For some time now, Commander Altsain has been having immense problems with her Type-10 Defender, once named the Crimson Heffalump. In a nutshell, what was once a natural upgrade from the Type-9 for mass hauling has been squeezed out by an increase in that ship’s cargo capacity. Efforts to make it a dedicated armed-to-the-teeth trader that could get into any port, no matter how well defended, were scuppered by the arrival of a Python which could carry almost as much and simply avoid interdiction.

Frustrated, the commander transferred the Type-10 from Heffalump Haulage to Ironwing Industries, renamed it the Auricwing and gave it a new coat of paint.

Then the real work began.

Ironwing Industries is all about removing… problems. You have a problem, give Ironwing Industries a call and, in a few hours, your problem will be… aggressively marginalised.

Up to this point, this work had been carried out by the Ironwing itself, a tricked out Fer-De-Lance. The arrival of the Auricwing would give Ironwing Industries a massive hammer that would deal with anything the Fer-De-Lance could not and, with the right weaponry, would provide an answer to the Thargoid Problem.

The first task was to take the cargo spaces and basically just fill them with concrete (or module and hull reinforcements, as the shipyard called them). This was followed, after a lengthy wait as the bank balance of Ironwing Industries steadily grew large enough, with a conversion of the ship’s bulkheads, from lightweight alloys to military grade composites.

The result of all this was an incredibly slow and ungainly ship – but one that had more than six times the durability of a stock Anaconda. The Auricwing was now a beast, an all but indestructible beast.

Now it needed teeth.

Commander Altsain immediately took advantage of the massive stocks of ship components at Jameson Memorial to equip the ship with four turreted AX multicannon. It was also equipped with xeno scanners, shutdown field neutralisers and a great big fighter bay that housed two AX fighters and could build many more.

This was everything the commander needed to begin hunting Thargoids, but she did not feel quite ready for that, as a pilot. So, she had the AX weaponry put into storage and re-equipped the Auricwing with more standard weaponry – four large turreted multicannon, three beefy turreted beam lasers and, to begin with, two small turreted cannon.

Oh, the pirates would rue the day the Auricwing turned up at a nav point or resource site…

Such combat testing was very useful for Commander Altsain, as she had never used fighters before, and the Auricwing now handled very differently to the days when it was the Crimson Heffalump.

However, it was devastatingly effective. The one modification the commander made was to replace the twin cannon with small multicannon – the standard cannon simply chewed through ammunition too quickly to be of much use when trolling for pirates, and the continued mining activities of the Antimony Sun meant the Auricwing had plenty of iron and nickel to synthesise small calibre ammunition in the field.

The fighters… were less than effective to begin with. The commander quickly learned that hiring the cheapest pilots for them usually resulted in getting someone who might be clinically cross-eyed, but patience and nurturing language gradually got them up to speed.

Commander Altsain is now very happy with the Auricwing, and it only took half a billion credits to get to that point. She is now in the market for fellow commanders who want to have a crack at a big Thargoid ship…