Perhaps one of the best cargo transports designed for military space lift was the Cargomaster. Federated-Boeing Interstellar-a former Terran Hegemony/Star League company now of the Federated Suns-designed a new class of DropShip to replace the aged yet still venerable Mule-class DropShip. Larger and fitted with more powerful engines, the Cargomaster could carry more cargo in one of its four unique cargo bays than the Mule could in a single ship. These specially designed cargo bays were all interconnected, with the ability to be isolated in the event of an emergency such as a fire, or catastrophic failure of any one of the bays caused by hull breech or explosions.
       What really made the Cargomaster's bays so unique, however, is that they were fully automated and self loading. Fully computerized, this self loading system was a cargo team's dream. It reduced the manpower normally assigned to the bay s to none. The crew could handle the loading without taking on extra members just for working the cargo bays. Star League accepted the design and asked them to produce a civilian model called the Cargoking.
         Pre-production began on the Cargomaster in 2781, when Federated-Boeing started to build their newest facilities around Galax. The Galax Megaplex was completed in December of 2786 after the fall of the Star League and the exodus of the Star League Defense Force. The Port Naval Yards were authorized to begin production of the Cargomaster line, and the first Cargomaster rolled off the assembly line in 2790, after major delays in construction the results of   the First Succession War. The ship completed its test trials in good order and passed final inspection.
       At the time of the design's original commission, the presence of the Star League ensured that the Inner Sphere would remain stable. Resources were high. The cost of such a ship, while expensive, was nothing to be concerned with. By the time the first Cargomaster rolled off the production lines, however, the universe was a very different place than the one in which it had been conceived. An expensive and prolonged war was costing tremendous amounts of both money and material, including DropShips. Deemed a waste of resources, the technologies to manufacture the Cargomaster were suddenly too prohibitive to continue. Some histories suggest that at this time the Cargomaster and the Cargoking were cancelled.
         Centuries of construction by the Federated Suns though show these reports to be wrong. They were not entirely incorrect though. The original Cargomaster design never was constructed past the prototype. The war had made all advanced technologies far to valuable to place on a mere cargo vessel, even if it was for military use, and the Cargomaster's advanced weapons grid was reduced to more inexpensive alternatives. This cheaper version of the DropShip has been in constant production ever since, through the Succession Wars, the Jihad, and all the smaller brush wars since. It is in fact becoming a favored transport in the modern era, sold to anyone wishing to purchase them to help fund the reconstruction of the shattered Federated Suns economy.