Drake Interstellar
Mid-tier shipyards and arms dealing, named for a voyage that is not possible. Drake sells romance at the front of the lot and second-hand hulls out the back, and it is very good at both.
Overview
Drake builds ships, breaks ships, and sells the weapons that go on them. Its yards are the affordable tier — nothing Drake makes will beat an Orion hull, and nothing Orion makes costs what a Drake hull costs. For an independent operator, a crew, a small hauler, a company with one ship and a schedule, Drake is not the compromise. It is the entire market.
Its two real properties tell the truth about it. Deimos Yard is a ramshackle salvage moonlet in Terra-Forge orbit where the grey market is not hidden because there is nobody to hide it from. Cutter is a shipbreaking world where old hulls are dragged down to die and be stripped, and a great deal of what Drake sells as new has been somewhere before.
The company's genius is provenance, or rather the professional absence of it. Drake will sell you a ship. Drake will not be able to tell you very much about the ship, and will not pretend otherwise, and the price reflects the silence.
Character
- Mid-tier shipyards and arms dealing — the affordable end of both
- Shipbreaking and salvage feed the yards; the line between refit and resale is not drawn
- Deniable by default. Drake's paperwork is thin as a service, not as an oversight
- Romantic branding, industrial reality. The advertising is all distance and horizon. The business is scrap
Where it stands on the Labour Question
A challenger, loudly and without a plan.
Drake wants catena relegalised because Drake wants everything cheaper, and it argues the case in bars and trade halls rather than in the Senate, because it has no lobbying budget worth the word. It is the only corporation whose reform position is genuinely unstrategic — it simply resents an arrangement that the incumbents wrote before Drake was large enough to be in the room.
Nobody weighs Drake's vote. Drake keeps casting it.
Relationships
- Orion Dynamics — the tier above, structurally. Orion does not consider Drake a competitor and Drake very much considers Orion one
- Lumen Freight & Trade — Lumen's older hulls end at Cutter, and some of them leave again
- The Sworn Song — privateers who run under other people's colours need hulls with no history. Drake is where that need is met, and Drake has never asked
- Independent crews — Drake's actual customer base, and the only faction in the Sphere that likes it
Status
Undercapitalised, unbothered, and the reason anyone outside a corporation can afford to be in space at all.