Design: the Shrike

Design, 24 October 2026. On hold: the sketches didn't work (boxy, no clear job), and the Shrike waits for a place in Solo & Sons' line-up (ships, classes and makers).

The second concept from Solo & Sons (the Falcons, a Legend): Iver Solo and his four sons, a yard hidden in the lawless systems, sheltering the forty-one from the Ninefold. Their ships are named for birds of prey. The shrike is the bird that pins its prey before it eats.

Leaked plans

Halloran Sisters show their concepts off. Solo & Sons can't: the yard is hiding from Wexley-Yorozu. So their concepts reach the site as leaked plans, "drawings recovered from a Falcon's wreck near Riedquat", half-redacted, in pirate red. A different voice for the same kind of page.

The ship

• Bram's ship (the eldest; mad). He flew escort for the Hold Fast the day it left the Ninefold, and he takes Wexley-Yorozu cargo first. The Shrike is built to stop a ship, not to destroy it: the Falcons' code is to disable, take what they came for, and leave you alive.
• The clamp. At the nose, something that grips a ship's hull and drains its drive, so it can't run or jump while the Shrike's crew take the cargo. It's how disabling and capture (law and travel) comes into the game, for pirates first and later for anyone with the kit.
• Size and feel: a short, heavy interceptor, about 45 m long and 38 m across (a Cobra is 50 by 68): deep wedge hull, a raised cockpit, two drive pods, small swept vanes to shed heat like the Falcon's. Pirate red.

The sketches

Three ideas for the nose, rendered in the game's own style (three-quarter, from above beside a Cobra, from the side):

• A, hammer nose: an armoured block with a short two-pronged clamp. Reads as a gunship.
• B, hooked beak: a long spar from the nose that curves down to a hook, like a shrike's bill. The most distinctive silhouette, and the most like the bird.
• C, talons: two pincer arms either side of the nose. Reads as a crab more than a bird.

Recommendation: B. It's the one you'd know from any angle, and the hook is the clamp. The hull in all three is boxy for a sketch; whichever is chosen gets refined (a slimmer hull, the hook's joints, the drive pods).

Also in the yard's drawers

Each son builds to suit himself. Later concepts, if the Shrike lands well:

• The Kestrel (Kit, glad): a sprinter, the fastest thing in a straight line (the Dragonfly out-turns everything; the Kestrel out-runs it). A reason for races and time trials.
• The Hearth (Jory, sad): a quiet blockade-runner for food and medicine to the forty-one, with pods that drop away to drift dark if a Marshal comes close. Named for home, not a bird.
• The Rook (Tobin, bad): heavier, uglier, better armed, built with Vorg Industries' money, and his brothers hate it. The first Solo ship you'd want to see destroyed.

Open questions

• A, B or C?
• Does the clamp come to commanders (as equipment) or stay a Solo & Sons secret?

Think something here should change? Say so on the ideas board, where others can vote it up, or email hello@witchspace.org.uk. If you code: this page is docs/design/ship-the-shrike.md on GitHub, open to pull requests.