Union Cutter 4326

The Union Cutter 4326 is a specific spaceship model used throughout the Gerualdi Union for the rapid transport of small cargo, individuals, or information. As with many other ships of this size, the Union Cutter 4326 lacks the ability to easily defend itself and mostly relies on evading possible hostiles or other allied ships for defense. Its development was said to be funded from an anonymous benefactor that sought a faster ship for cross-planet business deals, and the resulting product was co-opted by the Union's military. Because the ship is so small, its pilots need to be skilled in order to avoid "capsizing" from various space debris or strong gravitational pulls; within the military, there are jokes that the only ones who would willingly helm a 4326 Cutter are pilots who want to show off.
Seemingly an artifact of an older protoype or possibly just an ill-received experiment, Union Cutter 4326 ships have the strange quirk of their data encryption being color-based, relying heavily on individual-specific perceptions of different colors as a password. For example, a password to access data could request that the user sort various shades of green from lightest to darkest three times in a row -- these shades would specifically be tailored via vision tests to be ones that only "authorized" individuals could easily distinguish. Subsequent Union Cutters do not use this system, likely due to outcries of the system being "racially biased" against populations that have varying perceptions of color or that biologically cannot distinguish between different colors used in the system. As a result, these individuals would be unable to easily set passwords under the color encryption system. Some, but not all, 4326 models have had the color system replaced with more conventional security systems.
The IDC Mendicant is a repurposed variant of the Union Cutter 4326 model, albeit one that was modified by both Absinthe and Osvald Coalgrave for their own dramatically different agendas.
Category:Ealdremen Spacecraft
Category:No Spoilers