Description
Following reports that the Federation government had commissioned a limited run of a novel assault frigate based on the Utu from Duvolle Labs as prizes for the Independent Gaming Commission's Alliance Tournament XIX in YC125, the CreoDron board leveled a freedom of information claim which quickly returned a surprising volume of documents. While the majority have been fully redacted, what little can be gleaned dates the design of the Shapash to a YC120 contract authorized by the FIO for a series of joint operations with Crux Special Tasks Group and the Ostrakon Agency classified under "Project Trieste". The Shapash was developed by a provisional team under Duvolle's Advanced Manifold Theory Unit co-led by Rias Luisauir, prodigious R&D agent and engineer, and Progressive Plasma's Dr. Jinneth Duvolle, original co-founder of Duvolle Labs. Afforded a near-bottomless budget to design a platform suitable for locales where reinforcement would be impossible and return imperative, the two leads took full advantage of this unique opportunity to bring their most revolutionary and cost-prohibitive theories into reality as part of the designs. A reverse-ballast function devised by Luisauir, based on the micro jump drive's ultraweak force-compensated mass phase-tuning principle, negates armor plate mass gain by scaling microscale depleted vacuum volumes with the ship's mass in-flight, while a plasma cooling system designed by Dr. Jinneth boosts the operational threshold of hybrid turrets and armor repairers as well as the overload limit of propulsion modules. Combined with a substitution of the Utu's drone capabilities for potent hybrid hardpoints and the incorporation of assault frigate subsystems, the Shapash is a priceless force to be reckoned with.