Pan fried, deep fried, stir-fried

Here are some ships a shrimp might drive.

BLASTERS          

(Dex) aka Blisters. Fast. Red. Shimmering in and out. The engines are powered by slipping in and out of reality : just a touch : just a layer over, where this is flatter, this is fuller : they kick like a tail, a flagellum.  

Constantin Roucault

You gotta be a certain kind of hotshot to pilot one of these : it’s a captain forward kind of operation. They are not alive but they may as well be. They act alive. More alive in fact than:

THRUSTERS

(Int) aka Crusters. This is the old tech. Aristocratic. They swallow water and pull themselves along into the absence. In their gut, you can put a panalopy : a houda. You are well protected. 

Worried-Management48

These are docile creatures, droopy: they take up enormous resources to feed and care for : no great advantage other than endurance and they can live forever without the wasting and obsolesces and cheap plasticity that you get with a machine. They are already obsolete. There is no tinkering across engineers that makes things worse the minute he leaves/dies/tries his hand at being a captain. They are what they are.

WHIPPERS         

(Wis) Aka Skippers. The ship changes. It skips like a rock: across a series of different ships: these blink on and off, one after another : maybe it’s 6 different ships. Extreme examples will have hundreds. You need to learn it. 

Reluctant Rat

The captains have to be able to talk the ship down : they are ratty little fellows, tangled hair. They have to accept early on that maybe one jump the ship just won’t be there. It will dump everybody. On the other hand, really hard to fight, because they “regenerate” in the purest, recursive-function Troll, sense.

INSINUATORS

(Chr) aka Incinerators. They run on the psychic force of a prisoner : if you make him hate you enough, he’ll keep going: drive him insane, burn him up, but keep him fed. For the sadists and politicians, who they themselves know if the tables turned they would make the best engines, because when you have driven one of these babies: even if you are chained and powering it, you are scheming to get out. Scheming and scheming and that’s what it runs on.

Steve Ditko

CRUSHERS

(Con) aka Crackers. The density changes: they get small, and then big again, floating and sinking. They are sideways somehow, so they sink against the current, and float along it, and they squeeze and expand in different ways. 

Albert K. Libre III

The skilled captain only need apply : one who checks every box : you need a computer to run it, really : and these sorts of computers are patches : pull cable here. The captain as engineer.