Slippers

Slippers refer to a human exploratory occupation among starship captains and crews dedicated to finding and capitalizing on the most reliable Slipspace routes measured in speed and consistency. Often roles pursued by young and hotblooded spacefarers looking for adventure, Slipper work is risky, unpredictable and often lonely. Such explorers tend to live out of their ships and in deep space for most of their young adult lives and rarely visiting port- or planet-side until either a cosmic death or old age finally catches up to them.
Despite their hard work, Slippers have slim chances at success but the prospect of striking it rich still brings many into the stars motivated by promises of unimaginable fortune and fame. Those that do succeed often have their names immortalized across human data networks and in history books, their fast trade routes quickly bearing their name and cementing their place in the history of space exploration. Slipper culture tends to be rebellious, and frowned upon by society at large; it shares many commonalities with war wreckage salvagers, both keeping to the edges of insulated civilization.
Through the twenty-fifth century into the early twenty-sixth century, Slippers were a somewhat common encounter on the frontier and between-spaces separating the Unified Earth Government's Inner and Outer Colonies. Their appearances declined with increasing policing and regulation of space travel by the UNSC Navy beginning with the Insurrection and continuing through and after the Human-Covenant War. What remains of the culture and Slipper community is hardy frontiers-people making the most of odd jobs and adventure-seeking in an evermore dangerous galaxy threatened by hazards including interspecies piracy, alien harassers, hair-trigger Navy patrols, and far less unexplored areas to find in the patchwork of humanity's interstellar empire.
Instead, with the political changes warping the galaxy at large, the term Slipper now extends to several other occupations and experiences loosely tied to Slipper culture but ones that are no longer exclusively human or for the purpose of glory and exploration.
==Barbary couriers==
*Kig-Yar super skiffs
*Kig-Yar headhunters
*Covenant schooners
==Guardian-runners==