The big boy of the Altair crew, Kaliq is a Callistan technician specializing in mechanical restoration of antiques. Affable and well-grounded, Kaliq is easy to get along with and doesn't hold grudges. "It just ain't worth the troubles, brother". Kaliq smokes filtered aromatics, a style of Jovian cigarette that releases a more pleasant, incense-like scent than Terran brands- he actually got Amy to switch over to aromatics from her previous brand, to the relief of the rest of the Red Raven crew. Among his other achievements Kaliq is also the inventor of the roll-up qorabi, an adaptation of the Callistan loincloth that doesn't get caught up in machines so easily, which is extra-handy when he and Roflfox are clunking around inside a piece of old tech together. The design hasn't fully caught on yet but he's sold a few here and there. He also helped pioneer the design space for Callistan cybernetic prosthetics, did you know? He's just an all-around swell guy, really.
Kaliq's role as Altair Electronics' antique restoration expert is a bit like being an old-fashioned detective, hunting for clues not for what's wrong, but how to properly tune up a repair job. Old stuff doesn't always have surviving service manuals and, in many corners of the Sol system, "stuff" doesn't exclusively come from corporate manufacturers. Plenty of tech is bespoke, handmade by people out of their own garages or workshops in places the tendrils of interplanetary corporatism hasn't yet reached, and in order to work right it's gotta be tuned a certain way, which is difficult for a repair shop to figure out fifty or a hundred years later- difficult, but not impossible. Guys like Kaliq know how to read the scuffs, the scratches, the patterns of wear on the innards of a mechanical object and divine how it was built, how it was set and how it was tuned previously. "You gotta read what's there. It's telling you how to fix it, you just gotta listen right". Certain tools leave certain kinds of marks, and angles, depth and length of scratches can clue you in to how those tools were used for you to replicate yourself, with wear mark locations being a strong indicator of how timing instruments are calibrated. It's like being a doctor for clockwork, sorta. However you want to look at it, if you bring your old beloved bits of weird tech from your homeworld in to Altair Electronics, Kaliq's the guy who'll get it ticking again. Hell yeah!
One of the notable features about Kaliq is his prosthetic arm- he lost the original to a three-story tall Callistan megapredator, and while he is lucky to have kept the rest of himself intact he's not content to let a big creature rob him of his quills. Working together with Dr. Kurt, Kaliq helped in the development of Sleek-style cybernetic gadgetry designed to accommodate the needs of Callistans in restoring their quill-fanning abilities. By adapting starship forcefield technology, a set of overlapping panels can be built onto Sleek-style cybernetics that allow them to project Quillwaves, producing sharp spikes of energy from an array of nodes. These quillwaves can be turned on and off at will, allowing a Callistan to carry on normally and only spike up when they feel like they need to, which is a feature that is important to folks like Kaliq. In particular the overlapping array of panels at the shoulder to allow a full range of motion without quillwave projectors interfering in prosthetic articulation. These panels are built to be thin and attach to the exterior of a cybernetic piece, allowing the inner components to work unobstructed and offer a Callistan the degree of torque and strength they're accustomed to. Inner Belt species tend to be the major adopters of cybernetic technology, but by accommodating the natural features of his own people Kaliq has helped bring this technology more readily to the people of Callisto. He don't need no credit neither, he's just happy to help out.
While the rest of the Altair team have their own illicit side-projects they work after-hours, a great guy like Kaliq wouldn't be caught engaging in that kind of criminal activity, would he? Well, of course he would! It's a noble endeavor to help those in need and it wasn't his fault certain forms of help are outlawed, of course he's gonna get up to some mischief. The major project Kaliq works on is jailbreaking industrial farm equipment- corporations like United Robotics or Quasar Galactic who have a strong hand in major industries will often build their tech in a way where the owner of that tech is prevented or prohibited from attempting to fix or alter that hardware themselves, instead needing to bring in a URC maintenance technician to solve a solvable problem for them. Kaliq hates that kind of thing, and believes it's everyone's right to repair their own technology. So what Kaliq likes to do is work with Roflfox to pull up-to-date industrial machine schematics off the holonet and prepare care packages of pre-assembled modules and language-free diagrams- built with simple tools in mind- that farmers and other industrial machine operators on far-flung moons can use to bypass tamper-prevention systems and just fix their equipment themselves. You can search a model number for your piece of tech and one of Kaliq's care packages will pop up, you can order one at-cost to ship to your world, you can see clearly how it works and, importantly, you can share the jailbreak methods with your neighbors. You depend on that equipment, it's yours, you should be able to keep it running without being dependent on the availability of URC or any other corporate repair agents as well.
Like the rest of his work, Kaliq's care packages are unnamed and uncredited. No need to thank him, he's just happy to help you out. Whatever your problem? Kaliq's got you. That's the way to be.