Timeline
Four hundred years of key dates, from a fish warehouse to twelve orbital yards. The definitive chronology — or as definitive as GOW's archives allow.
GOW’s official archives are famously inconsistent. Dates may vary by up to a decade depending on which filing system was in use at the time. What follows is the best reconstruction I’ve been able to manage from the available records.
The Founding Era
2026 — Arthur Penrose and Maya Khatri, newly redundant from a defunct wind turbine firm, set up shop in a disused fish-equipment warehouse on the Grimsby docks. First contract: repairing atmospheric survey drones.
2035 — GOW moves into orbital drone maintenance.
2040 — First orbital tugboats. Crude, ugly, almost insultingly reliable. The Humber-1 launches — and, remarkably, is still technically in service nearly four centuries later.
The Expansion Period
2050–2060 — GOW takes on subcontracting work for humanity’s first permanent orbital construction yards. Hull scraping, waste processing, sanitation repairs. The unglamorous foundation of everything that follows.
2063 — Opening of Grimsby Station Yard A (“The Shed”). Assembled from decommissioned habitat modules. Officially: “modular and adaptive.” Unofficially: “held together by stubbornness.”
2089 — The motto “If it breaks, it wasn’t ours” emerges from a warranty dispute. Printed on mugs, t-shirts, hard hats, and — in one enthusiastic instance — the side of a space station.
2120 — The Decompression Incident. Explosive decompression of a docking bay on Grimsby Yard C. No fatalities, thanks to structural over-engineering and relentless safety drilling. Leads directly to the development of the Quad-Seal Standard: four independent sealing systems on every pressurised boundary. Never failed since.
The Interstellar Age
2130s — Faster-than-light travel developed. Humanity needs proper starships. GOW obliges.
2141 — Establishment of the Interstellar Brewers’ Guild. GOW maintains a permanent account as a matter of corporate policy.
2144 — Launch of the GOW-12 Longshoreman, GOW’s first FTL-capable vessel. A medium-haul cargo carrier described by Starship & Shipwright as “a brick with a transit drive.” GOW prints the quote on the hull.
2190 — Expansion to three star systems.
2200 — Founding of The Union (Amalgamated Union of Orbital and Interstellar Engineering Workers, Fabricators, and Associated Trades). First Shop Steward: Dorothy Huang. Motto: “So, that’s that then.”
2233 — Introduction of the Grimsby Pattern Drive Core. Becomes the standard power plant for mid-range industrial starships. Repairable with a wrench, a wiring diagram, and a reasonable amount of swearing.
2287 — First annual welding competition between GOW and Kowalski & Daughters. Both sides claim to be winning. Neither is wrong.
2298 — The Great Tea Scandal. Substandard tea procurement exposed. Board of directors falls. Office of Beverage Standards established. Biscuits also investigated (found adequate, but adequacy no longer acceptable).
The Dark and the Deep
2318 — The Silence. A Weyland-Tanaka contract vessel vanishes in the Zeta Reticuli sector. Found three months later — crew gone, logs wiped, cargo holds empty. Only survivor: the ship’s cat. Official cause: “undetermined.”
2334 — Establishment of the Independent Operators’ Maintenance Programme. Subsidised repair for owner-operators. Costs money every year. Never cancelled.
2340–2360 — The Outer Rim Incidents. At least seven vessels disappear in the outer reaches of settled space. Some found later, empty, damaged in inexplicable ways. GOW’s frontier stations adopt undisclosed protocols. When asked about them: “Don’t worry about it. Just don’t turn your sensors off.”
2347 — Attempt to change The Union’s motto defeated by a vote of 4,212 to 0 (three dissenting votes attributed to a faulty ballot terminal).
2371 — Project Serenity. GOW builds twelve fast patrol vessels for the Colonial Authority. The ships are excellent. What they are used for during the Valley Colonies dispute of 2373 is addressed in GOW’s official history in a single line: “GOW fulfilled its contractual obligations.”
The Heritage Renaissance
2387 — Cascading cyberattack disables three major networked competitors. GOW’s non-networked systems entirely unaffected. The company newsletter does not mention the incident. The next issue contains a recipe for flapjacks.
2398 — First recorded sighting of Gerald, the Grimsby Station seagull. Still present. Still unexplained.
2401 — Attempt to replace “Keep flyin’” with “Grimsby Orbital Works: Engineering Excellence for a New Era” lasted one business day before 12,000 messages forced its withdrawal. One was from Dorothy Huang’s email address, which IT had been meaning to deactivate.
2404 — Mk. VII Vacuum-Adaptive Hull developed. Real-time stress load redistribution. Described by the lead engineer as “not bad.”
2420 — Mk. IX Vacuum-Adaptive Hull with self-healing microfracture capability. The lead engineer, asked how it worked, said “well” and returned to her workshop.
2423 — Launch of the Heritage Series. New-build starships with exposed structural members, visible weld lines, and hull plating you can knock on and hear. Immediately popular with independent operators and, to GOW’s mild embarrassment, wealthy collectors.
2426 — GOW’s 400th anniversary. Twelve orbital yards. Seven star systems. 340,000 employees. One seagull.
This timeline will be updated as the archives yield more. GOW’s record-keeping has always been more enthusiastic than consistent, so corrections are expected and welcomed.
Keep flyin’.