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
Prior to the Great War, 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. According to Caleb Fisher's analysis of surviving documents from the wreckage, an apparatus capable of firing "beams" at Earth was in construction before its crash-landing. The purpose of this "space beam" was unknown, though Fisher hypothesized it was either a weapon or a communications device.

In 2103, the station's wreckage was later fortified by Meg Groberg's Raiders and used as their headquarters, renaming it to the Crater.

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 the 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 Werhner 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.


 * The design of the crashed station (a torus with external engines) resembles the Ballistic Orbital Missile Base 001 space station from the canceled Fallout 3 project by Black Isle Studios, codenamed Van Buren.