The Sulura is a passenger shuttle with a spike drive, registered to Thunde Hutre and Yuen Thubert under the NSQ corporation register of Kos. NSQ is a minor corporation that helps semi-independent owners like these two operate, though it keeps no response vessels of its own. The shuttle can carry 30 people at a time, and when Halial Quin and Simul Machinis found it on the Hub it was advertising space for up to 28 passengers at 500 credits a head, with no set itinerary until enough people had booked to make the trip worth it.

Taken from the Hub

After the Veremouth Retrieval Bounty went wrong the pair boarded as passengers to get off the Hub, sharing the open rear area with a family of six, and took the shuttle by force in the third hour of the trip. Halial's mag pistol put a round through the hull, doing one point of hull damage and causing some trouble with the ship's computers, and one of the family's children was lost to vacuum during the fight.

Yuen stopped the shuttle accelerating and called NSQ. Two corporate patrol boats tried to intercept it, one from ICC and NME's PT-4316 Namuran, though only the Namuran reached it. Its multifocal laser was aimed at the spike drive and took it down to Rating-1, which was still enough to drill out, but the damage meant the drill to Sarus took far longer than it should have.

Surul and the refit

At Surul the temple near the starport traded for the hull repairs, a day's work, and put the crew in touch with people who brought the drive back to Rating-2 for 2,500 credits, with another 1,000 paid to keep it quiet. Simul then used his pretech component to fit a Drill Velocity Upgrade, which only needs the one component on a fighter-class hull, along with an Emergency Thruster Boost. So in practice the Sulura is a spike-3 ship.

The only rutter aboard was a three-year-old route between Kos and Sarus, so Halial made a DC14 drill straight from Sarus to Atlas (old system), creating the Sarus–Atlas rutter in the process, and the ship reached Calypso on 1/2/3201.

With the Fleet

On arrival the transponder read Shuttle NSQ-858 'Sulura', and any ship that had been through Kos recently held the registry details for it, as well as for the two "highly dangerous individuals" who had stolen it. Thunde, who had signed on at Surul as an equal-share member of the crew, put 10,000 credits into the maintenance fund. Fleet Intelligence later issued the crew an Initial Charter for deniable privateering, and the trader Jani Hames joined the crew as well.

The High Grear

On 11/8/3201 the Sulura left Calypso for Sarus tucked inside the warp bubble of Akira's Acturos, the Acturos being a frigate and the Sulura only a shuttle. At Sarus the crew made their first attempt at piracy, against the Surulian prison transport High Grear. The Sulura is unarmed and does not have the fitting needed to alter its transponder, so Halial ran the Grear down in pursuit combat to get close enough for Simul to teleport the boarding party across, though the Grear's sandthrower scored most of the hull for 9 damage on the way in. The server ended mid-boarding. The story carries on in the Sulura campaign.

Names and registry

• Sulura: the ship's name throughout. "Sulara" is a typo for it in 17 places (GM ruling Q8).
• Shuttle NSQ-858 'Sulura': the transponder ID ‹atlas_space#1038877551168327800›. The GM's initiative order writes it "NSQ Shuttle-858 'Sulura'" ‹veremouth_retrieval_bounty#1029841807779045527›, next to "NME PT-4316 'Namuran'". NSQ-858 is the registry number, not a class, and the hull is a standard Shuttle (GM, 30 Oct 2026). The ChatGPT site's "NSQ-858 shuttle" class record is withdrawn.
• No renames are recorded on the 12th Fleet server.

Ownership