Ulsop Robotics

Overview
Ulsop Robotics was one of the top ten major corporations of the Star League and one of the League's foremost producers of advanced Robots. With its headquarters located in Grey Valley City, Zebebelgenubi, the company was created in 2387 when it broke away from its parent corporation, with regional offices on Terra, Murchison and Tharkad.

Ulsop first broke into the business producing assembly-line robots, quality machines which could last for decades without maintenance. This allowed their expansion into other areas of robotics, first with the unsuccessful test flight of the Bright Star Automated Scout JumpShip in 2545, then with the successful creation of the Guardian line of security guard robots. Efforts at creating combat robots proved dismal, in part because trained soldiers could outperform them in battle.

It was Ulsop Robotics, in one of their greatest achievements, which designed the artificial intelligence used to control the ground-based weapons of the Terran Hegemony Space Defense System. Stefan Amaris knew that retribution from General Aleksandr Kerensky for his coup was inevitable, and that the defense of his empire depended upon the Space Defense System developed by the SLDF. Amaris had made acquriing control of system SDS networks a priority during Operation APOTHEOSIS but the Rim Worlds Republic forces had only managed to secure control over six networks across the entire of the Hegemony.

Amaris' forces learned that the key developer of the SDS system was Ulsop Robotics of Zebebelgenubi, and in response Amaris made the training of loyal Republican SDS operators a priority. An intense three-year period of training activity promptly began on Zebebelgenubi, with technicians and researchers from Ulsop Robotics impressed into training several thousand Amaris' loyalist in SDS network operations. Partisans from the resistance attempted to disrupt the training, inviting harsh responses from Colonel Vargo Burkenya, the local Republican commander on the ground; after a successful resistance operation resulted in a fire at a training complex that injured more than a hundred Republican trainees and killed forty more, Burkenya responded by executing three hundred Ulsop Robotics personnel. This effectively ended the training of new operators by Ulsop Robotics staff, but Burkenya continued executing researchers and technicians at a rate of five for every Republican killed by the resistance up until he and his command staff were killed by partisan snipers two years later. By this point the Republicans had already trained enough operators and trainers that they needed no further external assistance.

Despite the months of training given by the Ulsop Robotics personnel to the first group of operators it still took more than two years for the Republicans to begin bringing SDS networks back online, particularly the most advanced of the systems, the Reagan SDS network in the Terra system.

Unfortunately, the company would not survive the collapse of the Star League and subsequent Succession Wars. What few scraps of technology which did survive fell into the hands of the Lyran Commonwealth.

Leadership
Ulsop Robotics was not ruled by one family; instead an Chief Executive Officer was elected to head the corporation.