This article originally appeared in Jump Point 8.4.
Esperia Prowler
TEVARIN SERVICE
The Prowler dropship has the unusual distinction of having two nearly separate histories: the first being its original manufacture and service by Tevarin forces several centuries ago, and the second being the now familiar replica constructed by Esperia. There is little agreed-upon history of the original Tevarin development process or its military service beyond its extensive use during both Tevarin Wars. What is certain is that the Prowler is a powerful landing craft whose unique silhouette, silent flight, and exceptional fighting capabilities made it emblematic of the Tevarin military cause and garnered both the ire and the respect of the Human soldiers who faced it in combat. The Prowler was first encountered by Human forces during the annexation of Idris IV in 2541 at the outset of the conflict. Prowler units were instrumental in pacifying the remaining Human defenders and transporting the first wave of elite Tevarin shock troops who secured the former military installations on the planet. A news photograph captured from the battlefield showing a sky full of distinct Prowler silhouettes became intimately associated with the early days of the conflict and the alien nature of the threat posed to the UPE by the Sovereignty.
Two distinct versions of the Prowler were encountered during the wars. The first, dubbed the Prowler-A, lacked the top-mounted remote turret. This initial configuration gave rise to a responsive tactic in which UPE interceptors would site a Prowler and then initiate a kick stop to blast this blind spot with full weapons as quickly as possible. As the war dragged into its second year, Prowler-Bs mounting what opponents called the ‘stinger’ (then a maser-based energy weapon turret) began to appear, costing the lives of dozens of Human pilots before new tactics could be disseminated. Technically speaking, the Esperia-manufactured replicas and updates were not the first Prowlers to be operated by Humans. During the first conflict, Human forces captured mostly-operational Prowlers on a number of occasions and equipped them for special forces missions, including behind-enemy-lines drone deployment and, in one case, a carefully orchestrated POW rescue operation. These Prowlers were not significantly modified for Human use and were often operated by UPE-loyal Tevarin.
The Human government of the era had very little interest in recovering or studying Tevarin technology and, as a result, most captured Prowlers (and other Tevarin-built spacecraft) were either scrapped or utilized as target vehicles in the final days of the war. The rapid destruction of Tevarin technology was fueled by the immediate value of their sometimes-rare composite metals to speculators and an overall societal interest in moving beyond the war. A number of Prowlers escaped the scrapyards to find themselves in private hands where they typically served as mercenary ships. These Prowlers were common until the early 28th century, where their existence faded due to wear and tear and the lack of available replacement parts. A single example, a stinger-armed late model Prowler, was retained by what would become the Imperial Archives and Records Administration. Stored in pieces, the vehicle’s wings were ultimately destroyed in a building collapse while the fuselage remained untouched for almost two centuries. The remaining portion of the ship has since been restored and appears in the Tevarin War Gallery at the Dayton Aerospace Museum. This spacecraft, still bearing UPE logos hastily painted on its side, was studied by Esperia as a control case alongside the newly recovered examples upon which the Human models were based.
DEVELOPING THE MODERN PROWLER
The Prowler’s impressive second act began in 2941 when Imperial pathfinders entered the newly discovered Kabal System and located a series of abandoned Tevarin settlements on Kabal III. Xenoarchaeologists and Tevarin historians would eventually date the preserved settlements to the middle of the 25th century, sometime before the start of the Human-Tevarin conflicts. The nature of the system and its separation (or potential deletion) from the rest of the Tevarin Sovereignty remains hotly contested. Whatever the history, the discovery was a major windfall for Esperia, a company then best known for constructing limited runs of replica Vanduul spacecraft for military use and occasional civilian sale. The UEEN, particularly happy with the recent purchase of four squadrons of replica Blade fighters for aggressor training, insisted that Esperia be included in the group of analysts brought to Kabal to study potentially lost Tevarin technologies at two aerospace bases identified by the initial surveyors.
Much of what was discovered in the Kabal System remains classified today and Esperia’s overall involvement with the project is no exception. What is known is that the researchers discovered what amounted to nine fully equipped squadrons of A-model Prowlers safely stored in antinuclear bunkers. The investigation revealed that none of the Prowlers had flown for almost five centuries and that they had been properly mothballed rather than left in situ. Another dozen examples were not properly prepared and had significantly decayed left to the elements on flight lines. Esperia requested that these also be provided for the study of individual parts, but instead they were remitted to another group for the study of long-term spacecraft storage.
Esperia’s initial survey team reviewed the available spacecraft, performed a series of atomic scans, and were allowed to disassemble two examples to produce an initial report on individual technologies and components involved in their construction. A UEEN test pilot was attached to the group and in the culmination of the initial study, a single vintage Prowler was fueled and tested in a 45-minute atmospheric flight that seemed to confirm that the spacecraft were as fully functional as could be determined with the equipment available in the Kabal System. The remote stage of the project took 18 months and at its conclusion, the government opted to ferry six of the Prowlers back to Esperia’s clean lab at Kutaram rather than retain the Esperia team on Kabal.
As the team from Esperia completed their work disassembling and documenting the ancient spacecraft, management began to develop an extension – a blue-sky project to go beyond study and move to recreating the ship with Human control surfaces and updated modern components. A tiger team developed a formal pitch to the UEE to allow the company both access and legal rights to recreate the ship, ostensibly to sell to hobbyists and others interested in a historical spacecraft. There was also a deeper plan. Esperia was keenly aware of teething issues then-delaying the intended deployment of the Aegis Dynamics Redeemer, intended to be the UEEN’s next-generation gunship. Seeing the briefest opportunity to market the Prowler once again back to the military, the company put an amount of resources into the project that greatly eclipsed those of their prior builds. Much to the surprise of all involved, the government approved the idea almost immediately and formally declassified the recovered Prowlers for Esperia’s benefit.
One of the first issues facing the recreation team was that the models found on Kabal predated the wars and thus lacked the dorsal maser turret. Knowing that newly created Prowlers would want to correct the blind spot, the team carefully studied the example stored at Dayton to structurally adapt the new fuselage for a standard turret mount (older maser turrets having long gone out of production in favor of efficient and modular present-day systems). Astroengineers also had trouble recreating the ‘plate cockpit’, requiring several months to perfect the once-commonplace Tevarin technologies that gave the ship its distinct forward structure. Working alongside historians and collectors, the company was able to trace every subsystem and component of the original spacecraft and either resynthesize it using present-day technology or substitute it for an existing modular system. Computer systems in particular were completely reworked, with the original Tevarin software either completely lost to data rot or deemed incompatible with present-day systems.
The ‘new’ Prowler debuted in 2946 in a stunning show at the annual IAE event, in which the distinctive winged ship cut a dashing and unexpected figure just as it had once in the skies of Idris IV. The intent to sell the design to the military largely fell through, with the UEEN ultimately purchasing only a limited run of the craft for study and potential special operations assignments. However, the design did immediately attract the attention of the civilian sector. Preorders for Prowlers were taken not from historians and preservation groups but instead from mercenary forces and wildcatters seeing a durable, high-tech ship for rough-and-tumble operations. Generations removed from the stigma of the war, the Prowler had found an unlikely second life serving the descendants of the Humans it had once fought so fiercely against.