This vehicle was originally designed by Alexandra Jenkins, an enterprising merchant captain who was intrigued by the economic potential of a small modular starship, but was dismayed by the inefficiencies she perceived in LSP's MSL series. She noted that the space saved by unstreamlined MSL hulls was more than offset by the onboard cutter required for surface interface operations, and that time for module attachment/detachment operations was more than doubled because they had to be performed both on the ground and in orbit. "Most tramp merchants," Captain Jenkins reasoned, "service backwater or frontier worlds and, unless there's a highport where you can park your ship, delivering the goods requires splitting the crew." She also was concerned about totally relying on skimmer modules for even minimum jump fuel; it made no sense to her to waste an expensive modular coupling on a payload she couldn't make a direct profit on. ("If it can't jump at least one parsec by itself, why are we calling it a starship?") Finally, after surveying the types of modules that would most likely be shipped, she decided that traditional couplings were significantly over-engineered for the loaded mass of most commercial payloads.

Believing that these "problems" were caused by Ling's focus on potential military customers, the captain set out to create a purely commercial vessel that she hoped would become the Empress Marava of modular shipping, and approached Kelso Starworks (creators of the inexpensive KS Moducraft [p.T:MC10]) with her ideas. Kelso eagerly accepted the challenge, hoping that a new (and successful) project would distract the public from their ongoing Moducraft design problems. They made surprisingly few changes to Jenkins's original concept, replacing a stateroom with a bunkroom to house temporary service crew for the modules without straining the vessel's life support and converting the standard utility to a combo gravitics system to drastically reduce liftoff times. In a controversial move, jump and manuever drives were designed to share the same power slices; this means that the manuever drive must be shut down when the jump drive's capacitors are charging. The 22 dtons of onboard fuel is sufficient to carry a fully loaded vessel one parsec, while replacing a payload module with a loaded fuel skimmer module allows full utilization of the J-2 drive. In extreme circumstances this ship can be made capable of Jump 4 by installing demountable tanks in the 8 dton cargo hold and only carrying a single loaded fuel skimmer module; this will however leave the ship off balance and difficult to manuever.

Officially designated the KS Moduship Mk. I, the Anyanka class (named after an obscure fictional character from an ancient Solomani vid series who was much admired by Captain Jenkins for her plain spoken mercenary nature and attitude towards vengeance), did in fact meet its goals, but sales suffered slightly due to the company's already tarnished reputation and the limited load capacity of its four 30-dton intrinsic couplings (150 stons each). Still, enough sold in the Spinward Marches for the venture to be considered a qualified success, and the design was licenced to several smaller shipyards that produce one or two new units each year. For her services as primary designer and test pilot, Captain Jenkins was awarded permanent use of the prototype vehicle, which she renamed "The Magic Box" after a particularly lucrative run.

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