Arbeitsdirektor Solomon Weiss here; out there to update you on a few occurrences.

You might have noticed that queerly named modular space station in the corner intermediate between Marshall and Bristol. It's a proxy for a group of Rheinlandic traders lacking in scruples and high moral fibre, which is about as healthy a diet as it comes. They've been shipping Union techs in and out of Hamburg on the quiet for us.

Hopefully this little trader's project of theirs will create ready access for both your movement and ours to the trading markets of Hamburg. If not, we'll storm the station, assume control of that little asteroid dugout for ourselves. The Hansa's conscious of what would happen if they tried anything unwitting.

Which puts us to a point - the re-emergence of the Feurball light fighter cannon is, frankly, something of a pain in the ass. The cannons were manufactured by an old ex-imperial design corp' called Kessler. Widely regarded; they built the artillery of the Imperial Navy. Fortunately or not, their clock got cleaned by the Nomad War when most of their upper-level board members were found to be incubi carriers after the purge. The Feurball was one of their premium products - one of the reasons why Rheinlandic weapory of that era had a reputation for bein' dramatically more effective than that of any other house arrayed against it. Relative tech levels have evened off by now, but the pulse of what they established hasn't.


We still have a number of (uninfected) Kessler techs within the Union, since most of them banded up with us to escape postwar reprisal. Kessler was responsible for manufacturing the powergrid you see in our Arbeiter space superiority fighters, which is the best in the damn sector, second to God only. Kessler techs helped work on reconstructing the Harmony's new reactor casing. The only snag is that the vault ship carryin' the only known schemata of the Feurball blueprints got frazzled by an Omega 11 solar flare about nine years ago, and what weaponry we have warehoused got used up in the one-year-war between us and the Hesse'. That cannon is a matter of institutional pride for us. It's demoralising for the men on the field to see the re-emergence of homebuilt copies bolted to the hulls of borderworlds contract killers.

The fact of it is, we've been sloppy with our artillery R'n'D. If Harmony finds any experimental cruiser, battleship, fighter, or Bomber weaponry, we'd happily pay extensively for working production copies. Every gun upgrade we can mount on our vessels will act as a force multiplier for us - considering the amount of havoc we wreck in Hamburg and Texas with what we presently have, I can't say I don't delight at the prospect of givin' my boys more means to come home without shrapnel mutilations.