The Liberty Rogues Wrote:

Mort appears on the screen, viewed behind the rather tattered wooden desk, encircled by a mix of messy stacks of papers of various importance, a rather messy coffee cup in front of him and an ashtray (_{just as dirty as the coffee cup}) to his left.

Ah..good day, Marauders.

Yeah, the project. It has approached the point where work has crawled to a near standstill. The workers you provided us were very useful initially, but as you might no doubt understand, some of the more integral systems should be left to be built by people, who do not secretly want your death.

We are busy hooking up all the needed control and safety systems. We would usually skimp out on the later due to the temporary nature of our usual outposts, but I doubt the visitors of the shipyard will be thrilled to find out otherwise. After we are sure everything is held together, we will finally start producing the engines itselves. The mockup plan is done and should not be too hard to implement, especially with the alloys you have provided us with, so at this point everything just depends on how

Mort takes a quick swig of the brew from his cup, his expression giving the faintest of twitches as he continued, slowly setting the near-empty cup back down on its usual spot- as indicated by the rings of brown stains underneath it.

The Hel? Oh, those things...yeah, we had a few employed at the time. Not so much anymore, because while you can fix a Scylla with swearwords, you need a manual for a Hel. Needless to say, we also do not have many of the parts to fix them with in the first place.

We stopped using them around at the same time, when getting in and out of Rheinland became a wee bit problematic due to the Liberty-Rheinland war. At that point even the jumpholes had frequent patrols belonging to the special forces from either side and any transport carrying components for ship building was quickly returned, forcefully of course, back to Rheinland by the Military or captured and repossessed by the Navy.

Considering the Hel platform did not offer all that more usefulness over our homebrews during the odd situation where we would need destroyers, we decided to simply stick to what we had.

We do still have a few of them, but most are in such a sorry shape, we use them as stationary platforms. A spare Hel platform would be good for spare parts if nothing else, so feel free to bring us one. I will get someone to assign a Scylla conversion on the Nonsense Factory and keep you updated as soon as we get the needed parts for it. We already have a couple of Bullmastiffs ready to be converted for that purpose.






~Mort





TRANSMISSION ALAHAMBAHAMED

The Liberty Rogues Wrote:

Good day, Mr. Ivankov.

It looks like as though I will be the one asking pardon for the late reply this time, but for a good reason. Or so I would think it is. First of all, I will consider the offer regarding the Artifacts. I might have a few people free for such a trip. I will keep you updated on that one. Anyway. Yes, I was made aware of the arrival of your vessel as its presence made the docking operators at San Quentin rather squirmy, but overall, I hope that your crew had something to occupy themselves with during their visit. I cannot personally say that I've visited the bar on that station myself, but I can imagine it is not as well stocked as the ones in, say, Rochester or Alcatraz are.

As for the current deal, I am glad to say that my boys found a rather innovative solution to your order. Instead of waiting for the two Bullmastiffs to arrive to the Nonsense Factory, one of the two destroyers in Coronado - the LR-Tug2 has been re-purposed once more. Since we disassembled it into makeshift propulsion platform earlier, which required us to pretty much remove the front half of the ship, my guys upon being asked to salvage it sort of...eh...stitched it back together.

It does not look too elaborate, but sufficed to say, I suppose it counts as the first of our gifts to you straight from the Goose Creek. Make of that what you will.

The ship itself was tested by running it from Coronado to Cassini, which involves going through six different navigation hazards. The only thing that the crew reported was that due to a small error during the assembly, the stitched on front is just slightly inclined towards the left.

In other words, as long as you do not attempt planetary landing, the ship should serve you well.

You will find the LR-Only.Slightly.Bent moored on the Nonsense Factory in Cassini.






~Mort





TRANSMISSION CHUNGA RUNGA'D