Due to recent financial hardships, the Sprocketeers have decided to cancel the planned mass production of the SPK-BusinessEnd combat space vehicle, and instead repaint and submit our testing prototype as a contest entry in order to win back our research costs. Allow me to give you a tour.
The ship\'s length checks in at exactly 75 meters, luckily enough. It has been remarked by some nerd in R&D that, at certain angles, the ship\'s front can resemble the face of a barroth.
Here is a photo taken by a satellite moments before explosively impacting the windshield. In it you can see all of the ship\'s weapons systems: a pair of side-mounted missile piles, a single fixed antimatter cannon below the main fuselage, and a dual-cannon turret above it.
The ship was created as an attempt to reproduce the efficiency of the VFW fantail drive in-house. Unfortunately, the decision to include three of such drives made the ship prohibitively expensive for manufacturing, so only this one was ever built. Please note that the Sprocketeer logo was already cut into the plating before the decision was made to submit it for consideration here; our mechanics quickly flipped the drives around to face the logos inwards, but could not hide them completely in the time given.
While this method was originally a strict trade secret, we can now reveal that the turret used here is not anchored directly at its base, but is rather quantumally tethered to a small pivot between the two higher engines.
This means that, when controlled by a reasonably competent pilot, the gun can actually avoid incoming enemy fire independent of the main ship, reducing the need for shielding and increasing available space for firepower.
This space has instead been utilized to make the gun glow and look kinda cool.
Here is a clearer picture of the fixed cannon. As you can see, it runs much of the length of the ship, and is lightly armored in order to favor firepower. This is definitely not because it was stripped from a larger ship and bolted on.
Also seen here is the left-side missile pile. Notice that the grating here runs the same direction as its opposite, rather than mirrored as it would be had it been copied symmetrically. This was a great engineering challenge for our team, and we are quite proud of it.
The entry door on either side of the ship is recessed, placing a meter of dense hull plating between the opening and the ion vent above it. We found that this arrangement reduces incidents of accidental depressurization by nearly four percent.
The ship core is near the entrance for easy crew access, but is still shielded with a layer of hull plating in case of accidental depressurization and subsequent interior exposure.
The interior comprises little more than a medium-length hallway with access to various internal systems, which were left open on purpose and certainly not as a result of budget cuts.
Accessible from this section are power storage and generation, as well as a small window into the missile pile on each side of the ship. Recommend reloading missiles only one at a time.
Some film of our tour is missing. Suffice it to say that the cockpit contains the weapons computers, and that the missile piles are separated onto two systems, in order to help mitigate the hopeless dread that sets in when all missile launchers are on cooldown at once.
Thank you for choosing our entry as this contest\'s winner. We eagerly await our hefty cash prize.
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