The Mammoth freighter was the largest spaceship known to men in Two Clusters. Only stations were bigger than the ship.
As of year 9599, the freighter design was retired and it was understood that no Mammoth freighter was in service although the blueprint was easily accessible via Earth archive.
The Mammoth freighter was originally designed and released by the Bau clan in sometime year 74xx. The clan released the blueprint royalty fee, resulting third party shipyards adapting them quickly.
The ship was developed during a heavy exploration era initiated by President Gawain Klisis (7006-7798). Having never needed to haul goods out of Sol system before, mankind did not have a large enough hauler needed in order to start colonization of planets in Andromeda cluster.
Initially, the design was praised for its inexpensive cost to manufacture by shipyards but experts questioned strength of its super structure which the Bau guaranteed that the design had been tested.
In a decade, 10 Mammoth freights were constructed and released. However, after some years of service, the freights started to show a critical design flaw in its super structure.
Its super structure was deemed inadequate for the mass of the ship under even micro gravity of 0.1g which caused the ship’s core structure to bend and deteriorate progressively depending on length of exposure to gravity. The overall situation was fairly serious as micro gravity from even a passing comet was reported to cause minor bending and creaking.
The Bau later released an updated blueprint but the repair cost was mounting and soon the design was abandoned. Both SSS and Lightwave shipyard took sizable damages of few billions in the end. This fiasco forced SSS and Lightwave shipyard to develop their own massive haulers which were significantly smaller than the Mammoth but far more reliable.
It was later revealed (leaked) that the Bau engineers cut corners severely in order to impress the public on their engineering superiority by wanting to introduce an inexpensive, yet, capable hauler.
The Bau eventually reduced number of cargo bays by 90% and licensed the new design cheaply to USF navy. Few hundreds were built by the navy and they are still being utilized even in year 9599 and beyond. The far smaller, but far more reliable, freighter was named “Elephant”.
The Mammoth freight had an ability to detach each pod and send them directly into orbit or close destination which would save a lot of time, in theory at least.
This feature, however, was never utilized due to a cost issue of replacing/repairing the pod.
There was an unconfirmed rumor that SSS attempted to sue the Bau clan for damages. Unverified lawsuit documents circulated on the net which said that SSS was suing the Bau clan for “inadequate and incompetent design that caused over a billion of damages in repairs and reinforcement”. The documents were considered hoax as official documents were neither found nor released to Earth archive.