June 3rd, 2070 by Marcus A. Zander, Tech Correspondent

Transport, Breton Motors / Automotive Industry / MSSIRT

As of 3pm BST today, the legendary vehicle manufacturer Breton Motors will have filed for bankruptcy, ending an era of 'Massive Vehicle' production that we won't see again for quite some time - maybe ever.

Founded in the 2030s, the group started off with lofty ambitions - to be the first & best at making ground vehicles for space-work: Skipping across the Moon, barreling across Mars, or baby-stepping around Pluto. The idea was that their crafts would be the one-size-fits-all for any gravity & any surface.

Skip past a couple decades, and we get to their crowning jewel - the "Massive Self-Sustaining <whatever> Truck" (the whatever being a couple extra letters depending on the use-case for a specific model).

The design all originated from a skunkworks project in 2041 to answer a major demand of the space industry:

• They needed a common chassis with heavy-duty weight capacity
• Which could stabilise itself across rough terrain
• And could keep itself going for very, very long periods of time

What we got from those wild demands is truly something for the record books, one that we still see in use to this day (probably for the next 30-odd years too). The MSST was the workhorse of the space industry now, after roaring into pole position back in 2051 when the first vehicle strode out the factory.

BM enjoyed a strong head-start on their rivals when the space-race turned into a space gold-rush, establishing themselves as the defacto "Common Chassis" of the solar system - practically every spaceship had one MSST in it (the largest use case being transportation of course).

And why every ship? Well that was in no small part due to the quality support that BM was known for; going to the extent of publicy documenting their issues list, striving to have the world's thickest operator's manual (that was readable no less, none of that techno-babble we see elsewhere) .

And this dominance was also why they kept strong, why Massive stayed Massive - once it's everywhere, it has the support system to just be fixable everywhere (by a Massive Self-Sustaining Repair Truck no less).

That was until a big change in the industry took place, swapping from wanting a jack-of-all-trades chassis to one that could be moulded to different needs on-demand by changing components. This is where BM fell face-first: their speciality was a truck that could do anything... if you had a month free to re-model it. Space-based operations wanted something that could be done in a day (Which you can't do with a truck the size of 3 flats)

Falling behind, then losing contract after contract, BM finally got submerged under their massive trucks and massive costs.

So what happens now?

Well, for one thing, due to the still-widespread use of the MSST platform, BM will supposedly be running in a skeleton-crew capacity, creating parts & doing repair jobs on a per-need basis. For another thing, we can still find computers running XP out in the wild of the digital jungle, so rest assured that the MSST will probably be around for another 100 years (somehow) too.

What happens to BM after this transitionary period is another question - maybe it'll be snapped up by GEC just like every other logisitics company. Maybe it'll become a museum that shows off space-tech for school trips. Maybe it'll just fade to a sad sorry death like the 100s of businesses doing so every week.

This is all to say: whilst the company itself is dead; their ambition, their ability to act on it, and the actual reality of being in space will keep them memorialised for centuries. Furthermore, with the way things are headed big-company wise? You just don't see the kind of sweat Breton Motors put into their craft that often anymore.