Cousin Crow's Custom Craft

Cousin Crow's Custom Craft is a Human company founded by Nampo "Cousin Crow" Vasko in 2924 that specializes in customizing spacecraft. Many of the Genesis ships sold on Crusader (Stanton II) are converted into branded Starliners for the corporations that purchase them at the company's flagship location in Orison. Cousin Crow's operated only on Lo (Corel III) until 2949, when Drake Interplanetary released the Privateer, a variant of the Kraken that was converted by Cousin Crow's into a traveling marketplace. The publicity from this release brought the company record profits. The flagship store is a high-end ship component vendor located on the Providence industrial platform in Orison.

The flagship store sits on the Providence industrial platform in Orison. It is reached from the tram stop at Providence by following the back railing past the display screens, descending the stairs near the gift shop, and continuing through a door to a lower level.

History

Nampo Vasko was born in New Junction (Lo, Corel system) in 2883. He spent his youth alongside friends rather than completing his Equivalency, and he later stated that his primary education came from the smuggling runs his mother took him on. To pay off debts from her gambling addiction, his mother frequently moved contraband in and out of New Junction, and Nampo's role was to provide a cover story and act as a distraction if any authorities paid the ship unwanted attention.

When Nampo was twelve, his mother suffered her biggest loss wagering on the Murray Cup. To pay her debt, she agreed to "loan" Nampo to a local Banu criminal souli. The Banu put him to work on a wide variety of tasks, and Nampo developed a love for stripping ships for parts. It was through this work that he acquired the first ship he ever attempted to repair himself, a 2894 Cutlass that was later featured prominently at the flagship store opening with a sign describing it as the ship that made Cousin Crow fall in love with ships. Even after helping pay off his mother's debt, Nampo became a regular at the Banu chopshop and grew more entangled with New Junction's criminal underworld. He continued to work on ships and absorbed the Banu philosophy that no design was sacred and that anything could be improved to look or work better. He created ship liveries for fake companies and modified internal layouts to build smuggler's holds. Seeing the credits that smugglers made compared to chopshop workers, Nampo assembled a group of friends and stole a Constellation, which the group reworked into a smuggling ship used for small runs through his underworld connections. In 2905, the Advocacy, acting on an anonymous tip, arrested Nampo and his crew for smuggling and sent them to a rehabilitation facility.

In prison, as his friends fell into gangs, Nampo used his affable personality to survive. His jet-black hair and his ability to move between groups earned him the nickname Cousin Crow, with "cousin" being slang at that facility for someone who could be trusted. After an early release, he returned to his North Block neighborhood and earned credits doing ship repairs and modifications for people he had met through connections made in prison. Because they knew him as Cousin Crow, he used the name when he opened a small ship customization shop in 2924.

Cousin Crow's Custom Crafts grew into a North Block gathering place. Cousin Crow stayed on the straight and narrow while customizing ships to be as audacious or as inconspicuous as their owners desired, and he often hired friends fresh out of prison or looking to leave the outlaw life. The most notable was Tufo Donato, who went on to design several of the company's most famous liveries and the graffiti-style murals later installed at the Orison store. The shop's reputation slowly spread and attracted customers from outside the Corel system. The company's break came in 2942 after it partnered with a luxury tourline company to modify an old Genesis Starliner into a party ship; a large marketing campaign saturated Spectrum with images of the starliner and established Cousin Crow's as a name in ship conversion circles across the empire. A piece of that ship was later displayed at the store opening with the campaign's tagline, "So much fun, it shouldn't be legal."

Drake executives subsequently invited Cousin Crow to visit their headquarters on Magnus, where they showed him plans for their first capital ship and offered him the chance to make an exclusive livery for the launch. Cousin Crow countered with a bolder idea. Many of his clients had hired him to convert their ships' holds into Banu-style marketplaces, so he proposed working with Drake directly rather than performing after-market retrofits. The executives accepted, and the Kraken Privateer followed, sealing Cousin Crow's reputation as one of the premier conversion shops in the UEE. After this success, Vasko expanded the North Block shop and hired friends and family at high salaries, became a collector of classic ships, a patron of the arts, and a follower of high-end street fashion. In 2944, following this success and the earlier party-ship conversion, Crusader Industries approached Cousin Crow about overseeing the engineering team responsible for converting branded starliners to customer specifications. As part of the deal, Cousin Crow negotiated for a flagship store on one of Orison's most heavily trafficked platforms.

When the flagship store opened on Orison in 2949, the event drew such a crowd that the Providence platform registered a record number of controlled bursts to maintain its altitude. Patrons packed the store and overflowed up the stairs in both directions, spilling into the Crusader Discovery Center and the Covalex store. Culture reporter Sabastien Frost remarked that many attendees from Lo had spent their life savings to attend. The store was built from a series of old repair bays formerly used to maintain Crusader's fleet of cargo haulers, and its open design allows customers to watch ship customization in progress. For the opening, the bays held classic ships and pieces of ships showcasing Cousin Crow's most famous modifications and paints, including a piece of the first Kraken Privateer and a replica of the stolen Constellation's smuggler's hold, displayed as his first failed design for not properly concealing contraband. The shop features a triptych of graffiti-style murals designed by Tufo Donato that pay homage to Vasko's home neighborhood of North Block in New Junction.

System components

Note|System Components Updated: - Alpha 3.18.2

| rowspan="4" | Tyler Design & Tech

| rowspan="2" | Wen-Cassel Propulsion

| rowspan="6" | Amon & Reese Co.

| rowspan="1" | Lightning Power Ltd.

| rowspan="6" | Sakura Sun

| rowspan="4" | Tyler Design & Tech

| rowspan="4" | Behring Applied Technology

| rowspan="6" | Gorgon Defender Industries

| rowspan="1" | Seal Corporation

Vehicle weapons

Note|Vehicle Weapons Updated: - Alpha 3.18.2

| rowspan="4" | Apocalypse Arms

| Strife Mass Driver Cannon

| rowspan="5" | Behring Applied Technology

| SW16BR1 "Buzzsaw" Repeater

| SW16BR2 "Sawbuck" Repeater

| SW16BR3 "Shredder" Repeater

| rowspan="3" | Gallenson Tactical Systems

| YellowJacket GT-210 Gatling

| Scorpion GT-215 Gatling

| rowspan="3" | Joker Engineering

| VariPuck S1 Gimbal Mount

| VariPuck S2 Gimbal Mount

| VariPuck S3 Gimbal Mount

| VariPuck S4 Gimbal Mount

| VariPuck S5 Gimbal Mount

| VariPuck S6 Gimbal Mount

Vehicle paints

Note|Vehicle Paints Updated: - Alpha 3.18.2

| Arrow Light Green and Grey Livery

| Arrow Metallic Grey Livery

| Aurora Green and Gold Livery

| Aurora Light and Dark grey Livery

| Avenger Olive Green Livery

| Avenger Splinter Livery

| rowspan="1" | Constellation

| Constellation Dark Green Livery

| rowspan="2" | Retaliator

| Retaliator Twilight Livery

Miscellaneous

Note|Miscellaneous / Other Updated: - Alpha 3.18.2

| Cambio-Lite SRT Attachment

| Cambio-Lite SRT Attachment (can)

| Snaggle Protein Stick (Pepper^3)

| Snaggle Stick (Smoke Daddy)

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