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Main: Septagons Titan
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Post Ship Fluff thread
I posted a few days ago in the suggestions forum that I'd had the idea of doing a series of snippets and lore entries for some of the base series of ships on the forum for a long, long time. I'm bored so, thought I may as well get started with everyones absolute favorite ship, the Zebucart!

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The Zebucart
Manufacturer: The Interstellar Metalworking Combine
Hull Classification: Light Fighter
Recommended Use: General Purpose Vehicle

While there are many hundreds of different types of spacecraft seen in Earthforce space and beyond, there is no ship more prolific, loved, despised, and vital than the humble Zebucart. IMComs star product, and indeed as some have said the sole reason they have not gone bankrupt, it is a versatile multipurpose vehicle that nonetheless earns scorn from the more wealthy, pretentious, or ignorant who underestimate its uses.

An Ancient Design
Part of the reason for the Zebucarts great success lies in its design. While at a first glance inside the cockpit or engine compartment the ship seems to have most of the traditional bells and whistles of modern craft such as holoscreens, kinetic buffers to ease the impact of acceleration, and artificial gravity, the core of the ship is based around an almost unimaginably ancient vessel. IMCom was formed several hundred years in the past under the name Baikonur Engineering Solutions, and was comprised near entirely of the descendants of Russian scientists and engineers. As such, rather than create an entirely new spacecraft to assist in the ongoing exploration of Sol, they created a series of iterations and revisions to bring the old Soyuz spacecraft up to modern standards. Continuing over generations, this process eventually created the most reliable warp capable spacecraft in production today: The Zebucart. The old design sensibilities that created those first prototype craft continue today, with each Zebucart having manual, mechanical fallbacks for steering, reactor temperature control, docking and more.

A versatile craft
Aside from its astonishing mechanical reliability, the Zebucart is truly at its core a multipurpose vessel. Each one is designed to be extremely modular, with optional storage bays, mounts for varying sizes of weaponry, and much more. Pirates are fond of them as both merchant targets and as cheap, customizable spacecraft with which to liberate the goods of others, while more than one merchant has destroyed a threat with the aid of the inbuilt mass drivers and shield boosters. It has even been rumored that some dictators on more backwards planets have turned large numbers of Zebucarts into cheap, drone operated FTL kinetic kill missiles, a guarantee that should they fall from power they'll take someone (and their entire planet) with them!

Summary
The Zebucart is quite possibly the cheapest, most successful and widely produced spacecraft in existence today. While it has neither the weapons strength or shields of more powerful ships, or the cargo capacity of industrial ships, the Zebucart has played (and indeed continues to) an essential role in the development of modern, warp capable ships.

Would you like to know more? Order our official IMCom brochure to obtain details on our entire line of spacecraft and Zebucart derivatives today!


Sun Jul 02, 2017 5:03 pm
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Main: enkelin
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Post Re: Ship Fluff thread
This is pretty good content. How do you envision it being displayed to the player? One thing we've had issues with in the past is mission text that was too wordy.

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Hi, I'm Anil, a long-time player turned developer. I am Star Sonata's lead content developer, which means that I run weekly dev meetings and make sure that any proposed changes to the game receive proper review before going live.

http://www.starsonata.com/features


Sun Jul 02, 2017 6:14 pm
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Main: Septagons Titan
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Post Re: Ship Fluff thread
Oh, I never thought of it being put in game, it was always just an idea to have it on the forums as a fun little thing people could look at when they're bored between uni resets and so on.

I don't think the game as is can really support something like that, unless some sort of inspect/info option was added to the other right click commands for items.


Sun Jul 02, 2017 7:00 pm
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Post Re: Ship Fluff thread
Cool, then we are on the same page. Looking good!

_________________
Hi, I'm Anil, a long-time player turned developer. I am Star Sonata's lead content developer, which means that I run weekly dev meetings and make sure that any proposed changes to the game receive proper review before going live.

http://www.starsonata.com/features


Sun Jul 02, 2017 7:51 pm
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Team: Axis Industries
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Post Re: Ship Fluff thread
Communiques. Those things are flavor text for Jungle and Serengeti and decay on reset.


Mon Jul 03, 2017 5:48 am
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