The Tardigrade is an agile starship of Neptunian design currently in service of Salamander Search & Rescue, one of the emergency service teams dispatched from Titan Garden. The primary role of the Tardigrade is to quickly respond to deep space distress calls, locate and recover starfarers before emergency services like Red Raven's Jackrabbit II arrive. Unlike many other mid-sized starships the interior of the Tardigrade is built for comfort, with spacious guest accommodations, allowing distressed starfarers a gentle place to unwind on their return trip from the dangers of space. In lieu of a large cargo capacity the Tardigrade sports a clean and well-stocked on-board medical bay, allowing the Salamander team to administer care immediately on site and stabilize a harrowing situation.
In order to arrive quickly at the scene of an emergency call the Tardigrade comes equipped with a bank of seven engines- four small, two mid-size and one large central thruster, giving it a high top speed once it has a course set. On each side of its main body are a set of wide balconies, allowing for easy delivery of injured starfarers into the ship's central cabin area. A retractable top fin allows the Tardigrade to maintain stability while traversing thick planetary atmospheres, and a buoyant design allows for safe landing in liquid environments. A bank of front-mounted floodlights allows Salamander Search & Rescue to easily illuminate the site of an emergency, and a dorsal tether line enables crew to attach a lifeline to themselves if they need to navigate labyrinthine ship hulls and find their way out easily without drifting off into space.
Like many ships the Tardigrade's bridge is separated into a main top deck- its domed window giving crew excellent view of an emergency site- and a separate gunnery deck below it. From the gunnery deck crew can operate a ball-turret precision laser cutter intended to cut away bulkhead or other dangerous obstructions, or use a pair of pneumatic cannons to safely knock down or break up hard surfaces without the use of heated energy; these pneumatic cannons fire dense gobs of concentrated gases to allow a firm impact without risking the ignition of flammable hazards. An array of forcefield generators ensure debris stays safely away from the Tardigrade's hull and doesn't disrupt the recovering crew inside.
The most novel feature of the Tardigrade's design is its retractable wings. Beneath its hemicylindrical hull are a set of four foot-like wings which can be arranged in a number of configurations to allow the ship to adapt to a variety of emergency situations. When fully retracted the Tardigrade can make easy aquatic landings. The back wings can be extended fully to the sides with the front wings retracted to give the Tardigrade better control in atmosphere. All four wings can be fully extended on an angle below the Tardigrade to provide a stable landing on uneven terrain. Each wing has an articulated magnetic foot at the end of it, which allows the Tardigrade to arrive at space stations or large starships and attach directly to the side of their hull, enabling the use of a bottom-side connecting bridge to link straight from the site of an emergency to the ship's medical facilities.
The Salamander Search & Rescue crew have special clearance to dock inside Titan Garden's Dockyard ring, where radio dispatchers like Carol will coordinate to arrange a pickup by ambulance services. Flying vehicles are prohibited in Titan's central city area except for emergency services like those ferrying starfarers from Salamander's dock to Titan General Hospital. The Salamander crew enjoy a good reputation around the Dockyards and the B-District, as they want to do good by their fellow starfarers, and the Tardigrade helps them ensure as many people as possible can survive the cold, irradiated depths of space.