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Although Thaumtech Unlimited may be most famous for its fearsome Omenbringer battleship, it’s the versatile Cairncarver whose sales have funded the company’s most ambitious research. Like many ships of Eoxian design, the Cairncarver is an intimidating ship with an unnervingly skeletal shape that has changed little over the centuries. Cairncarvers remain fairly common ships in Eoxian space, but they’re even more popular in the reviled Corpse Fleet, where they serve as ideal marauders capable of raiding distant settlements and eliminating key targets. This strong association with piracy makes Cairncarvers tempting targets for overzealous law-enforcement patrols, which often harass or even open fire on such ships without authenticating their credentials first.
Of course, with conventional life support limited to only a portion of the ship, the Cairncarver has little appeal to living crews. A typical ship configuration includes a sealed environment chamber for transporting live passengers, and even then, the crew can readily vent that chamber’s atmosphere should they determine the passengers are as valuable dead as they are alive.
Standard armaments include a forward-mounted Alkaria light particle beam affixed to one of the Cairncarver’s arms and a Festik light plasma torpedo launcher embedded in the other, while two Vertebrex coilguns mounted port and starboard provide flank defense. The Cairncarver’s aft quarter is notoriously undefended, however.
With its ample cargo space, the Cairncarver doubles as a well-armed freighter. Eoxians often use the ship’s cargo holds as crude passenger seating for undead troops, who can travel indefinitely without life support.