The Rosers family had started in industry early in the Empire's reign. At first, they offered cleaning, waxing, and polishing services for small and medium-sized transport ships. It took several generations and nearly a century of hard work for them to grow from a tiny ship-cleaning workshop into a repair shop, and then into a small contract manufacturer of atmospheric aircraft. When Marshal Li's independence movement began, they had thrown everything they had into supporting it, willing to sacrifice their family fortune for the cause. Naturally, they had become founding heroes of the Commonwealth.
So the new Commonwealth government handed them Newport Shipyard, seized from the Empire. They renamed it Rosers Newport and established RN Shipyard.
The shipyard was, of course, nowhere near the size of the Mars Shipyards, which had been reduced to ashes, but it was still considered quite high-quality by galactic standards. It was especially good at building small and medium-sized high-speed liners, as well as destroyers... Well, they still couldn't build large ships or warships, which was exactly why they were doing just fine. Even after the Friends of the Republic Party came to power and accepted some investment from the Alliance, the interstellar conglomerates had never considered taking control of the shipyard.
The winged ship designed by their Big-Tech Buddy Number One, the big, pudgy engineer Comrade Anson French, was now under construction at RN Shipyard.
Going by the schedule, it should be ready to launch any day now. Naturally, it was being built to compete in next year's liner race, to be held in the Alliance.
The winged components had already proved their capabilities on fighter craft. The Thirteenth Fleet had only been equipped with a single squadron of specially made White Devil fighters, but they had already achieved dazzling feats of arms. Congress