Competitors

In which we acknowledge that other companies exist, however regrettable that may be.

GOW does not operate in a vacuum. Well, technically it does — most of its facilities are in space — but commercially speaking, it shares the market with several other firms of varying competence and moral character.

Weyland-Tanaka Resource Group

The largest aerospace conglomerate in human space. Enormous, omnipresent, and possessed of a PR department that could make an airlock malfunction sound like an exciting opportunity.

Their ships are technologically impressive, clinically efficient, and aesthetically identical. Their company motto, “Building Better Tomorrows,” has been voted “Most Likely Slogan To Be Hiding Something” in Spacefarer’s Quarterly reader polls for twenty-three consecutive years.1

GOW’s relationship with Weyland-Tanaka is one of mutual professional respect expressed through a medium of total contempt.

There is also the matter of the 2318 incident — a commercial towing vessel operating under W-T contract vanished in the Zeta Reticuli sector while investigating what was described as “a signal of potential commercial interest.” Found three months later, drifting without power. Crew gone. Logs wiped. Cargo holds empty.

The only living thing aboard was the ship’s cat, which was found in a locker, healthy, and profoundly uninterested in explaining what had happened.

The official inquiry concluded with the phrase “cause undetermined,” which is bureaucratic shorthand for “we don’t know and we’d rather not think about it.” GOW’s frontier crews responded by quietly upgrading every sensor array in the sector and adding an extra item to their daily checklist: Look for anything that shouldn’t be there.

Sunbright Aerospace

Based in the Tau Ceti system. Manufacturers of fast, elegant, lightweight ships that win design awards and occasionally disintegrate in unexpected ways.

Their hulls are thin. Their warranties are thinner. Their brochures are magnificent.

Sunbright ships look like sculptures. They fly like dreams. They last about as long as a favourable weather forecast. GOW has rebuilt more than a few Sunbright vessels that their original manufacturer had quietly disowned, a process that typically involves removing the decorative hull cladding to discover what’s actually underneath and then sitting down for a long, quiet cup of tea before proceeding.

To be fair to Sunbright — and the archives suggest GOW feels this should be done grudgingly and briefly — their latest models are considerably more robust than their early work. Whether this is due to genuine improvement or to a class-action lawsuit that is still technically sub judice is a matter of some debate.

Kowalski & Daughters

A family-owned yard in the Alpha Centauri system. Similar ethos to GOW, smaller scale. If GOW has a sibling in the industry, it’s K&D.

The two companies maintain a warm relationship built on shared values, professional courtesy, and an annual welding competition that has been going on since 2287 and which both sides claim to be winning.2

K&D ships share GOW’s preference for durability over beauty, though their aesthetic runs slightly more toward the angular where GOW favours the blunt. A trained eye can tell a K&D hull from a GOW hull at a glance. An untrained eye will see two perfectly functional boxes with engines attached and conclude, not unreasonably, that the difference is academic.

GOW speaks of Kowalski & Daughters with the particular warmth that one honest company reserves for another. In an industry full of brochure-polished competitors, this counts for rather a lot.

The Others

The above represent the major players that interact with GOW’s story most frequently, but the ‘Verse has no shortage of shipbuilders, yards, and engineering outfits. Some are excellent. Some are adequate. Some should probably be reported to whichever regulatory body hasn’t been merged, abolished, or lost in a filing cabinet during an office move.

The independent yards on the Rim deserve their own page eventually — small operations, often one or two skilled engineers, doing extraordinary work with limited resources. GOW supplies many of them with parts and technical specifications, sometimes at cost, sometimes below it. This is officially described as “supporting the independent engineering community.” Unofficially, the yard crews call it “looking after our own.”

Keep flyin’.

Footnotes

  1. W-T’s response to this poll has been, each year, to purchase a full-page advertisement in the same publication assuring readers that they have nothing to hide. This has not helped. ↩

  2. Scoring is conducted by a committee of retired welders from both companies who have never once agreed on the criteria. The competition is, by some measurements, the longest-running unresolved dispute in human space. ↩