Dogfighters

The player's ship. Each comes equipped with one weapon, passive item, and active item, as well as the basic abilities of a regenerating shield, finite hearts, hyperspace jumping, strafing, and boosting.

## The Paw

Starring: A modified Low-Tech fighter. 'The Paw'

* Equipped with a Chaingun, Booster Pack, and Flares.
* A beginner loadout that can counters homing missiles with agility and flares. Excels at hunting down light targets, but struggles against shields or armor.
* *Some we picked up from worlds just like our AO. You can only be blown to pieces and regrown in a tube so many times before you start to question your masters. The best of those who tried to defect got an offer from the GC.*

Starring: An upgraded Low-Tech interceptor. 'The Paw' MK2

* Unlocked by beating the game with The Paw.
* Equipped with a Heavy Chaingun, Overdrive Coil, and Missile Hard-points.
* A fast, hard hitting interceptor loadout that can take on almost any target with its heavy chaingun and dishes out even more damage with its homing missiles.
* *We also grew our own sometimes, fully sentient killing machines from bio and mind templates of the greatest aces that ever lived. One year of service, after that retirement in GC or Xeno space.*

Starring: A soon-retired bomber craft. 'The Paw' Stray

* Unlocked by beating the game with The Paw MK2.
* Equipped with an HE Burstcannon, Hatch Displacer, and Plasma Torrent.
* A challenging loadout that makes attacking ground targets trivial, at the same time vastly complicating air engagements.
* *Yeah, we don't really talk about that one...*

## The Fur

Starring: A custom GC hybrid craft. 'The Fur'

* Unlocked by reaching zone 2 for the first time.
* Equipped with three random items.
* A randomized loadout that starts each run a little different. Comes with a random tier 1 weapon, a random active up to tier 2, and a random passive that can be up to tier 3 quality. Unlocking more items of these tiers allow for more varied starting loadouts.
* *No, I don't have the slightest idea what this pilot was running with, their mission plans where kinda like unobserved quantum states.*

Starring: A GC air-superiority fighter. 'The Fur' MK2

* Unlocked by beating the game with The Fur MK1.
* Equipped with an Ultraviolet Burstlaser, Jet Black Mirror Paint, and Strike Configuration.
* A boss killer loadout that starts well prepared for late game challenges. Counters enemy shields with its photon weapon, while at the same time coming with its own defense against photon attacks.
* *I think they where genetic quadruplets. The one that flew the MK2 was more grounded. The fourth wasn't with us any more, had left the GC to become a freelancer. More of a raw experience for low-tech civs they said, even though they kept most of our tech.*

Starring: A fluctuating quantum flier. 'The Fur' Stray

* Unlocked by beating the game with The Fur MK2.
* Equipped with a Spectrum System, Quantum Augment, and Crowdsourced Displacer.
* A loadout with constantly changing stats that force you to adapt on the go. Its active is similarly random, with the potential to either buff or hamstring the jet.
* *Ok now their mission performance was literally unobserved quantum states.*

## The Fang

Starring: A heavy Contempter air-brawler. 'The Fang'

* Unlocked by getting at least six heart containers in a single run.
* Equipped with a pair of Hardlight Sai, Blade Hull, and Stim-Sixpack.
* A melee-focused, damage resistant jet loadout that performed well up close, but suffers penalties when using ranged weapons. Can trade health for damage potential by using its active.
* *The pilot was expelled from the Contemper domain for getting multiple degrees in both aerospace and hyperspace engineering, unbefitting to their caste.*

Starring: A Contempter warrior craft. 'The Fang' MK2

* Unlocked by beating the game with The Fang.
* Equipped with a G-Field Katana, Kinetic Heart, and Hardlight Shuriken.
* An extremely resilient melee loadout that can rapidly deflect large volumes of enemy shots. Is capable of dealing heavy single target damage with consecutive attacks and also has a clutch range attack in form of its active.
* *One of our best, with us for over 100 standard years now. Not a single death so far, a data point regularly disputed and investigated by GC record keeping. The pilot is contractually obligated to back up of course. But are they really?*

Starring: An aerial gladiator wanna-be. 'The Fang Stray'

* Unlocked by beating the game with The Fang MK2.
* Equipped with a Hardlight Gladius Set, Gladiator Aegis, and Planetwide Cyber Taunt.
* A melee oriented jet loadout that trades its jump capabilities for a deflecting melee block. Can be hard to master due to its limited defense against beam attacks. Becomes stronger by increasing escalation.
* *Going into the fight with nothing but hardlight fields surely got the crowd going...*

## The Eye

Starring: An experimental End-Tech vessel. 'The Eye'

* Unlocked by acing an entire zone (by not taking heart damage).
* Equipped with a Heavy Railgun, Glass Configuration, and DMZ Field.
* A challenging glass-cannon loadout that demolishes heavy targets with its railgun, but can be quickly pressured by swarms of light enemies due to its weak shields. Comes with a defensive active that can save the jet in critical situations.
* *Unfortunately we had to scale back our end-tech assets so far that they sometimes appeared weaker most other jets. Pure deception of course.*

Starring: An advanced End-Tech kill-ship. 'The Eye' MK2

* Unlocked by beating the game with The Eye MK1.
* Equipped with an Antilight Death-Ray, Trigger Wire, and Reverse G-Field.
* A powerful but somewhat fragile beam sniper loadout with the potential to instantly destroy any conventional enemies, given you can land the hits. Also carries a powerful defense active.
* *Barely legal. In fact the proceedings about whether deploying this thing was justified are still ongoing.*

Starring: An ai science-ship, gone mad. 'The Eye' Stray

* Unlocked by beating the game with The Eye MK2.
* Equipped with an X-Ray Precision Laser, Experimental Coilage, and Orbital Support: Radiation.
* A fragile beam loadout that suffers from EMP when shields get low. Given enough time, its radiation damage can take out light enemies, or corrode the armor of heavy targets.
* *Yes I have heard the theory that I was flying this thing. The identity of the commanding entity will be kept of the record I'm afraid.*

## The Tail

Starring: An agile Floatoid fighter craft. 'The Tail'

* Unlocked by beating every zone 2 boss.
* Equipped with an Area Denial Device, Hyperspace Heat Sink, and Rocket Rack.
* An evasive short-range loadout that excels at taking out swarms of enemies with its scatter weapon, while the rocket active can help against ground targets.
* *Our Floatoid contingent was mostly recruited from Swirl Watch veterans. They had no problems adapting to combat in less dense, less heavy atmosphere. Experienced with orbital stealth combat, they often demonstrated great tactical finesse.*

Starring: An advanced Floatoid dive-bomber. 'The Tail' MK2

* Unlocked by beating the game with The Tail.
* Equipped with a HE-Rail, H-Barrel Theory, and Rocket Pod.
* A powerful explosive-focused loadout that can deal massive area damage with both its main weapon and its high tier active.
* *Turns out having three equally functioning appendages comes in handy if you want to fire railguns, release rockets and steer a jet simultaneously. Not so much for physical inputs, but neuro commands from trilimbals are just more adept. Something about how the bio-brain is wired...*

Starring: A vain Floatoid rich-kid with money issues. 'The Tail' Stray

* Unlocked by beating the game with The Tail MK 2.
* Equipped with an SRM Decay Rail, Money Implies Poverty, and SRM Replicator.
* A quirky challenge loadout that can become quite powerful by stockpiling SRM, but will need to forgo other upgrades to do so.
* *While money can not buy you happiness, it can certainly buy you a spot on the GC pilot list. Not like the pilot didn't qualify, in fact they where hand picked. Both they and us though it would be hilarious to charge a fee on top though.*

## The Collar

Starring: A sentient drone prototype. 'The Collar'

* Unlocked by bringing Sentient Combat AI and/or all 4 Processing Power items to the Space Tether
* Equipped with an Advanced Kinetics, Anti-Grav Engine, and Grav-Grid Anchor.
* An stable burst-weapon loadout that can outmaneuver enemies with its anti-gravity engines and anchor active.
* *I mean technically, it is more sentient than you. But it wasn't exactly a sophisticated machine. Wait, don't tell it I said that ok?*

Starring: A self aware shock drone. 'The Collar' MK2

* Unlocked by beating the game with The Collar.
* Equipped with a Simple EMP Device, Sentient Combat AI, and Orbital Support: Weather.
* An EMP-centered loadout that excels in disabling early game enemies, but desperately needs to upgrade for the late game.
* *The avatar of that thing was most obnoxious. Other AIs needed EMP shielding, organics straight up had to endure low amp shocks every now and then.*

Starring: An all-assimilating swarm intelligence. 'The Collar' Stray

* Unlocked by beating the game with The Collar MK2.
* Equipped with the Flock Gun, Drone Flock, and Drone Egg.
* A command-jet loadout that creates friendly drones to do the fighting, even scaling in weapon power as their numbers increase.
* *Probably the least sophisticated entity we deployed. It came with a self destruct failsafe we could trigger, should it go and multiply somewhere it wasn't supposed to.*

## The Nose

Starring: A spec-ops unit, disguised as a diplomat. 'The Nose'

* Unlocked by reaching 80% completion in-game
* Equipped with an Infrared Pulse Laser, Artifact Stack-Printer, and End-Tech Scanner.
* A jet loadout that starts with great potential, but no direct upgrades, relying instead on finding a good passive to lay the foundation for its run. The jet can have a hard early game if the search for a suitable item drags on.
* *A good friend of mine from the diplomatic corps. Not sure how this is mission relevant though.*

Starring: A fully weaponized aerial intruder. 'The Nose' MK2

* Unlocked by beating the game with The Nose MK1.
* Equipped with a Somatic-Link Infrared, Lost Mission Intel, and End-Tech Code Breaker.
* A powerful laser loadout with great upgrade potential due to its high-tier active.
* *A theoretical asset configuration we could drop deep behind enemy lines. We never actually deployed one in the whole history of GC.*

Starring: A deniable asset. 'The Nose' Stray

* Unlocked by beating the game with The Nose MK2.
* Equipped with a Su-pho Knife, Emission Mask, and Spacemelon Jam.
* A stealth loadout that leaves enemies unaware and decimates them with heavy melee strikes. Hostiles that survive long enough to counterattack can pose a serious threat though, due to the jet's slow jump cooldown.
* *No comment.*