Catgirl Industries

Catgirl Industries
Nicknames	LEGO cats (members), CI (as an acronym), CGI (as a funny acronym)
Home Base	Jenga
Population (2015 rough)	18 (17 catgirls and one AI)
Political Influence	Minor to Non-existent
Allies	Panzer Kunst Gruppe, Furries
Stereotype	Catgirl tinkering on some mechanical stuff, lazy sleeping cats pretending to do something useful

“	Yes, send a group of the love faction for the talks with the catgirls... will take three times as long until we get the contract, but the chance to get a good discount is much higher.	”
—Overheard at Crystal Tokyo

“	Many people are still thinking most catgirls are nothing but some poor discarded pets from the Boskonian war. We are here to change this perception, once and for all.	”
—Cathy, when asked about the motives of ‘her’ company in 2015

“	We are working on the prototype of the next ‘cannon ball’ at the moment. We still have some problems getting the engine running without an AI controlling it, but we will getting it solved soon. Expect something to test within a few months.	”
—Vivio to Jet on the status of the new recon drone in October 2015

How it came to be

Cathy is a catgirl that biomodded herself accidentally while building her spaceship Stargazer back on Earth in 2011. She worked as tourist guide first and became a member of the Senshi Armed Forces after SOS-Con until the end of the Boskone War in 2014. Her ship, the Stargazer, is well known throughout the solar system.

Vivio is a victim of a Boskonian catgirling machine on 2462 Nehalennia, which erased her whole memory and left her mind blank. Instead of being sold to Earth, she was used by Quattro, the daughter of Agatha Clay, for memory experiments. In 2015, Cathy and Ford Sierra went undercover on Nehalennia; Quattro captured Cathy and copied several years worth of her memories, before uploading them into Vivio’s mind. (Her plan was to interrogate Vivio, erase her, then reload from the stored copy, comparing and cross-referencing answers.) Vivio is, in essence, a fork of Cathy. Shortly before she could be erased for good, Vivio was freed by Ford Sierra, Cathy and the Panzer Kunst Gruppe.

When Cathy began looking for something useful to do after her mission on Nehallania, Jet passed a remark about the lack of small surveillance drones for the Panzer Kunst Gruppe. Vivio suggested that the rescued catgirls including her and Cathy could build the drones, pooling their abilities. Cathy and Vivio managed to persuade a number of Catgirls from Nehalennia to join their effort to build the drones for the Kuenstlers, and so Catgirl Industries was born on 23th March, 2015 .

The company

Catgirl Industries is well known for producing small customized drones, ranging from basketball up to truck-wheel sized. They mostly work as a research and development company, leaving mass production to other groups.

Catgirl Industries were not founded just to make money, their incoming is just a mean to strengthen their own independence. Most work they do is done because the catgirls have fun doing it, so from time to time they might just decline a profitable contract because they think its boring or dangerous to Fenspace.

The other motivation of the catgirls in the company is to change the perception of Fenspace about catgirls. Most catgirls got ‘produced’ during by the Boskones as slaves, so a lot of people are used to think about them as friendly, helpless victims (or worse). Catgirl Industries tries to establish a new stereotype in Fenspace with catgirls as resourceful, clever tinkerers. Only time will tell if they are successful with this.

History

Catgirl Industries started as a project to build a small recon drone for the Panzer Kunst Gruppe. Their final prototype looked like a dull black sphere somewhat smaller than a basketball. It was a quick and agile ground recon drone with enough armor to survive being used as an ad-hoc thrown projectile by a Kunstler.

The prototype impressed the Gruppe, and they followed the prototype with a contract order. The money from the contract allowed the catgirls to begin construction of their own space station. Similar to their first product, they never started creating AIs, most of the catgirls felt bad about designing a living mind and selling it to a customer.

In late 2015 the first additional catgirls from 125 Liberatrix joined the company. With the money they got from their new point-defense drone series and other small jobs, Catgirl Industries began to expand the conglomerate of containers as their orbital base for production, research and living. Since then the base and the member count of Catgirl Industries has been increasing slowly but steadily.

Shortly after this, an accident in one of Jenga’s labs created the first batch of Element Zero, a Handwavium strain that follows the rules of the Mass Effect games. After some experiments, Catgirl Industries quickly began to exploit their new discovery. In the next years, most engines for flying drones were designed with a Mass Effect engine.

In 2016 the politics of the company about not creating sapient AIs finally failed during the Exocomp project. Luckily the emerging AI Serina and the Exocomps integrated well into Catgirl Industries, which greatly helped the catgirls with maintenance of Jenga. Catgirl Industries licenced the design of the Exocomps to the Trekkies, but they still increase the number of their own Exocomps. Jenga is considered as the place with the highest ‘Exocomp density’ in Fenspace.

The increasing number of catgirls as the base and their growing resources made all of them safe for the first time. The war was over, nobody would be stupid enough to challenge them in their own space station.

They were wrong.

In late summer 2016 ships of the Tanglewood Boys attacked Jenga, looking forward to raid the base, kidnap the catgirls and stealing anything valuable. The catgirls fought a fighting retreat for hours when Jengas defenses proved themselves inadequate to keep the attackers away. In the end they managed to prevent the attackers from capturing them until a relief group of the Roughriders arrived.

The Jenga Defense Project

The shock that even their new home wasn’t safe fueled a new wave of projects to increase the defensive capabilities of Jenga. The catgirls called it the Jenga Defense Project.

While repairing the station and fixing the battle damage, the catgirls began to add more defensive turrets than before. A large scale laser cannon joined their upgrade efforts soon.

Several friends and allies were worried that the Catgirls were overdoing their attempts to increase the security of their home, but none of them listened. The few members of Catgirl Industries who already had experience with small arms weapons began to teach the rest of the members of the company, while others began to take lessons at Survival Shot at Frigga. An unknown party even supplied them with a number of unwaved submachine guns and pistols.

A few months after the attack Catgirl Industries presented their Mini Madcat Corps to a few friends. While the old Madcat robot had been a toy, the new ones were armed and armored enough to be used as a heavy weapon carrier inside the space station.

The efforts of the catgirls finally led to the completion of the Normandy in December 2018, only a strange quirk prevented the catgirls to keep the ship at home. They instantly started to build a second Normandy class.

Slowly things began to normalize on Jenga, the catgirls felt safe again.

Moving outwards

In 2017 the catgirls suddenly got the idea of extending their basic research capabilities with a faster than light particle accelerator. This required to move the Little Big Bang Labs away from the Jenga space station out of the limit.

After the first experiments with the new accelerator were successfully done lightyears away from the next solar system, roughly a third of Jengas modules were moved to the gas giant Nostromo to form a new place of research for Catgirl Industries.

The Little Big Bang Labs quickly became the major producer of Eezo of Catgirl Industries, but it also began to establish themselves as a place that do 'hard' science.

A year later in 2018 Catgirl Industries started a joined venture together with the catgirls from 125 Liberatrix, which they called For Tailed Ones. This was CI's first attempt to directly cooperate with an external party. Since then the company is producing modified infrastructure as doors, chairs and showers for biomods with tails but its also famous for its line of furniture made from real organic wood.

The latest expansion of Catgirl Industries happened in 2022 after a private discussion of Cathy with her friend Jet Jaguar. The catgirls on Jenga were thinking about working on small vehicles and spacecrafts which they wanted to sell to the rest of Fenspace. Instead of increasing the size of Jenga to make space for mass production of customer goods, Jet proposed to build a new factory complex in out of 77 Frigga's old mining areas.

The work on the Frigga Factory began in 2022, but it took until early 2025 until it was declared fully operational. The first vehicles released to the public became the M-35 Mako all terrain vehicle and the UT-47 Kodiak shuttle.

Installations

Catgirl Industries has three full scale bases in the solar system. While each of them is focusing on different topics, all are capable on producing everything the catgirls have ever invented.

• The original Jenga space station as their headquarter. Jenga focus on improving Mindtech and Mimetic Plastic and on extensions of the CI space stations itself.
• The Little Big Bang Labs, a split-off from Jenga which orbits the Gas Giant Nostromo. The Labs focus their research on Eezo related projects, hardtech research and materials science.
• The Frigga Factory, build into an old mining cave on the asteroid 77 Frigga, which focuses on commercial mass production of small goods and vehicles.

In addition to this there is For Tailed Ones, a joined company together with the catgirls on Liberatrix, which builds all kinds of furniture and basic infrastructure for tailed biomods. Catgirl Industries still has the long-term goal to equip the company with a full factory complex to give the catgirls on Liberatrix a boost in infrastructure.

Research

“	Most of us have one or two research projects we are working on in small groups. Some are related to our drone design and construction, others are just for fun.	”
—Cathy, asked about what Catgirl Industries does when not building drones

Since the foundation of Catgirl industries the company has done a large number of research projects, most of them only for a few months. But there are a few research projects that have been continued permanently.

Catgirl Industries also acquired several Boskone technologies during the raid of Jet Jaguar, Sierra Ford and Cathy that freed Vivio.

One technology captured on the raid on Nehalennia was a substance Catgirl Industries named ‘Mimetic Plastic’, a latex- or plastic-like substance that reacts to special stimuli by nearby control systems, changing back and forth from a semi-liquid to solid form and can even apply some bending force on itself. Depending on the kind of handwavium used in creation, it has different attributes. In its original form its breathable and can stick to skin and fur without damaging it. Other forms are airtight and can be used for creating a vacuum resistant surface. Some catgirls at the company are working on combining the different kinds of Mimetic Plastic in one batch, others are experimenting with creating morphing clothing or even space suits out of it.

Catgirl Industries also got the Catgirling Machine that was acquired during the raid. They have joined the Fen research community that has been working on reverse-engineering the machine. Their machine is still working, and they sometimes offer to turn people into catgirls, but they don’t advertise this. The ‘Cats in paradise’ groups knows about the machine. The memory-wiping part of the machine seems to have been removed.

Other research projects are more related with their work on drones of all kind. In 2016 they presented a first prototype drone for the Panzerkunst Gruppe with a Mass Effect drive. In addition to moving the drone this new reactionless ‘dark energy’ drive prototype was able to project a small forcefield shield in one direction, which proved to become a quantum leap forward in the drones Catgirl Industries sold. Later revisions of the drive added an improved forcefield capability to the drones. It is believed that the drive design has a very low maximal area of effect, because not a single released drone or prototype had a drive field with a diameter more than two meters.

Members

The non-AI members of the company are exclusively catgirls, all of them seemingly well versed in construction and tinkering with waved drones. Many of them exploring other construction related research project, from creating unwaved plush catgirls for children that can purr up to experiments with large capital ship lasers.

Both Cathy and Cortana have joined GJ teams and the Panzer Kunst Gruppe on some occasions for special missions, even after they started their company. Some of the other company members have done the same.

Most of the members are known to leave their Home Base only in small groups, but almost never alone. It has yet to be seen how the rest of the “cat gang” will react if some of their friends are stuck somewhere because of a problem. Speculations on Interwave forums go from ‘will log a formal protest” to “will release their secret drone swarm of Doom to break their friends out”.

Catgirl Industries and AIs

Most of the members of Catgirl Industries have been victims of a Boskonian Catgirling Machine. Because of this the company has a very rigid stance on slavery, like the one the Boskonians practiced with their produced Catgirls.

This of course created a dilemma for them, because many drones they produce need waved electronics and computer parts, which might develop an AI. And selling an AI to a customer would be as bad as what the Boskonians did. The catgirls decided to produce only things without an AI. To prevent the creation of an AI they followed a common believe of Fenspace that small devices like Smart Phones could not create AIs on their own. But they failed.

In Spring 2016 the Exocomps, a new series of drones, began to develop an animal like mind and later a sapient group mind too. Even after accepting the Exocomps and the new AI Serina as new friends and partners at Catgirl Industries, this spawned a longer debate.

Catgirl Industries stopped producing new drones for nearly a month until they worked out a new strategy to prevent new AIs. Since this days all waved electronics is connected and loaded to Cortanas own AI code. The theory behind the new strategy is that a computer that already contains an AI that consumes all of its resources will not create a second one if waved carefully. Even if there is no prove that this strategy is more sound than the old one, there has been no other incident with new AIs at Catgirl Industries after this.

While no accidental AI was created at Jenga since the Exocomps and Serina 2016, the two AIs of the station got a daughter in early 2017. EDI was raised in the Grid, the virtual reality of Jenga, and became the AI of the Normandy when the ship was finished.

First Product

PKG recon drone (the “cannon ball”)

A black basketball sized surveillance drone with eight internal cameras and microphones (360° stabilized vision) in a 2cm thick hollow sphere of waved steel and filled with a shock absorbing gel. The surface of the drone is covered with an waved material that can stick to nearly any other material, while allows the drone to roll up to most walls and ceilings. Remote controlled with autopilot, no AI.

Trivia

• Most company members are enthusiastic users of augmented reality and cyberspace.
• Most of the modules of the Home Base have been built from Battle Steel bought from Hephaestus, who also helped with the construction of some parts of the modules.
• Catgirl Industries has offered a bounty on for capturing Boskonian catgirl slavers together with Space Patrol. The bounty will mostly paid in hardware or services, and only if a Great Justice or Space Patrol office validates that the right people were caught.