes

 * According to level designer Steve Massey, the crashed space station was selected as the site of the Raiders' settlement as the team had always wanted to do more with the space station since the game's initial release.
 * The real-world counterpart never got off the design and model stages created by Wernher von Braun in 1950. It used the theory proposed by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky that a spinning ring could be used in a weightless environment to create artificial gravity that would be controlled not only by the size of the ring, but by how fast it would spin. NASA has toyed with the concept since 1975, but to date no one has constructed one, unless the Space Station X-1 attraction built by von Braun and Walt Disney in 1955 is counted.
 * In the real world, a space station reentering earth's atmosphere would be torn apart by friction and deceleration. Sixty to ninety percent of its mass would burn away, and whatever remained would rain down over an area of several hundred miles.