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The CoIonial was the first of the high-capacity freighters and in its life has undergone a number of major changes.
The early models bore no more than a passing resemblance to the one which is so familiar to us today. The Colonial I wait first built in 2004 and was manufactured in the great TTA yards in North Africa with the specific task of transporting the massive amounts of equipment and materials required for the construction of the Lunar Research Station.

In order to make the passage through Earth's atmosphere the hull of the world's biggest spacecraft was equipped with a mass of wing surface and booster rocket packs and looked very different from the clean smooth lines of its descendents. Apart from the enormous cost of operating a ship of this size from surface bases, it was a difficult craft to control until free of Earth's atmosphere; and if launching was dangerous, landing was a spaceman's nightmare. One out of every three landings resulted in damage to the ship of varying degrees of severity and this fact allied with the prodigious consumption of fuel led to a major redesign. From this emerged a sleeker looking vessel lacking the untidy array of projections carried by its forebear and one which required a completely revised mode of operation. It was to operate entirely in space, thereby avoiding the need for the huge kerosene/oxygen thrust engines which consumed fifty tons of fuel every second. Instead the McKinley ion drive, which had been perfected a year earlier In 2013 was fitted, this being sufficient to provide escape from lunar gravity and place the Colonial in a free-fall around the Earth.

Cargo transfer to and from orbit was then effected by the AAT 191 loaders specially designed by Avery Astronautics. These ships were essentially container barges linked form a complete hull, sandwiched between a power section and a manned control module. Once the containers were delivered the fore and aft sections locked together for the return journey. The success of Avery's tender was at least in part due to the ingenuity of their designers in providing an additional function in the containers themselves, for with little additional work they could be interconnected in a number of ways to form a habitable structure. They could be used to form living or working facilities either in space or on the surface and there are plenty of these structures still to be seen.

The successful application in 2040 by Dr Hans Berger of the principle of gravity-resist was probably the single most important benefit gained from our association with the Alpha Centaurians. It certainly transformed the physical appearrance of every subsequent spacecraft beyond anything previously conceived, and the Colonial III was the first to he equipped with gravity-resist equipment. Fitted with Berger generators a ship of almost any size or shape could land safely in most gravitational conditions and the bulk of the Colonial III could thus be increased dramatically.

The Colonial series has been in service longer than any other space freighter and It's contribution to our expansion into space is immeasurable. Although no examples of earlier versions exist, the Colonlal III and its military variant, the Quartermaster, remain n the freighters most usually seen in the spacelanes.