What is the Urutu?

There has been a debate over a period of years about what the Urutu referred to in the Moccassin datacard actually is. There are a couple of candidates, which are generally rare encounters. I've recently been flying with DoggySoft's Hacker loaded, and have taken some screengrabs of the ships i think are probably the Urutu. These grabs appear on this page, together with my speculation on each one.

Ship 1

This is the ship reckoned by many people to be the elusive Urutu. !EliteExt's ID feature identifys this ship as being the Urutu, but the program has misidentified a number of ships, including mixing up the Boa 2 and Anaconda.

It has been very difficult to get some sort of size comparison for the ship, but I recently spotted one being towed by a Viper, and I managed to get a screengrab, which is below.

An 'Urutu' under police tow

As you can see, the 'Urutu' is considerably smaller than the Viper, which would seem to suggest that a theory some people (including Simon Challands) have put forward that this ship is in fact a Galactic Navy prototype of a Thargon-type ship is correct. I was sceptical at first, but this grab is pretty good evidence. On the other hand, it could be a small one-man fighter, similar to those found in Frontier.

One of the ships of this type I encountered appeared to have the following spec:-

A little overspecified for a drone, IMHO, but you never know!

Ship 2

This is the other ship which is a candidate, identified by !EliteExt as the Moccassin, although it isn't the ship on the Moccassin datacard (which is ID'd as 'Special Moccassin').

A picture of the Urutu? A nice top view demonstrating the similarity to the Moccassin. A bad screen grab of the regular Moccassin. The datacard has a better view.

The first picture shown above is the possbile Urutu, the second is the regular Moccassin. As you can see, the first ship differs from the second in a number of ways:-

  1. The first ship is shorter, but has a noticably wider 'wingspan.'
  2. The colour scheme of the first ship is different from the Moccassin - there are no green triangles in the orange triangle aft of the cockpit, and the cockpit window is green rather than red.

My Conclusions

Although I had originally thought that the first ship was the Urutu, the screen grabs shown here suggest that I may have been wrong. The first ship seems to be too small to be a cousin to the Moccassin, whereas the second ship bears a distinct resmblence, while still being different enough to be considered a seperate ship design.

Of course, if the second ship is the Urutu, what is the first ship?

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