Rapid Smelter

The Rapid Smelter is the Rim's answer to refinery ships: fast, cheap, and good enough. The smelting systems process basic ores into refined materials at twice the speed of Solarian precision refineries, at half the quality. The Rim considers this an acceptable trade-off — volume beats quality when you're supplying frontier operations that need materials yesterday. Speed 2 makes it mobile enough to follow mining operations rather than waiting at a fixed location. The entire smelting assembly was salvaged from three different decommissioned stations and welded into a hull that the original engineers would not recognize.