Red Dwarf

Red Dwarf

The Consular-class cruiser Red Dwarf began its life as a diplomat's transport in the service of the Galactic Republic, but its later life grew increasingly dangerous after this relatively peaceful beginning.

It had originally been commissioned as the Plain Dealer, serving as transport for the Senator from an unspecified Outer Rim world (her original assignment documents have apparently been lost, and no one since has bothered to find out who the ship was meant to carry). The dawn of the Clone Wars brought an end to this role, and she was one of many Consular-class ships to be refit for more dangerous service in the Republic Navy, being armed with a twin turbolaser turret and a pair of proton torpedo launchers, all set in retractable emplacements so that the ship could appear unarmed in order to lure in pirates and Seperatist raiders.

She survived the galaxy-wide conflict (by the skin of her teeth in a few cases), and was later decommissioned as more powerful warships came into what became the Imperial service. Rather than being scrapped, the cruiser was stolen from a convoy heading for the wrecking yard and, after another refit to disguise her, became a smuggler's ship and was first called the Red Dwarf, after a star near to her owner's homeworld.

By the time of the Galactic Civil War, the ship had come under the ownership of a smuggler named Talus Krayth, who considered her retractable heavy weapons emplacements to be rather valuable in his line of work. After proving herself as a smuggler's personal ship, the Dwarf underwent her final metamorphosis.

After a disastrous run-in with an Imperial Customs frigate, Krayth was in it up to his neck: his ship was damned near wrecked and he was stuck playing hide-and-seek with the warship while trying to repair its hyperdrive. A lucky break showed up in the form of Wayland's Wilders, who appeared in-system for a raid on a small Imperial supply depot. They agreed to help bring the Red Dwarf to a safe port in exchange for joining up with the group. The necessary repairs were rather extensive, but the ship emerged as a powerful gunship; a later meeting with a similar customs frigate ended with the Dwarf barely being scratched in the process of blowing the frigate into interstellar dust. While the ship's retractable weapons mounts were sacrificed in the name of more total emplacements, she still carries a small element of surprise; even if an enemy's sensors manage to break through her ECM systems and get a good scan of the ship, most of them refuse to believe that such a small ship really is as heavily armed as their readings say. The lucky ones live long enough to learn.