Zorgon Peterson is happy to announce ongoing development to enter the market of ship launched fighter technology.

The current "Shuttle" prototype is said to eventually come in 4 different variants, filling a high demand for small utility:

- Refinery (4 bins), 2x Mining Laser,- Cargo Rack (4 tons), 2x Fixed Pulse, 1x Chaff- Passenger Seats, 2x Gimbal Pulse, 1x Point Defense- Shield Cell Bank, 2x Fixed Plasma, 1x Heat SinkTo fill all these tasks, the Shuttle comes in a much bulkier frame than the other ship launched fighters, barely fitting into the fighter bay.Rumours say they are facing many technical difficulties that may lead to a significant delay or complete failure of the project.It may also lead to yet another collaboration with Saud Kruger.Additionally this raises the question of whether Zorgon Peterson is developing a large fighter bay capable vessel of its own.________________________________________________Soo ... the shuttle idea has been floated around for quite a while. I felt like fleshing it out a bit.First of all, there is no Gelid variant, because this little ship is running hot. Being the bulkiest of them all and carrying the most, the drives are having a hard time moving it around. That puts it at similar handling and integrity as the Taipan, but it comes with less speed and slightly weaker shields., the "easy" variant. Despite being mainly focused on utility, Zorgon Peterson still knows combat and they're trying to prove it by squeezing a shield cell bank(!) into this small frame. Now you may be wondering what good that's gonna do with such a small shield. Well, it'll let this little ship temporarily tank a little more fire than the others by instantly countering shield damage, keeping the shield at full capacity. That will allow getting close to turreted ships until the heat sinks run out and the Shuttle melts itself via heat damage. Fighter pilots will appreciate this durability., the "challenging" variant. Mining in wings has long been proven to be highly efficient, especially when combining smaller craft for scouting with larger craft for refining. This build aims to capitalise on that concept. As a small craft the Shuttle is still nimble and decently fast to quickly scout resources for the lumbering mother ship. Beyond chipping single fragments to scout, the mining lasers will also add additional yield to the mining process of the mother ship itself. It is still unclear whether these may possibly come at above average range and significant damage output similar to Lances. The biggest challenge yet is adding a tiny high quality refinery and fragment scoop to this ship. Power constraints to operate that force it to come without a utility. If successful, this would boost collection rates and make up for having a fighter bay where a large collector controller could be. After filling 4 bins the Shuttle would have to dock and refine into the mother ships cargo hold. Fighter pilots mayappreciate this variant at all, as mining is not their profession. Getting this into wider use may require building a market for non combat pilots. A required skill would be to mine the asteroid of a targeted prospector (shoot and scoop) and potentially operating collector limpet controllers in case of controlling the mother ship. However these tasks aren't too complicated and they pay well with little involved risks, so traditional fighter pilots may still pick this opportunity., the "difficult" variants. These are difficult, because they are made to shuttle between the tiny mail slots of outposts and large ships. This requires acooperation with thousands of minor factions to make this port accessible for general use (they are currently authorised only). This needs a new formalised docking procedure, cleaning these ports (they are hardly used) and safety measures (the mother ship still cannot enter a hangar and the pilot may still want to swap controls between accessing limited outpost services and controlling the ship). And while these variants dorequire a cargo scoop unlike the Torrid, they do require a procedure for safe loading and unloading of cargo and passengers, which in turn requires close collaboration with the fighter bay manufacturer. It is safe to say that only the helm will be authorised to dock the Shuttle at outposts, but in any case (this will apply to other fighters as well, so there are multiple interested parties) this will grant limited access to contacts, cartographics and missions (generally non cargo related missions). Tepid will have the advantage of getting access to markets and missions involving up to 4 tons of cargo (delivering/receiving), while the Aegis allows to take and complete VIP passenger missions.________________________________________________Now that was all kind of in universe, but I've tried to hint at all the things this connects to and what kind of things would need to be done for implementation. I think the bang for buck ratio is unfortunately low, so no expectations on seeing this fit into development any time soon (unless it's already scheduled!) - but I feel it's a perfect fit in general (it would be great to release alongside the Panther Clipper).Obviously the whole thing requires designing, modelling and animating a whole new ship, sound effects included. But just like the Taipan it would eventually double as an excellent asset in CQC and before that it brings a lot more use cases, which of course also require a lot more implementation work.There is a decent amount of balancing to do to get the tiny shield cell and general heat profile of this ship to work.Then the cargo scoop has to be added back into the fighter just for the Torrid variant as well as the inventory menu for the refinery (and required interactions for refining into the mother ship, automated process upon docking).The passenger cabin and cargo inventory could eventually be bypassed by treating the shuttle like a direct link as if the mother ship had docked (no scoop/eject or other options related to that on Tepid/Aegis). Otherwise the docking process of these two fighters needs a UI option similar to SRVs for loading/unloading things.Crew, whether they come with a new job specialisation or not, need a new command to mine a rock (behaviour already exists in NPC miners - may require prospectors to specify the target) as well as new voice lines for this command and related status changes (like the refinery being full).Outposts need a dedicated docking procedure for fighters (maybe the holographic of the bay fits onto these existing tiny mail slots?) including case sensitive station services (normal fighter or Shuttle Tepid/Aegis) and new model details, animations and sounds for that port (effectively a whole new object).And that probably doesn't even cover everything.The potential will keep me excited once I've gotten used to normal fighters being part of the game though.