Crew: ____________________

The Ra is the eldest. Named for the Memphis system's own star — the head of the pantheon, as befits the head of the family — the AT-80 entered service in 2813, seventeen years before the first Mongoose walked, which makes it the true first body of Melissa Starr's memorandum and the oldest design in continuous TriStar production. It was built for the famine decades by a trading company whose worlds were feeding a March the Federated Suns had stopped defending: eighty tons of fire support on the house 240, slow as a verdict and armored like one, planted where the triple system needed the argument settled. Two and a half centuries later it is still in production, still on the same engine, and still doing the same job — the Common Heart program did not adopt the Ra; the Ra is the precedent the program was written around. The mandated 240 gives the eighty-ton hull a 54 kph flank and no apologies: the Ra and the Hathor share an engine and represent the mandate's two extremes, the hotrod and the anvil, and the program office keeps a photograph of them side by side for visitors who believe standardization means uniformity.