This article originally appeared in Jump Point 8.2.
Drake Interplanetary Cutlass Red
THE BIRTH OF A VARIANT… AGAIN
In 2845, Drake Interplanetary put itself on the map with the introduction of what was then referred to as the AS-1 Cutlass. Following the base model’s unexpected success, Drake earned the undesired reputation as a manufacturer of spacecraft favored by outlaws and pirates. The company initially addressed these concerns with the launch of the Cutlass Blue in 2860. The Blue was a modification of the base Cutlass to appeal to law enforcement agencies. While the launch of the Blue failed to stifle all criticism, it did manage to successfully generate reasonable doubt among consumers and provide Drake’s defenders sufficient ammunition to engage detractors.
The latter group’s argument was again brought into the mainstream following the release of a 2875 documentary, Bent Cutlass, that claimed that Drake had knowingly ignored background check flags when selling ships. The documentary detailed an incident when twelve Cutlasses were sold to an intermediary who later transferred them to an outlaw organization for use in a raid that left 122 dead on an orbital outpost. Facing renewed criticism, the company decided to attempt to repeat their past success introducing what executives termed an “infallible” Cutlass variant. But the Cutlass Red’s road to acceptance was rockier than the Blue as the initial marketing campaign fell comparatively flat. Drake enlisted actor Don Shadow (then starring as Doctor W. Robin Simkins on the top-rated Spectrum drama Situation? Emergency!) as the spacecraft’s official spokesperson. In an uncharacteristic series of advertisements, Shadow addressed the audience directly and invited them to sit down with him for a “very serious conversation” in which he extolled the new Cutlass model’s virtues. “Ask yourself, do you want to put your life in the hands of an inferior scanner array?”. He then informed viewers that they could request prepared correspondence to petition their local emergency services organizations to purchase the spacecraft. The ads did not feature the ship itself and were widely panned as disingenuous by audiences. Aerospace analysts and mainstream comedians alike had a field day with the Cutlass Red before it had even taken flight.
INTERNAL DEVELOPMENTS
As with the Cutlass Blue, Drake invested a great deal into developing the Red as a bespoke spacecraft. However cynical the inspiration behind the ship’s development, the team actually charged with making the project a reality was dedicated to building a spaceborne ambulance that would improve and extend the current standard of care. Like the Blue, the Red would have its own assembly line producing a significantly altered fuselage. The idea of turning a militaristic spacecraft into a hospital support ship greatly appealed to the war-weary Drake development team and slots on the Cutlass Red program were highly sought after. Early on, designers identified that the Cutlass Red could combine two previously unrelated roles: ambulance-style supported patient transport and search and rescue. The latter role, previously the domain of military-sponsored heavy equipment, was becoming increasingly necessary as the technology to make survival in a spacewreck or other catastrophe was improving greatly across the latter half of the 29th century. With more and more crews able to survive the destruction of their spacecraft (and a corresponding increase in space combat occurring on the edges of the Empire), the Cutlass Red was seen as a design with a strong raison d’être.
Drake assigned a full development team to each role and developed a mediating process for interfacing the two roles into a single ship. Each group was ordered and budgeted to develop a single keystone innovation that would help the Red stand apart on a professional level. The ambulance team opted to partner with AutoDoc for the development of a bespoke medical bed that would fit into the extended rear cabin (a recalled Blue being used for early fast prototyping). The search and rescue team decided to focus on software, assembling an electronics sub-division to develop the now familiar Nav-E7 Long Range scanner system. The Nav-E7 would give the Red a unique edge in identifying and safely maneuvering around patients in three-dimensional space. The new electronics team, which would end up developing everything from the Dragonfly’s bespoke ground interface to the Herald’s protected computer core, managed to advance scanner clarity 23% from the industry standard using available components alone. Both role-specific projects proceeded extremely well and, because they focused on building out different areas of the ships, needed little mediation when adapted to the final hull design. In all, conversion of the Cutlass Blue into the Cutlass Red proof-of-concept took only eleven months, with a fully constructed Red production prototype flying its first round of space trials in September 2876.
UNEXPECTED SUCCESS
Then, in another example of Drake’s extraordinary luck, laughter turned to applause within days of the Cutlass Red’s first sale. In spite of the failed marketing campaign and overall negative perception of the project, Drake opted to continue with the planned launch in April 2877, believing that the investment could easily be made up due to the Cutlass Red’s practical superiority in its role. With little event surrounding the initial release, first month sales were limited. Then, galactic events shifted unexpectedly in Drake’s favor when a cruise liner collided with a customs weigh station in the Corel System, penetrating both ships’ hulls and setting off a case of improperly stored explosives aboard the station that caused significant further damage. Dozens were killed immediately and hundreds were left stranded. The ensuing explosion destroyed the station’s vacuum hangars, emergency spacecraft, and medical supplies, forcing emergency services on Lo to put together a makeshift response themselves. The centerpiece of that response became a flight of thirty-six brand-new Cutlass Red spacecraft that had just arrived for sale. Local forces deputized the ships and crewed them with anyone available to help. The familiar Cutlass controls allowed local pilots to make easy use of the Reds during the emergency. The situation was tailor made for Spectrum stories with the force of newly painted, bright red Cutlasses riding to the rescue and ultimately stabilizing and transporting back and forth dozens of patients who would otherwise have been lost.
Drake marketing knew to capitalize on the situation, ensuring that footage of the rescue appeared whenever possible. Gone immediately were the concerns that the Cutlass Red was a cynical public-relations ploy replaced with the understanding that it truly was the next evolution of medical support spacecraft. So rapid and so significant was the Cutlass Red’s turn to favor that actor Shadow credited the spacecraft as part of the reason for his move from Spectrum series to successful film roles. Inside the company, there was both a palpable sense of relief and a true sense that the Cutlass team had done something important.
THE NEXT GENERATION
Following the Corel customs rescue, sales of the Cutlass Red doubled month over month for two years. Drake was forced to move from a single production line to a dedicated factory building only Cutlass Reds (since 2915 it has constructed both the Cutlass Red and some Caterpillar components). Even more important has been the long-term impact of the Cutlass ambulance concept on both aerospace design and emergency services. While the initial metrics for the Red were based only on the need to use a similar internal layout to the existing Blue, its rise in importance has led to countless third-party adaptations, including specialized medical components and massive designs like the optional boat decks of the Endeavour-class research ships. The bed-and-work-area designed into the Cutlass Red has become an industry standard unit that has gone on to define everything from loading decks to scanner mounts on a dozen different manufacturers’ spacecraft.
For the Cutlass team at Drake, the ultimate mark of its success occurred in 2895 when the United Empire of Earth purchased an order of three hundred Cutlass Reds for use as fleet support. Though a minor order in the scheme of things, the idea that the same UEEN that once turned down the Cutlass Black and forced Drake to ‘go their own way’ would purchase Cutlass Reds directly was seen as an indication that the project had true merit. The Navy has continued to buy small numbers of Cutlasses in the years since, outfitting many planet-side military hospitals with the ships in an attempt to maintain the same standard as civilian agencies; they have as of yet refused to contract a hardened militarized version for frontline service, favoring the larger (and more expensive) RSI Apollo instead.