Red Storm

Red Storm was the name of an engineering and manufacturing concern within the Alliance. During the Sixth Age for a period of roughly one hundred and fifty years, they were known as one of the most innovative, creative, and efficient companies.

History

Founded in A.Y. 601, Red Storm personified the heat of the Kamian Succession Wars. The initial founders owned an iron mine, and had just received a grant from the Alliance government to build a processing plant on site, so that ready-made metal stock could be shipped directly from the facility to Alliance factories in the city.

The board of directors, mostly young engineers and chemists, had grander ideas, though. With the foundry still being designed, they petitioned the Gudersnipe Foundation for contracts to manufacture composite materials, stating that excess heat from the foundry could be used to fire clay, another resource abundant in the region. Soon, Red Storm was manufacturing high-grade armor plates for use in ships and vehicles in both the Alliance and Foundation.

Profits from these ventures were used to fund a lab and high-grade electronics manufacturing plant. Again, using metal from the mines and ceramic composites, Red Storm began manufacturing top-end servos and compact, high-grade electric sub-systems. These very quickly found homes in the manufacturer of armored mecha, one key-area where the Alliance and Foundation fell well-behind the Kamians.

But Red Storm wasn't happy to settle there. In A.Y. 6732, the company unveiled its first battle-mech: the Tora. Though a highly-capable mech, the weapon failed to perform effectively under military conditions (the mechs were said to be extremely "picky" about their pilots).

While the Tora became highly sought-after in the spectator mech-fighting world, it was essentially useless as a military vehicle. Red Storm took a massive financial hit on the project and was forced to sell off many of its assets.

The Tora fiasco hit around the same time the mine failed, and clay reserves grew scarce. A big part of Red Storm's success was in essentially sitting on a huge pile of natural resources that had now been exhausted. Unable to keep the foundry and composite plants in operation, Red Storm scaled back its operations to producing mecha parts and power components.

Despite numerous successes in the design and production of Mecha and related technologies, by A.Y. 6745, the military contracts had dried up, assets were sold off, and Red Storm was forced to file for bankruptcy.