Jackal is a Steelframe formerly owned by the Venture Out corporation, a now-defunct autonomous technologies company based out of Terra. A mid-size frame, Jackal is equipped with sturdy exterior paneling and rugged articulation covers, allowing it to traverse hazardous areas scattered with hard debris without worry of damage to its most vulnerable components. Large shoulder-mounted supplemental power cells allow Jackal to have a long operational uptime, and a pair of top-mounted brackets allows Jackal to attach itself to special deployment gliders, saving its fuel reserves as it transports from home base to a job site. An array of directional boosters allow Jackal to move quickly and nimbly in and out of atmosphere, working just as well in space as it does on the ground. Floodlights mounted to the central torso housing project light in front of the Frame, and a set of locking clamps on each forearm allows a pilot to secure delicate hand articulation around the grip of a Frame-sized tool, preventing it from dropping should mechanical problems cause its grip to fail. These locks can be manually disengaged by the pilot; it's recommended to give them a good jolt with whatever is in your Frame's other hand.
For as cool and popular as the idea of a big robot is to starfarers from every port of call, it's pretty rare to find one operating in the Sol system. The way former pilot and present-day corporate consultant Yu Ming describes it to her clients, Steelframes are complicated machines that require both an extreme amount of technical proficiency and an invasive neural implant with a 50% rejection rate to operate, so if you're looking for someone to operate your big robot, good Steelframe pilots are few and far between. Standard heavy industrial equipment can often perform the same job as a Steelframe with less training and no neural implant required, provided there's no pressing limit on time, but if a job site is remote and difficult to access, or if it requires a specific intersection of speed and precision, then nothing else compares to the utility of piloting a big metal guy; that just happens to be a very specific and expensive niche. Genuine Frame pilots are easy to spot by the pair of metal contact points on their forehead allowing them to wire into their Steelframe's cockpit, always located in a Frame's upper torso. In order to operate a Steelframe without it tipping over, a complex central computer harmonizes the Frame's gyrostabilizers by using the pilot's own subconscious sense of balance in their own organic brain- it's the reason a dangerous neural implant is required, and one of the biggest deterrent costs to more widespread Steelframe adoption. Without this neural implant, there's simply too many microadjustments to be made to keep a huge bipedal machine upright, and an unwired pilot would just as soon trip and fall on their face.
Despite being piloted by former Star Navy, Jackal served in the civilian construction of the MoonGate project, a dual-purpose Venture Out corporate investment on the dark side of Terran's moon, Luna. Moongate was a planned proof-of-concept for self-contained habitat developments in the remote or hostile worlds of Sol that don't innately support life, like a mass-produced and smaller-scaled parallel to the Titan Garden project. Moongate's construction was also intended to showcase Venture Out's line of autonomous construction drones; unmanned non-sentient machines which could be deployed to worlds that can't sustain organic life and build habitable structures to serve as a ready foothold for long-term residency or industrial operations. Venture Out believed they could improve on the mistakes of the original CX-units which laid the foundation of Titan Garden, developing a set-and-forget solution to remote habitat deployment, but to sell the technology it needed the MoonGate project to be a resounding success. Jackal and the rest of the Sparrows' Steelframe pilot crew assisted in construction to ensure that if there were faults in the autonomous construction drones, they were not seen or noteworthy- one of their secret reasons for building MoonGate on the dark side of Luna. Jackal and the others would use a wide array of Frame-sized handheld equipment to survey terrain for an ideal building site, identify mineral composition and integrity of subsurface soil, break up stubborn rock that could create jams in the autonomous excavation drones and otherwise provide on-site field repair to the self-directed machines. They were there to ensure the autonomy of Venture Out's technology was the headline and not its failure; they served in this role admirably, delivering the project on time and under budget; but in the year to follow the project's completion, the rupture of a critical installed component- a Venture Out self-maintaining fuel regulation system- resulted in a sudden and catastrophic loss of life for many people who had taken up residence in the completed MoonGate colony. Though the pilots were themselves blameless, Venture Out disbanded its Steelframe operations and collapsed as an interplanetary megacorp not long after.
To this day the remains of the MoonGate colony are known to be one of the most haunted places in the Sol system. A high concentration of spectral energy can be found there- a lot of people with big dreams put a lot of trust into the MoonGate, and a lot of those people paid for that trust with their lives. There are many very angry ghosts still roaming the wrecked halls of the MoonGate ruins, but what also resides there, in a quiet hangar in the colony's northwest dome, are the Sparrows' old Steelframes, intact but mothballed indefinitely. For decades no salvage company would touch the MoonGate ruins for fear of disrupting the sheer volume of ghosts that haunt it, until Bryce and his Timberwolves got the bright idea to survey the site for a potential salvage operation. Their initial survey reported the location and condition of the Sparrows' old Steelframes- a rare and priceless bit of salvage- and when word got out that Timberwolf Reclamation & Demolition were planning to brave the ruins of the MoonGate, something flipped in Red Raven's co-owner and ace pilot, Haley. Suddenly, Red Raven had to beat Timberwolf to the punch. They just had to.
There were no Androids among the Sparrows, not even a Delta droid, but something inside Haley Redraven's goofy metal noodle knew she was connected to those Frames, she couldn't let them be salvaged by anyone else. The very idea of Alan Timberwolf taking possession of Jackal drove her up the wall in a way she couldn't explain to anyone, it simply couldn't be allowed to happen. She would pitch an idea to her companion, Amy: the acquisition of a Steelframe could be a huge help to Red Raven in large salvage operation, and while she's not a Frame pilot herself, she would insist, she could probably operate the Frame after Amy converted its neural implant bridge to work over a standard Delta Astronav wireless antenna array. Haley thought the idea of tinkering with big, complicated machinery would be enough to sell Amy on the job, but the truth was the idea of using Bryce's own survey data and beating him to such a grand prize was enough to get her onboard. Amy had long had her questions about Haley's origins, going all the way back to the day she rescued her from the wreck of the Reef Shark, but out of respect for her privacy and autonomy she locked those files away and never spoke a word about them. Haley really wanted to get her hands on this specific Steelframe, though. That was interesting.
It was settled. Red Raven would load up the Jackrabbit II; brave the haunted, harrowing wreck of the MoonGate and claim salvage rights to a rare and valuable Steelframe before Bryce and his crew could get there first.