Aquila (TV series)

Did You Know?

• While digging on farmland, Tom and Geoff discover a cavern containing the skeleton of a Roman centurion and the craft Aquila.
• The boys eventually discover that Aquila came from a massive abandoned spaceship orbiting the Sun.
• Upon seeing the larger ship, the boys exclaim, 'a battle cruiser! You could have some serious fun with a battle cruiser!'

Aquila

Aquila is a liferaft from a larger ship, constructed by the Yrrillians from the planet Deneb. It can fly almost any distance and operate in outer space without crew spacesuits, though damage to its Oxygen Regeneration system before it was unearthed limited its air supply to six hours. The craft possesses invisibility, verbal remote control, lasers, a holographic interface, and the Core Defence Wave Gun, which can incapacitate everything within a 300 coleymort (191.1 m) radius. Aquila can be programmed to execute basic manoeuvres upon detecting certain signals; the boys used this by programming it to respond to an inaudible dog whistle. This caused a problem when a dog owner blew his own whistle while the craft was invisible on the grounds of a stately home, making it go missing. A friend named Dunstan found it and returned it to the boys, also discovering that Aquila could be connected to a computer and contacted by email. In the 2010 novelization, Dunstan finds that Aquila can also be contacted using mobile phones, which the boys find more convenient, and the craft can use the phones for verbal communication since its vocal generator was destroyed millennia ago, though the software remained intact. Aquila can demolish objects by flying directly through them; the boys demonstrated this by flying it through a brick wall, after which the craft was found completely unharmed. The ship stores everything it sees on egg-shaped objects that can be played back on its holographic screen, recording approximately 1,600 years of data. If the eggs are not replaced, the ship begins recording over the start of the footage. Aquila is also equipped with a lie detector that can interpret conversations in its black box footage as well as immediately outside it. 'Aquila' is the Latin word for 'eagle'. Inscribed on the centurion's safety harness is the proverb 'Licat volare si super tergum aquila volat', derived from an ancient Greek story about an eagle and a sparrow racing to Mount Olympus. The craft's name is inscribed on its exterior as AQVILA.