Drew's Fighting Ships: Curtis JN-4

Curtis Industrie (often misspelled Curtis Industry or Curtis Industries) bought out Julio-Novak in 2736. In typical Curtis fashion, most of J-N’s product line was discontinued, with customers of unfilled orders being offered an “equivalent” Curtis product or their money back. Most elected to have their money back, which seems fair comment on the perceived value of Curtis’s offerings at the time.

Four J-N offerings survived the acquisition, however. The federal government refused both options, threatening to block the deal under anti-trust law if J-N’s Space Train troop and cargo transports or the related Red Ball fleet oiler were to be discontinued or substantially altered. The ships were renamed, though, to be consistent with the rest of Curtis’s lineup: the Space Train troop transport became the JN-1, the cargo transport JN-2, and the Red Ball oiler became JN-3. These ships continued for another 7 years, seeing only minor changes until they were replaced in the government’s lineup by variants of Wang’s Stratolifter series.

The fourth J-N product to survive the buyout was a yet-unnamed light reconnaissance vessel. Reasons given for its survival vary, but survive it did, though Curtis’s engineers managed to saddle it with a governing subroutine that severely limited its engines’ performance. As the fourth former J-N product in the Curtis catalog it was named the JN-4, but it quickly became known as the Curtis Jenny.

Factory-standard Jennys featured twin Rolls-Royce Vega Mark IV engines mated to an equally robust Allison P-63 “Voyager” transdifferential, directed by an Intellicorps DN-5 CPU with Intellibus; and an FBW modular body-on-frame design that, unlike the more-common unibody designs of the time, separated structural integrity from hull integrity. The result was a fast, powerful, widely adaptable vessel that could absorb a great amount of punishment, all of it choked nearly to death by Curtis engineers’ software.

The obvious solution was to do away with the software, and a small industry sprang up to do exactly that. Within less than a year after the Jenny’s launch in 2737, no fewer than ten such companies existed, offering software designed for operations as varied as military reconnaissance, fire suppression, and courier service. Aftermarket body modules were a natural extension of this theme, and by 2739 it was possible to purchase new Jennys from secondary manufacturers, already fitted and optimized for fields as diverse as emergency medical services and resource exploration. In 2741, Curtis, belatedly recognizing the uses that its JN-4 was being put to, began offering option 5a, an incomplete vessel containing chassis, cockpit, engines, and drivetrain, designed for sale to secondary manufacturers for fitting out.

Thus, by the second half of the 28th century, Jennys were found as campers, ambulances, light and medium reconnaissance vessels, police patrol and intercept vessels; as tenders to larger vessels, as lighters, as light freighters in their own right, as communications and control lorries, as mobile offices and as mobile laboratories, to name just a few of the over 100 registry types in the Helios system alone.

Curtis gave the JN-4 a facelift for 2740, visually harmonizing the vessel with the rest of the Curtis fleet. Changes included a general softening of the vessel’s profile, reshaping the faceplate to an oval form, and consolidating forward lighting into a “cyclops” arrangement typical of the company’s in-house designs of the time. Other cosmetic changes were also made, all minor, yielding a second-generation JN-4 whose operating characteristics were essentially unchanged, and which could trade modules with first-generation vessels.

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