Type: Industrial heavy-lift dropship
Carried by: The Second Chance, in a landing cradle in the dropship bay
Overview
The crew’s surface-to-orbit workhorse, and for two and a half sessions simply “the dropship.” She finally got a name during the fighting at the colony office on Siddhartha’s Peace, in a lull between one wave of cultists and the next, after Carl worked through Starfall, Hot Drop and Intruder and the table landed on something better. Carl insists on the apostrophe: Hot ‘n Ready. Proposed nose art is a wartime-style pin-up holding a pizza, and there was some discussion of a “1” after the name, in case they ever need a second one.
She is built for freight, not for fighting. She has carried a full cargo container down to a planet and back, and can pack close to twenty people into the hold if nobody is fussy. She has heavy floodlights, a rear loading ramp, and — as the crew have now noticed twice — no weapons of any kind. Carl has started asking about that.
Condition
She came off Siddhartha’s Peace badly used and has not been properly repaired since:
- A stabilizer struck by a shoulder-launched missile on the climb to orbit.
- The right engine smoking after an argument with a power pole during a low pass over the cultist barricades.
- A landing gear snapped off on the colony office roof and then spot-welded permanently into the down position — she will fly strangely until someone with real facilities fixes it properly.
- Control lines melted during that same repair, rewired using cable stripped from The Second Chance’s exterior running lights. The parent ship has been flying dark on the outside ever since.
Standing Ambitions
Bennett II grew attached to the automated sentry turret at the colony office and floated mounting it on the Hot ‘n Ready. The turret was left behind — still firing — but the crew did take its ammunition crates, and the idea has not gone away.