Sledgehammer Hazardous Yield Thermal Extraction / SLDGHMMR

About Us: The company was initially founded by UEE vets facing involuntary early retirement or reserve status as part of a service-wide downsizing. While the founders possessed reasonable assets, they wisely acquired excess Navy hardware that had been declared “surplus and/or obsolete” and was therefore subject to resale to the public through the Assets Selected for Sellback, Rates As Per Equity Declared program.

The company’s acquisition of this equipment has been shrouded in controversy. How the company obtained a relatively new fully loaded warship with front line hardware, complete with all of the appropriate and correct documentation when everyone who would have had to authorize the transfer do not recall doing so and there are no obvious “smoking guns”, such as unexplained credit deposits or sudden retirements, to provide leads. All other acquisitions show the same characteristics. No one in the company was known to possess the skills required for such an elaborate electronic deception, and there is a similar lack of payments to the usual suspects in that regard. The consensus remains that the transactions APPEAR to be above board and legal, yet simply cannot be.

Sadly, due to a software error in the navigation systems during a routine transport, all the previously acquired equipment and ships were reportedly destroyed when they were accidently routed through the sun of the Stanton system. Thankfully, all personnel on board the ships were able to safely evacuate and were rescued by a passing freighter, the SS Black Joke.

As a side note, every few years an up and coming, eager investigator will reopen the case, convinced that they would be the one with the clever insight that would shed new light on the obvious inconsistencies. Predictably, those investigators are left grasping smoke in the wind. These investigations always make interstellar headlines when the liberal news reports yet another investigation into Sledgehammer, to which the Company responds by throwing a huge party, celebrating the past success and generally making a nuisance of itself in the investigator’s home town. Company Co-Presidents Antonio Accardio and Solomon Steel routinely lead parades through the town, astride ancient, loud, petrochemical burning conveyances nicknamed “HOGs”, leaving clouds of exhaust and trails of rubber in their wake. Company employees, most of them veterans themselves, find the entire spectacle amusing. The extreme leftist media is highly disparaging, or in the words of one rather miffed correspondent, “their shared love of noise, concussion, violence, and doing things solely for a grin is a disgrace. The sooner they are charged, tried, convicted, and incarcerated for their obvious crimes, or recalled to active duty where their antisocial and Myrmidon-istic tendencies are encouraged, the better.” These parties have the side effect of being phenomenal recruitment drives, both for the UEE and Sledgehammer itself, so local authorities, the Advocacy, and the Navy generally just smile and send Sledgehammer the bill for cleanup afterwards, usually without padding it too much.