Sometimes all it takes is a really wild idea to get things started.
For me in Star Wars Galaxies, that idea was to effectively solo the entire Rebel Alliance starfighter training from start to finish. At the time I had never done anything solo on an MMO. I’d always been fighting alongside friends, acquaintances, and guildies.. So I picked up my character on a day off and off and set out from my lakeside home on Naboo for Moenia, so talk to the piloting trainer droid there.
I started out with a Z-95 Headhunter training craft – about the crappiest ship in the game. I hated it. But I persevered and eventually got myself the skills to fly a Y-wing 2-seater. This presented a bit of a problem with me, but some careful outfitting allowed me to perform reasonably well without the second gunner. Further work and a lot of frustration later, I earned myself a single-seat Y-wing Longprobe, built by our guilds recently-establish manufacturing plants. The ship performed reasonably well, and the high weight abilities of the bomber’s frame allowed some seriously heavy equipment to be fitted. Still, the ship handled like a drunk Kowakian monkey-lizard at the best of times.
I stuck with the Y-wing until I earned my wings in the Incom T-65 X-wing. The Y-wing was relegated to a mining ship, and the much-more-nimble X-wing, and later Advanced X-wing became my primary starfighter, and took me from the space above Kashyyyk, to the heart of the Kessel system, where I took on the Corellian Corvette for the first time alone, earning me my master pilots license.
It was at this point that I contracted my guild’s manufacturing division and had them build me the biggest ship they could – the YKL-37R Nova Courier. The ship was outshopped 3 days later, with the hull number 1711 and a custom red, yellow, and white paint job. I named it the Starstreak, after the British short-range missile system and outfitted it with the best equipment our guild could make.
The Starstreak stayed fairly quiet at first, with me mostly spending time decorating it. The ship had an on-board galley for extended missions, bedding for the crew, a conference room, and fully stocked parts cabinets for in-flight repairs. She was used for flight training for other guildies, and occasionally as a transport to other missions off-world.
Almost a year after it was first built, the Starstreak was called on to participate in it’s first PvP combat, performing reasonably well for the first day. That performance improved dramatically over the following events, as our crew became more accustomed to the ships behavior, and to their respective stations. Contrary to what most would expect, despite owning the ship, and being it’s commanding officer, I was not the pilot. Instead I elected to hand this role to another, much more capable member of the crew, our own Unimatrix. Instead, I sat in the operations chair and controlled the ship’s systems.
With a capable crew of four people, and systems recently overhauled, the Starstreak and it’s crew rapidly gained a reputation as the go-to team for large personal spacecraft for the Rebellion in the galaxy. Members of the crew were regularly sought out to serve on other ships when the Starstreak herself was unavailable, and she frequently bested better-armed spacecraft in her numerous engagements. Her notoriety among Imperial pilots often led to her being targeted early in each engagement, and that often led to disparately high kill counts for her and her crew at the end of the battle.
Later in her life, she participated in numerous missions to destroy Imperial property, including countless star destroyers and corvettes, and was a participant, and victor, in the Battle over Theed at the end of the game’s lifetime.
The ship was last seen charting a course for the planet Hoth under orders from General Carlist Rieekan…
Game Reference: Star Wars Galaxies