Corporate Ships

During the First Federation the corporation owned starships developed into immense structures. The reason was the need for holding together a business over interstellar distances despite fairly slow transports, the expense of building individual starships and the many possible roles of the ship. Instead of building many small ships, which would have been prohibitively expensive given the cost of amat and advantages of scale, the ships were extended with many functions. They were not just cargo and passenger transports but also acted as communication links, weapons platforms, universities, colonisation support and mobile headquarters. They were the visible presence of the Corporation, extending its will many lightyears from the central Headquarters.

Passengers were mainly kept in cryonic storage, but it was found that the decades of voyage could also be used to educate and train new employees and their families. This resulted in the development of mobile universities, at first mainly for colonists but later extending into nearly all forms of education. Since the conditions at the destination was by no mean certain, the ships were often equipped with extensive colonisation technology even if they were not colony ships - if the destination system had suffered misfortune or disaster the ship could help rebuild it or at least construct infrastructure enabling it to return. Another consequence of the uncertainty about the destination was the inclusion of many weapons systems and fighter craft to meet potential hostilities from locals, competing corporations or unknown forces.

To power these behemoths amat was used (later era ships used GUT drives or even drive sails). The bulk of the ship consisted of reaction mass surrounding the core where the passengers and crew lived as radiation shielding. The ships were often kilometres in length; although far larger ships have been constructed the corporate ships still remain in the high quartile of interstellar crafts.

The arrival of such a ship to the system was a major event throughout the era, implying both the arrival of news, entertainment and technology from the rest of human space as well as new directives for the local branch of the corporation. Quite often the higher echelons of local management felt that the arrival was a mixed blessing - audits, questionings, promotions, demotions, new appointments and changes in strategy followed in their wake.

The Corporate ships were the start of the relativist culture, although it began to develop its own uniqueness first when the ships reached ultrarelativistic speeds. The crews of these slow ships did indeed develop very different subcultures, often unique to a ship or corporation; however, their slowness made the subcultures drift so much that they never gained the cohesion of their relativist descendants.

The end of the Corporate Ships came with reactionless drives and wormholes. The drives made ships faster and smaller, making the economies of scale that had previously supported the huge ships now promote medium-sized specialised craft. The death-knell was the wormholes that completely circumvented the need for interstellar passenger crafts and were often too tight to allow the ships through. The old corporate ships were dismantled, used as space stations or retrofitted into colony ships for the periphery. Today only a handful Corporate Ships remain. The largest collection can be found at Old Ceres Shipyards in the Sol System, where several corporate ships from the middle and late first federation era can be visited in the spaceflight museum. Of special note is the Wiedermanste of Interstellar Development Group, famous for being the ship where Mutual Co-Development Treaty was first underwritten. It was donated to the Solar Organisation by the government of Bisaya in 9474. It had been mothballed and forgotten for several millennia after the Version War when it served as an amat missile station. Other ships have suffered far less well: the Makigbuylog of K4H were drifting through the rings of Rejkre IV for 2300 years before being rediscovered and salvaged, and the classic Prometheus of Numedia Interstellar was destroyed as target practice for planetary defence systems at Tulila in 5433.