XM207 Kamalass Class Dro'Sanla Tug

Xygritt Matriarchy

      The Kamalass Dro’Sanla Tug serves as the Matriarchy’s means of accessing and using the UCDR’s Node Station network.
      The Kamalass has a troubled design history. At conception, it was simply a scaled-up version of the small Noutr tug used for conventional larger-scale ship recovery, with a 180-rating point defence system and a pair of tractor beam arrays. It was simply assumed that the Noutr could be enlarged and the Dro’Sanla patched into the GVD focussing array.
      The Kamalass thus was built with the over-sized, fat nose that housed the GVD coils and the focussing array on the Noutr. The GVD coils themselves were down-sized, and the Dro’Sanla attached in the resulting space, to operate through the emission disk. This odd choice was chosen for cost over function, as the Matriarchy at the time viewed combat vessels as the priority.
      The prototype was a disaster, tearing the ship and crew apart in a catastrophic overload due to trying to force two incompatible system to work together. It was an elementary error, and one that should never have been committed. Indeed, though the Matriarchy made a typical effort to cleanse all the pertinent records, it appears that even the engineers working on the design knew this, but were over-ruled by their political masters.
      The entire project was very nearly shelved permanently. But then the Matriarchy had a stroke of luck. They managed to salvage a completely intact Phystyulon vessel, whose crew had been wiped out due to a freak mechanical failure in the environmental system which had turned the atmosphere lethally poisonous in seconds. Without even the damage caused by leech cannons, the intact Phystyulon Dro’Sanla allows the Matriarchy engineers to completely re-design their own Dro’Sanla to use a system more like the Phystyulon’s Nazograk Cores than their current Xyriat-derived system.
      The Kamalass thus only required a pair of emitters for the Dro’Sanla, mounted on the rear hull, and the cores were solidly buried in layers of metal and ceramics in the forward hull.
    The Kamalass initially was not a favoured ship, due to the developmental disaster and subsequent unreliability of the systems, but over time, as evened out to an unremarkable vessel. Unconfirmed reports suggest that there are still occasional accidents, with vessels simply never re-appearing when teleported, but if true, they are quickly covered-up by the Matriarchy command.