The Crater

The crashed space station is a location in the Toxic Valley region of Appalachia in 2102. It is the wreckage of the Valiant-1 space station, having fallen from orbit after the Great War. As of 2103, the station wreckage has been occupied by raiders and turned into their headquarters in Appalachia, renamed "Crater."

Background
A United States Space Administration space station, the Valiant-1 was in orbit of the Earth before the Great War. As time passed, the space station lost optimal orbit, careening to the surface of the planet and crashing in the Toxic Valley, the northernmost part of Appalachia.

While the space station stayed largely intact, its crew appears to have perished upon re-entry. Little remains to be scavenged aside from a spacesuit within a sealed airlock.

Layout
The crashed space station is located in a large, shallow crater near the northeastern edge of the Toxic Valley. It appears to have fallen from orbit at a high velocity, devastating the surrounding area. The Valiant has weathered the impact remarkably well, all things considered. The bulk of the station remains embedded upright in the center of the crater, with fragments scattered around it. At the northern edge lies the separated Airlock C7, which can be accessed with the Airlock C7 inventory list and contains the location's steamer trunk and unique space suits.

Small sections of the torus, torn off during re-entry or the impact, lie around the partially-intact main body of the station, which is on its side. The skeletons of former station personnel are scattered across the area. Fissure site Delta is south of here.

By 2103 the location has been turned into a raider settlement and has had scaffolding, amenities, and other decorations typical of raider architecture added.

Notable loot

 * Airlock C7 inventory list - Note, found next to a skeleton, slightly southwest of the torus' core, in a broken section of the station.
 * Spacesuit and helmet - Inside Airlock C7 - use the code on the airlock C7 inventory list (111418).
 * Untitled poem - Note, in an outhouse near a raider cabin on a promontory in the hills south of the station ruins.
 * Flight data recorder
 * Random armor mod - Immediately south of the middle of the station, inside a destroyed section and laying on the ground at the left, inside.
 * Random recipe - On a metal shelf in the raider cabin on the aforementioned promontory (roughly east from the crash site, on top of the mountain).
 * Raider power armor chassis - On the second floor of the raider cabin.

Appearances
The crashed space station appears only in Fallout 76.

Behind the scenes

 * 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.
 * 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 a several hundred mile area.