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Ship design, construction and philosophy within Rheinland, over the last the four hundred years, has remained relatively consistent; build big, build large, build strong. Create redundancies wherever possible. Function is paramount, reliability is critical, form is secondary. The vessel should be able to retain pressure even with all active hull strengtheners offline. Canopies are small, reactors are large, if a design still offers maximal performance for hundreds of years, redesign at your own peril. Yet despite the staunch conservatism of the Rheinland engineering industry, Rheinland designs remain intensely radical - spartan, yet supremely high performance, and whilst pressure hulls may last for generations, their internals, avionics and flight systems are subject to consistent, iterative tuning and update.


The biggest disruption in the evolution of Rheinland stellar construction came during the intensification of the Eighty Years War, when the heavily ornamental designs of Imperial Rheinland started down the road of optimisation by fire into tighter, more martial designs - the long ranged vessels of the colonial era jury-rigged into sleeker, darker designs, utilising cheaper, massed produced prefabricates in much of their construction. Evidence of this transition can be seen in the arching lines of the Uruz armoured container transport, a vessel that once ploughed the wastes of the Crow nebula. Steadily, the designs of Rheinland headed towards a brusque, brutalist, blocky efficiency, with space frames shaved of superfluity - components naked, paint stripped, transponders and sensor pods on display. Stealth and subterfuge rarely factors into modern Rheinlandic engineering - massive social and celestial pressures induced by some of the most hostile settled environments in the house worlds. The 80 years war was so defining to the Rhein’s social and technological consciousness, that many of the stylistic decisions that influenced shipwrights of the 80 years war, remain resplendent in modern Rheinlandic thinking - most distinctively Rheinland’s preference for expansive MOX-based fission-fusion pellet torus reactors, rather than H-fuel reactors, as embraced by the GMG dependent Kusari and Liberty near universally. With low-mass designs impossible under these constraints, Rheinlandic engineering has pushed towards power and weight - with the notable exception of the perpetually lethal Valkyrie, and its latter-day descendent, the Wraith.


As the majority of Rheinland’s shipbuilding talent enjoyed the rich protections of the Imperial Labour Union (ILU), the total ousting of all blue-collar shipbuilding Unions following their non-compliance with the terms of Rheinland’s surrender to the GMG effectively intellectually bankrupted any revolutionary new developments for the next century and a half. Whilst the service designs of the 80-years war found themselves subject to numerous refreshes and updates under the Niemann administration, it is only within the last fifty years that DHC and Republican has started to commit entirely new hulls to mass production, designs capable of superseding their ancient brethren. Most notable is the Tirpitz battle cruiser - a design which both performs equivalently to, and exceeds, its predecessor, the Donau, and the Elbe combat carrier, whilst within the shipping industry, the Colossus superheavy transport dominates the Omega trade lanes. This wave of innovation has created a certain amount of obscurantism by organisations the new order of Rheinland engineering intellectualism has threatened - especially the Unioners, who remain dependent upon the continued manufacture of components for the Oder gunboat and Donau cruiser by DHC in order to leech away the hardware they require to keep their own stock of antiquated imperial vessels functional. For now, the venerable vessels of old retain their well-deserved primacy amongst Rheinland’s armada, but their staying power is questionable - especially due to the heavy outlining the Nomad Conflict gave to both the strengths and insufficiencies of the vessels of the ancient regime. With the Unioners actively pressing both Oders and Donaus back into service to brace against the steady flurry of Vidars and Jormangunds pressing out of the Omegas into Dresden, the preservation of the old Imperial systems of tooling, manufacture and service, have never been the more critical.