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When we were also excluded from the contract to expand the Quatre Belle shipyard in the Outworlds Alliance, and from the to help Magistracy repair / refit the ex-SLS Zughoffer Weir (no MCS name assigned yet, that we knew of) Kamea decided it was time to activate the Deep Space Resources program. The first step of this program was the exploration of the Oort cloud in the Coromodir system.

To this end the production of at least four 'Ferry' class JumpShips was authorized.

The first one was built on the Orca prototype chassis, to keep costs low (after all this program had a limited budget) since both designs had the same dimensions were similar. It helped that with everything required already being produced in Mechdur, the production of future Ferry would be considerably less expensive than any other JumpShip design.

The main difference with a classical JumpShip was that we removed all armament, LF Battery and compact K-F drive in favor of a short range K-F drive. This type of drive had some interesting features, for example, being made of only 80% of the usual Titanium-Germanium alloy while the remaining 20% were various metal alloys, neither exotic nor expensive to produce. Even if it had a maximum range of only 3LY and a minimum of 0.05LY, it could be 'charged' in just one day via fusion reactor safely and did not need a solar sail to do so. Because of residual effects, there was also a minimum period of 6 hours between each jump, making the implementation of super-accumulators for a second jump in a row useless. Its size was basically the same as a compact K-F drive, but at the cost of a 'civilian' K-F drive, making it much more economic provided you had the space to put it into any ships.

It also had a higher jump error margin, about 10% than standard drives, with the pilots calling it suicide to use one to reach the smallest pirate points.

Only the final step, installing the new K-F drive, was performed in Coromodir V, everything else was done in Mechdur at the facility that also built the Orcas.

Testing with the Ferry 001 began in March 3059 with some jumps between one of the Lagrange points of Coromodir V (the biggest one) and various areas of the Oort cloud system and back.

The funds for this project came partly from the provincial budget, partly from the Aurigan Central Bank controlled by our family, and partly from our personal funds.