Survey Corvette Rating

Survey pilots are the people who find things. Prospecting guilds, science foundations and mining cooperatives all depend on them to fly slow, precise passes over rocks and moons while sensors map what lies beneath. The Survey Corvette Rating trains you to do exactly that in the Valkyrie Survey Corvette, Halcyon's 92-metre, two-pilot survey ship.

The Valkyrie is unusually versatile. It reaches 860 km/s in transit, can range 220 AU on helium-3 pellets at only 1.9 tonnes per 100 AU, and then spends days crawling a few hundred metres above a tumbling asteroid. That contrast shapes the 12-week syllabus. The first half covers long-range navigation, fuel planning for multi-month deployments and two-pilot cooperation with a survey team of four. The second half is all about proximity operations: station-keeping against irregular gravity, matching spin on rubble piles, and flying the grid patterns that lidar, magnetometer and gravimetry instruments need.

Students log 100 hours in the simulator and 85 hours in the Valkyrie itself, most of them on the Vesta Survey Range, a set of instrumented asteroids we lease for training. The final phase is a field deployment where your crew surveys a real target and hands the data to a working prospecting team.

Each cohort of eight is taught by two instructors, matching the ship's two-pilot deck. Tuition is 118,000 credits. Applicants need a Commercial Pilot Licence (Orbital) and 300 hours as pilot in command. The next intake begins on 17 November 2187, and seats remain for self-funded candidates.

Since 2183 our first-attempt pass rate is 89 per cent. Graduates earn the Valkyrie Survey Corvette Type Rating and go on to fly for prospecting guilds in the Belt, ocean-science groups at Europa and cartographic expeditions to the ice giants.