Mr.Tucker wrote:Any reason these were called Crushers? Was the company name? Were they deliberatly overpowered to be able to accommodate weaponry or just to be fast (not sure if that really matters though...)? Are they armored like military vessels to protect against the rigors of space (I believe you once told me that TCA ships were armored against radiation and kinetic impacts. Same kind of armor?).
"Crusher" is just a descriptive term borrowed from Haruka Takachiho's
Crusher Joe novels; the name itself doesn't have any special significance within the Outsider setting. Takachiho's Crushers were well-funded, high-priced trouble consultant teams, taking assignments ranging from transportation to rescue to terraforming and everything in between.
Any vessel designed to be fast must by definition be overpowered and structurally rugged enough to endure high acceleration, and so will have many of the qualities you need for a warship. All spacecraft must have at least some protection against radiation. Almost any well-designed fast transport is going to be a good candidate for conversion to an armed vessel. They don't have heavy armor, but neither do most military vessels in the same size class, as such armor comes at the expense of acceleration.
That said, some of the fast transport vessels were deliberately designed for the possibility of such a conversion, and some were themselves converted from warships. During the Aldea crisis, both sides were in the process of building dedicated military vessels to supplement their makeshift armed transports. When the treaty was signed and destroyer-to-light-cruiser-class vessels became illegal, some of these vessels were turned over to the TCA, some were scrapped, and some were converted to fast transports.
Mr.Tucker wrote:Did the TCA have ANY indication of present or past alien activity in this region of space (ruins, sporadic radio bursts, etc) or was it all just academic in nature?
There was no hard evidence of alien civilization, but with the discovery of primitive native life on numerous alien worlds, it seemed to be merely a matter of time. But, it's human nature to go from crisis to complacency when an expected threat doesn't manifest itself in a timely manner.