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Description
The post-Tukayyid armistice between the Clans and the Inner Sphere provided both breathing room and impetus for the Sphere's naval rearmament programs as documented in ComStar's Technical Readout: 3057 publication. This was when TME Industries expanded its production capabilities through Scheme VANGUARD and still fully embraced its do-it-because-we-can ethos, well before it grew more pragmatic and paranoid in the VANGUARD PLUS era. In 3056, with VANGUARD two years until completion, TME Industries had several production facilities in the twenty- and thirty-thousand ton range standing idle since finishing the hardware required for the larger fabricators after them in in Scheme VANGUARD and Management was at a loss with what to do with them. Setting them to manufacture mid-size civilian transport DropShips would've been profitable, but TME Industries only really started thinking in terms of profit in the 3060s in terms of trading for materials necessary for VANGUARD PLUS. What they wanted instead was an idea. The fighter supercarrier that would eventually become the Vanguard-class was certainly an engineering feat but it wasn't novel, and novel ideas--besides selling--inspired Industrialist culture.

The idea that would put these mid-range factories to work came from three engineers who hailed from different backgrounds: Cooper, from the recently disbanded Pop Occulture design team; Karmazin, one of the more level-headed members of TEAM MELTA; and Wohlford, a Security Directorate engineer who had worked previously with Simplicity and the Flying Circus. Karmazin, a student of history, came up with the original concept. All DropShips up to then had been built with a specific purpose in mind and had been modified ad infinitum by end users and in production into many other roles. Karmazin--better known as "Karma" at the time--thought that this could be worked around if DropShips were modular. He sketched up a concept resembling a trident, suggesting that gull-like wings could provide emplacements for broader fields of fire.

Knowledgeable readers may note that a similar concept drove Shipil's Aurora-class DropShip concept of the same year. All available records indicate that the nearly simultaneous development of these ideas occurred independently.

Wohlford's time with the Flying Circus included many hours watching old pre-spaceflight newsreels from the Terran Hegemony media archives, and he pointed his friends towards the XC-120 Packplane, a prototype cargo aircraft that carried an underslung cargo module. This informed Cooper, the group's 'numbers guy' and closest thing to a technical artist, to draw up basic plans for their "Loki DropShip." In the concept drawing, the Loki was an aerodyne DropShip with a large aft engine module, a relatively planar gull wing, and a long, shallow fuselage with a distinctive 'beak' or 'chin.' Aft of the chin and under the fuselage, "mission-adaptable-mass pods" could be attached in a modular fashion, either streamlined with the rest of the hull or in a bulbous, high-volume pod that resembled extremely large landing gear sponson. Secondary intakes on the inner faces of the wingtips would supply additional air to the transit drives on the ventral sides of the wings, giving the Loki VTOL capability unknown to aerodyne DropShips but possibly feasible, given that said DropShips often had transit drives anyway.

With image in hand, the three engineers--calling themselves the Triumvirate of Yut, with "Yut" apparently being an intentionally meaningless in-joke between them--lobbied for access to conceptual layout software so as to at least check the feasibility of their concept on a back-of-the-envelope basis. Targeting for thirty thousand tons loaded and half that empty, Cooper found that the unsupported cantilever nature of the gull wings would impart unacceptable pitching moments on the wing roots, the wings had to be thinned to be aerodynamically effective and thus precluded extensive intake systems, and that, as doodled, the Loki had no reasonable provision for landing gear outside of whatever was on the bottom of the pod. With long landing gear unfeasable for a ship of this size, Cooper added structural fins to the bottom of the fuselage that contained landing gear trucks and integrated canards between the bottom of the forward fuselage and the forward wingtips, forming an imperfect Prandtl wing. While not sized correctly for maximum efficiency, there were some aerodynamic gains in the new planform and it kept the wingspan within reason. The resulting "Loki Mk.II" received Management approval in late 3056 and the Triumvirate was incorporated as an official design team in charge of Project Loki.

As young engineers with no management experience, the Triumvirate of Yut were supported by a Management tiger team but project leadership officially rested on the Triumvirate. This put them in a tricky position: they knew that they didn't have the skills or experience to successfully lead the project themselves, but they did have the vision that Management desired. As such, they took on the role of 'first among equals' in Project Loki leadership, adjudicating disagreements and facilitating the rest of the team to work together but only very rarely dictating explicit courses of action. They were also extremely attentive to the advice of their more senior 'subordinates,' out of respect for their experience. Less scrupulous managers attempted to take the opportunity to politic between the three friends, but the Triumvirate was remarkably loyal. When this didn't work, they instead lobbied for mass allowances and design considerations. This, combined with the conceptual layout of the Loki Mk.II, would dictate what would eventually emerge from the project.

As a jack-of-all-trades, it was argued that Object Loki should be able to serve any conceivable DropShip role: cargo carrier, fighter carrier, ground forces carrier, tanker, assault ship. The latter was the most technically challenging, as it required an overpowered propulsion system for offensive acceleration. The Triumvirate, swayed by this logic, decreed that Object Loki would have a cruising acceleration of two and a half gravities fully loaded, making it as maneuverable as a heavy fighter even if it was filled with ore. As the Mission-Adaptable Mass pods would be detachable, the Triumvirate decreed that, like the Packplane, Object Loki would be capable of fully functional flight without MAM pods attached (making it markedly different from the Aurora-class being developed independently elsewhere). Without a MAM pod, Object Loki would be lighter but have the same drive, thus making it faster, thus suiting it even better for the assault role. This weighted their decisions towards armament on the 'empty' mass. Systems required crew, and whatever was left went to armor. For the 'empty' mass, cargo came dead last.

With thirty thousand tons, the Triumvirate of Yut decided that Object Loki had to outfly and outshoot anything else it was likely to encounter in service. The aforementioned Technical Readout: 3057 would play a decisive role in this, since Object Loki's armor would be scaled to other military DropShips, almost all of which were much smaller than Object Loki. An organic subcraft component of two small craft and six aerospace fighters was also dictated by the Triumvirate vision of a do-everything DropShip, and juggling these requirements meant that Object Loki's fully-loaded cargo fraction slipped from one half to one third. Having a cargo capacity the size of three fully-laden Union-class DropShips was still considered sufficient, and so Object Loki continued to evolve. The engine module simplified to a degree from its two-module system to a single block carved into a rough 'T' cross-section for atmospheric aerodynamics. The wings turned from being planar to a hunched configuration for the same reason. The MAM pods themselves evolved in that the extra-volume pods had to extend around the structural fins, resulting in a three-pod system of centerline and outboard stations.

The MAM pods had the additional effect of complicating the empty vehicle's internal arrangement. Powering anything in the MAM pod was easy, given that it had standardized attach points. Connecting to JumpShips, on the other hand, was a complex matter. At first the concept was to attach to the pod, which then attaches to a carrying vessel's docking collar, but that was considered excessively complex and instead a 'dorsal down' connection method was explored. As there was no room in the packed upper fuselage to put an additional cargo door without compromising structural integrity, the Triumvirate went back to the imperfect, but good enough, concept of ventral-down and including cargo doors on the bottom of MAM pods.

By the end of its development in 3062, Object Loki evolved into a DropShip massing twenty thousand tons empty and thirty thousand laden. It was capable of two and a half gravities laden, as required, and thee and a half gravities empty: in its pure assault configuration, this heavy military DropShip was as maneuverable as a medium aerospace fighter. Endurance at one gravity was one hundred days, and it could sustain its maximum crew of 348 for nine months. Its 'empty' configuration retained almost four hundred tons of mass for miscellaneous cargo, and it was nearly as well armored than the Star League-era Colossus-class. Where Object Loki truly shined, however, was armament. It carried, without apology, ten heavy Gauss rifles, sixteen light Gauss rifles, twenty long range missile box launchers of twenty tubes each augmented by Artemis IV-class fire control systems, six more five-tube box launchers covering the aft arcs, and sixty medium pulse lasers. Object Loki required one hundred and three tons of dedicated fire control equipment to make full use of its arsenal, and its engine's open-cycle heat dissipation capability gave it a twenty-six percent heat efficiency margin.

On 20 March 3062, TME Loki rolled out from her VANGUARD interim production facility and, upon release to the Testing Department, took off on her first test flight. Unladen, she was designed to be unstable to take full advantage of her thrust-induced maneuverability. This was also effectively inevitable, given the nearly ten thousand tons of drive she carried aft. Her flight control logic kept her aloft and her inertia kept her flying smoothly, though later air combat maneuver tests would reveal the need for aerodynamic adjustments to avoid overstressing her frame. Landing on her structural fins also required delicate control to prevent tailstrikes or overtaxing individual wheel trucks, meaning that she required long runways to land and, unlike the Buksyr or the Leopard-class, had no rough-field capability. This would go on to limit her utility as a military transport.

While the unladen test project proceeded apace, the Triumvirate went on to design MAM pods. A universal cargo-carrying pod with reconfigurable load-bearing bulkheads made the obligatory bulk cargo, containerized cargo, BattleMech, vehicle, and aerospace fighter carrier versions simple. Where they started to have fun was with gunship variants. The 'Spooky' MAM pod, which used all three MAM pod stations, added one-hundred-fifteen light gauss rifles, forty twenty-tube long range missile launchers, sixty twenty-class assault smoothbore autocannon, and one-hundred-twenty medium pulse lasers. Since this was more interesting than any of the cargo variants, this is what went into production, and hinted at the first real trouble for Project Loki.

In their drive to create something new, the Triumvirate did not consider the whole picture for their system. Modular pods made sense for OmniTechnology-equipped combat units, all massing below a hundred tons. Individual pods almost never exceeded twenty tons. A MAM pod was one hundred thousand tons of equipment. Manufacturing one was just like building a DropShip without a propulsion system. An operator could reasonably procure, say, an OmniMech and have dozens of pods in storage to outfit it. A massive DropShip with DropShip-size MAM pods, however, presented an impossible logistics challenge in terms of simple storage. While there was no historical evidence surviving as to why the XC-120 Packplane never left the prototype stage despite having no technical issues, it can be assumed that it suffered a similar problem with regards to its discardable fuselages and their expensive solution to a problem already solved with containerized trucking.

Nevertheless, the Triumvirate of Yut persevered and on 11 November 3062 TME Loki was outfitted with her first MAM pod, a fully-loaded Spooky. Her aerodynamic performance suffered dramatically; her flight control computers refused all air combat maneuver input as exceeding the structural envelope. The previously nimble Loki had been reduced to the flying-brick status of the Leopard-class. She was, however, faster and a low altitude pass with her Spooky MAM pod over the live-fire range resulted in a swath of freshly plowed and craterized earth a third of a kilometer across and three kilometers long. The Spooky (then nicknamed the "Mulcher") pod carried enough firepower to reliably level anything placed in its path, as intended, and the appearance of TME Loki over the horizon carrying the Spooky ended many a wargame.

The lessons of TME Loki were incorporated into the design in a series of changes to the structure, aerodynamic loft shaping, and systems layouts for 'production,' which meant as-ordered manufacturing at Scheme VANGUARD interim facilities. With the FedCom Civil War heating up and the Lyran rebel government of Katherine Steiner-Davion's heavy-handedness with its LOKI intelligence service, Marketing considered the "Loki" name a non-starter but, on Karma's insistence, stayed with the Norse theme and renamed the class Svadilfari, after a mythical Norse workhorse. (That this workhorse managed to get Loki pregnant was, perhaps, a factor in its selection.) The first of that class, TME Svadilfari, launched in 3064, became the second ship to flag an Industrialist trading flotilla just as TME Vanguard had done. The Svadilfari retained the MAM pod concept of Object Loki, just in case anyone was interested in it, but was generally sold as an easily reconfigurable DropShip practically ready-made for OEM variants via the MAM pod system. As such, the standard TME product naming convention followed the line that sub-numbers indicated standard MAM pod variants: the Svadilfari-00 was the 'unladen' bus; the -01 was a bulk cargo hauler, the -02 was a 'Mech battallion carrier, the -03 was an aerospace fighter regiment carrier, and the -04 was a regimental combat team carrier. This indicated that House Davion was a definite target customer. The Svadilfari-05 carried the Spooky pod but, at 6.8 billion C-Bills, caused distinct sticker shock in all who considered it.

By its launch in 3064, the Svadilfari was already obsolete in the assault DropShip role due to, if nothing else, the Overlord-A3 by the simple fact that it lacked capital-class weapons. No one needed a Spooky pod, and an overreliance on standard weaponry was considered a liability by potential AFFS customers who had an admittedly slower but much cheaper and much longer-ranged Pocket WarShip already. The Svadilfari, especially with a Spooky pod, could easily vaporize any DropShip that it got into a knife fight with. This required it to be able to get into knife-fighting range first. What few contests there were between Overlord-A3s and Svadilfaris relied entirely upon whether the Overlord could maintain range long enough to either wear down its opponent or get a lucky hit with its missiles. Not to be deterred, TME Industries responded with the Svadilfari-06 Missile Boat and its VLS pod. The VLS pod added five Kraken-class teleoperated superheavy capital missile tubes and eight Barracuda-class light capital missile tubes in dorsal-firing vertical tubes for ease of bombardment and placement. Fire arcs were restricted by fire control requirements but this overwhelmed the Overlord-A3's two capital missile tubes.

This bought the Svadilfari more time as a Pocket WarShip when it wasn't being a rear-echelon military transport or a close air support arsenal ship, but its increasingly marginal armor compared to others in its class once again rendered it obsolete in that role. By the late Jihad and Human Space's reorientation towards Pocket WarShips rather than true WarShips as ships of the line, the Svadilfari was increasingly threatened by the advancement of the Pocket WarShip arms race. Even the acquisition and application of sub-capital weapons on the Svadilfari-07 (Sturm und Drang pod, ten light sub-capital autocannon, twenty light sub-capital lasers, five Killer Whale-class heavy capital missile tubes) in 3075 only bought it two more years in the role before it was rendered almost completely obsolete by the Interdictor-class in 3078. Even if the Svadilfari Pocket WarShip was better armed, and it always was, its armor was simply too weak to effectively capitalize on it.

Almost two decades older and wiser, the Triumvirate of Yut looked back on the Svadilfari while working on their second attempt at applying OmniTechnology to DropShips. The Svadilfari was perfectly capable in all its other roles, and its natural armament, if nothing else, almost automatically deterred aggression by raiders without numerical superiority. If it was to be an assault DropShip, however, it was too big: its size, combined with the inefficiencies inherent in an aerodyne planform, made thin armor a nigh inevibility. Their solution was to leave the MAM pod off and reconfigure the main hull as though it was never there. Combined with the deletion of two fighter bays, 3079's Svadilfari-A nearly tripled the armor protection of the Svadilfari-00 while retaining the same overwhelming arsenal of standard weapons. Deleting two more fighter bays, the Gauss rifles, and rationalizing the weapon systems resulted in the later Svadilfari-A1 of 3080 to outgun the Interdictor-class on its own capital-weapon turf, though by that point the Word of Blake had been driven back so hard that doing so merely added insult to injury.

Description
The post-Tukayyid armistice between the Clans and the Inner Sphere provided both breathing room and impetus for the Sphere's naval rearmament programs as documented in ComStar's Technical Readout: 3057 publication. This was when TME Industries expanded its production capabilities through Scheme VANGUARD and still fully embraced its do-it-because-we-can ethos, well before it grew more pragmatic and paranoid in the VANGUARD PLUS era. In 3056, with VANGUARD two years until completion, TME Industries had several production facilities in the twenty- and thirty-thousand ton range standing idle since finishing the hardware required for the larger fabricators after them in in Scheme VANGUARD and Management was at a loss with what to do with them. Setting them to manufacture mid-size civilian transport DropShips would've been profitable, but TME Industries only really started thinking in terms of profit in the 3060s in terms of trading for materials necessary for VANGUARD PLUS. What they wanted instead was an idea. The fighter supercarrier that would eventually become the Vanguard-class was certainly an engineering feat but it wasn't novel, and novel ideas--besides selling--inspired Industrialist culture.

The idea that would put these mid-range factories to work came from three engineers who hailed from different backgrounds: Cooper, from the recently disbanded Pop Occulture design team; Karmazin, one of the more level-headed members of TEAM MELTA; and Wohlford, a Security Directorate engineer who had worked previously with Simplicity and the Flying Circus. Karmazin, a student of history, came up with the original concept. All DropShips up to then had been built with a specific purpose in mind and had been modified ad infinitum by end users and in production into many other roles. Karmazin--better known as "Karma" at the time--thought that this could be worked around if DropShips were modular. He sketched up a concept resembling a trident, suggesting that gull-like wings could provide emplacements for broader fields of fire.

Knowledgeable readers may note that a similar concept drove Shipil's Aurora-class DropShip concept of the same year. All available records indicate that the nearly simultaneous development of these ideas occurred independently.

Wohlford's time with the Flying Circus included many hours watching old pre-spaceflight newsreels from the Terran Hegemony media archives, and he pointed his friends towards the XC-120 Packplane, a prototype cargo aircraft that carried an underslung cargo module. This informed Cooper, the group's 'numbers guy' and closest thing to a technical artist, to draw up basic plans for their "Loki DropShip." In the concept drawing, the Loki was an aerodyne DropShip with a large aft engine module, a relatively planar gull wing, and a long, shallow fuselage with a distinctive 'beak' or 'chin.' Aft of the chin and under the fuselage, "mission-adaptable-mass pods" could be attached in a modular fashion, either streamlined with the rest of the hull or in a bulbous, high-volume pod that resembled extremely large landing gear sponson. Secondary intakes on the inner faces of the wingtips would supply additional air to the transit drives on the ventral sides of the wings, giving the Loki VTOL capability unknown to aerodyne DropShips but possibly feasible, given that said DropShips often had transit drives anyway.

With image in hand, the three engineers--calling themselves the Triumvirate of Yut, with "Yut" apparently being an intentionally meaningless in-joke between them--lobbied for access to conceptual layout software so as to at least check the feasibility of their concept on a back-of-the-envelope basis. Targeting for thirty thousand tons loaded and half that empty, Cooper found that the unsupported cantilever nature of the gull wings would impart unacceptable pitching moments on the wing roots, the wings had to be thinned to be aerodynamically effective and thus precluded extensive intake systems, and that, as doodled, the Loki had no reasonable provision for landing gear outside of whatever was on the bottom of the pod. With long landing gear unfeasable for a ship of this size, Cooper added structural fins to the bottom of the fuselage that contained landing gear trucks and integrated canards between the bottom of the forward fuselage and the forward wingtips, forming an imperfect Prandtl wing. While not sized correctly for maximum efficiency, there were some aerodynamic gains in the new planform and it kept the wingspan within reason. The resulting "Loki Mk.II" received Management approval in late 3056 and the Triumvirate was incorporated as an official design team in charge of Project Loki.

As young engineers with no management experience, the Triumvirate of Yut were supported by a Management tiger team but project leadership officially rested on the Triumvirate. This put them in a tricky position: they knew that they didn't have the skills or experience to successfully lead the project themselves, but they did have the vision that Management desired. As such, they took on the role of 'first among equals' in Project Loki leadership, adjudicating disagreements and facilitating the rest of the team to work together but only very rarely dictating explicit courses of action. They were also extremely attentive to the advice of their more senior 'subordinates,' out of respect for their experience. Less scrupulous managers attempted to take the opportunity to politic between the three friends, but the Triumvirate was remarkably loyal. When this didn't work, they instead lobbied for mass allowances and design considerations. This, combined with the conceptual layout of the Loki Mk.II, would dictate what would eventually emerge from the project.

As a jack-of-all-trades, it was argued that Object Loki should be able to serve any conceivable DropShip role: cargo carrier, fighter carrier, ground forces carrier, tanker, assault ship. The latter was the most technically challenging, as it required an overpowered propulsion system for offensive acceleration. The Triumvirate, swayed by this logic, decreed that Object Loki would have a cruising acceleration of two and a half gravities fully loaded, making it as maneuverable as a heavy fighter even if it was filled with ore. As the Mission-Adaptable Mass pods would be detachable, the Triumvirate decreed that, like the Packplane, Object Loki would be capable of fully functional flight without MAM pods attached (making it markedly different from the Aurora-class being developed independently elsewhere). Without a MAM pod, Object Loki would be lighter but have the same drive, thus making it faster, thus suiting it even better for the assault role. This weighted their decisions towards armament on the 'empty' mass. Systems required crew, and whatever was left went to armor. For the 'empty' mass, cargo came dead last.

With thirty thousand tons, the Triumvirate of Yut decided that Object Loki had to outfly and outshoot anything else it was likely to encounter in service. The aforementioned Technical Readout: 3057 would play a decisive role in this, since Object Loki's armor would be scaled to other military DropShips, almost all of which were much smaller than Object Loki. An organic subcraft component of two small craft and six aerospace fighters was also dictated by the Triumvirate vision of a do-everything DropShip, and juggling these requirements meant that Object Loki's fully-loaded cargo fraction slipped from one half to one third. Having a cargo capacity the size of three fully-laden Union-class DropShips was still considered sufficient, and so Object Loki continued to evolve. The engine module simplified to a degree from its two-module system to a single block carved into a rough 'T' cross-section for atmospheric aerodynamics. The wings turned from being planar to a hunched configuration for the same reason. The MAM pods themselves evolved in that the extra-volume pods had to extend around the structural fins, resulting in a three-pod system of centerline and outboard stations.

The MAM pods had the additional effect of complicating the empty vehicle's internal arrangement. Powering anything in the MAM pod was easy, given that it had standardized attach points. Connecting to JumpShips, on the other hand, was a complex matter. At first the concept was to attach to the pod, which then attaches to a carrying vessel's docking collar, but that was considered excessively complex and instead a 'dorsal down' connection method was explored. As there was no room in the packed upper fuselage to put an additional cargo door without compromising structural integrity, the Triumvirate went back to the imperfect, but good enough, concept of ventral-down and including cargo doors on the bottom of MAM pods.

By the end of its development in 3062, Object Loki evolved into a DropShip massing twenty thousand tons empty and thirty thousand laden. It was capable of two and a half gravities laden, as required, and thee and a half gravities empty: in its pure assault configuration, this heavy military DropShip was as maneuverable as a medium aerospace fighter. Endurance at one gravity was one hundred days, and it could sustain its maximum crew of 348 for nine months. Its 'empty' configuration retained almost four hundred tons of mass for miscellaneous cargo, and it was nearly as well armored than the Star League-era Colossus-class. Where Object Loki truly shined, however, was armament. It carried, without apology, ten heavy Gauss rifles, sixteen light Gauss rifles, twenty long range missile box launchers of twenty tubes each augmented by Artemis IV-class fire control systems, six more five-tube box launchers covering the aft arcs, and sixty medium pulse lasers. Object Loki required one hundred and three tons of dedicated fire control equipment to make full use of its arsenal, and its engine's open-cycle heat dissipation capability gave it a twenty-six percent heat efficiency margin.

On 20 March 3062, TME Loki rolled out from her VANGUARD interim production facility and, upon release to the Testing Department, took off on her first test flight. Unladen, she was designed to be unstable to take full advantage of her thrust-induced maneuverability. This was also effectively inevitable, given the nearly ten thousand tons of drive she carried aft. Her flight control logic kept her aloft and her inertia kept her flying smoothly, though later air combat maneuver tests would reveal the need for aerodynamic adjustments to avoid overstressing her frame. Landing on her structural fins also required delicate control to prevent tailstrikes or overtaxing individual wheel trucks, meaning that she required long runways to land and, unlike the Buksyr or the Leopard-class, had no rough-field capability. This would go on to limit her utility as a military transport.

While the unladen test project proceeded apace, the Triumvirate went on to design MAM pods. A universal cargo-carrying pod with reconfigurable load-bearing bulkheads made the obligatory bulk cargo, containerized cargo, BattleMech, vehicle, and aerospace fighter carrier versions simple. Where they started to have fun was with gunship variants. The 'Spooky' MAM pod, which used all three MAM pod stations, added one-hundred-fifteen light gauss rifles, forty twenty-tube long range missile launchers, sixty twenty-class assault smoothbore autocannon, and one-hundred-twenty medium pulse lasers. Since this was more interesting than any of the cargo variants, this is what went into production, and hinted at the first real trouble for Project Loki.

In their drive to create something new, the Triumvirate did not consider the whole picture for their system. Modular pods made sense for OmniTechnology-equipped combat units, all massing below a hundred tons. Individual pods almost never exceeded twenty tons. A MAM pod was one hundred thousand tons of equipment. Manufacturing one was just like building a DropShip without a propulsion system. An operator could reasonably procure, say, an OmniMech and have dozens of pods in storage to outfit it. A massive DropShip with DropShip-size MAM pods, however, presented an impossible logistics challenge in terms of simple storage. While there was no historical evidence surviving as to why the XC-120 Packplane never left the prototype stage despite having no technical issues, it can be assumed that it suffered a similar problem with regards to its discardable fuselages and their expensive solution to a problem already solved with containerized trucking.

Nevertheless, the Triumvirate of Yut persevered and on 11 November 3062 TME Loki was outfitted with her first MAM pod, a fully-loaded Spooky. Her aerodynamic performance suffered dramatically; her flight control computers refused all air combat maneuver input as exceeding the structural envelope. The previously nimble Loki had been reduced to the flying-brick status of the Leopard-class. She was, however, faster and a low altitude pass with her Spooky MAM pod over the live-fire range resulted in a swath of freshly plowed and craterized earth a third of a kilometer across and three kilometers long. The Spooky (then nicknamed the "Mulcher") pod carried enough firepower to reliably level anything placed in its path, as intended, and the appearance of TME Loki over the horizon carrying the Spooky ended many a wargame.

The lessons of TME Loki were incorporated into the design in a series of changes to the structure, aerodynamic loft shaping, and systems layouts for 'production,' which meant as-ordered manufacturing at Scheme VANGUARD interim facilities. With the FedCom Civil War heating up and the Lyran rebel government of Katherine Steiner-Davion's heavy-handedness with its LOKI intelligence service, Marketing considered the "Loki" name a non-starter but, on Karma's insistence, stayed with the Norse theme and renamed the class Svadilfari, after a mythical Norse workhorse. (That this workhorse managed to get Loki pregnant was, perhaps, a factor in its selection.) The first of that class, TME Svadilfari, launched in 3064, became the second ship to flag an Industrialist trading flotilla just as TME Vanguard had done. The Svadilfari retained the MAM pod concept of Object Loki, just in case anyone was interested in it, but was generally sold as an easily reconfigurable DropShip practically ready-made for OEM variants via the MAM pod system. As such, the standard TME product naming convention followed the line that sub-numbers indicated standard MAM pod variants: the Svadilfari-00 was the 'unladen' bus; the -01 was a bulk cargo hauler, the -02 was a 'Mech battallion carrier, the -03 was an aerospace fighter regiment carrier, and the -04 was a regimental combat team carrier. This indicated that House Davion was a definite target customer. The Svadilfari-05 carried the Spooky pod but, at 6.8 billion C-Bills, caused distinct sticker shock in all who considered it.

By its launch in 3064, the Svadilfari was already obsolete in the assault DropShip role due to, if nothing else, the Overlord-A3 by the simple fact that it lacked capital-class weapons. No one needed a Spooky pod, and an overreliance on standard weaponry was considered a liability by potential AFFS customers who had an admittedly slower but much cheaper and much longer-ranged Pocket WarShip already. The Svadilfari, especially with a Spooky pod, could easily vaporize any DropShip that it got into a knife fight with. This required it to be able to get into knife-fighting range first. What few contests there were between Overlord-A3s and Svadilfaris relied entirely upon whether the Overlord could maintain range long enough to either wear down its opponent or get a lucky hit with its missiles. Not to be deterred, TME Industries responded with the Svadilfari-06 Missile Boat and its VLS pod. The VLS pod added five Kraken-class teleoperated superheavy capital missile tubes and eight Barracuda-class light capital missile tubes in dorsal-firing vertical tubes for ease of bombardment and placement. Fire arcs were restricted by fire control requirements but this overwhelmed the Overlord-A3's two capital missile tubes.

This bought the Svadilfari more time as a Pocket WarShip when it wasn't being a rear-echelon military transport or a close air support arsenal ship, but its increasingly marginal armor compared to others in its class once again rendered it obsolete in that role. By the late Jihad and Human Space's reorientation towards Pocket WarShips rather than true WarShips as ships of the line, the Svadilfari was increasingly threatened by the advancement of the Pocket WarShip arms race. Even the acquisition and application of sub-capital weapons on the Svadilfari-07 (Sturm und Drang pod, ten light sub-capital autocannon, twenty light sub-capital lasers, five Killer Whale-class heavy capital missile tubes) in 3075 only bought it two more years in the role before it was rendered almost completely obsolete by the Interdictor-class in 3078. Even if the Svadilfari Pocket WarShip was better armed, and it always was, its armor was simply too weak to effectively capitalize on it.

Almost two decades older and wiser, the Triumvirate of Yut looked back on the Svadilfari while working on their second attempt at applying OmniTechnology to DropShips. The Svadilfari was perfectly capable in all its other roles, and its natural armament, if nothing else, almost automatically deterred aggression by raiders without numerical superiority. If it was to be an assault DropShip, however, it was too big: its size, combined with the inefficiencies inherent in an aerodyne planform, made thin armor a nigh inevibility. Their solution was to leave the MAM pod off and reconfigure the main hull as though it was never there. Combined with the deletion of two fighter bays, 3079's Svadilfari-A nearly tripled the armor protection of the Svadilfari-00 while retaining the same overwhelming arsenal of standard weapons. Deleting two more fighter bays, the Gauss rifles, and rationalizing the weapon systems resulted in the later Svadilfari-A1 of 3080 to outgun the Interdictor-class on its own capital-weapon turf, though by that point the Word of Blake had been driven back so hard that doing so merely added insult to injury.