The Agios was the first of the LuxLiner hulls laid down by AetherLux, and the first one christened. For the first decade of its operations, things went swimmingly. The ship was booked solid every single trip and had a consistently full three year waiting list.
In 2561, the Agios was making a fairly routine run from Calysto to Gaelia. As was standard operating procedure for the Entranza LuxLiners, the Agios was scheduled to make four emergences from subspace at various, semi-random spots along its route. On the third one, they surfaced in a recently-dead system.
Within the first minute of their time in the system, ship's sensors registered hundreds of micro-meteor impacts. More than half of them resulted in hull breaches and injuries, some fatal, amongst the passengers and crew. This alone would have been disaster enough, but the micro-meteors also impacted two critical systems.
The first one was the sensor relays. This resulted first in the sensors sending nonsense readings and quickly, the entire relay system failed outright. The designer of the relay system made the inexplicable decision to have the "no data" message pass an "all systems nominal" message to the bridge. By the second minute in-system, as far as the bridge crew was concerned, the subspace drive systems were green across the board for an immediate jump out of the system.
However, the gravity drives were not in the green. The micro-meteor cloud had also done significant damage to the grav vanes and by all rights, the sensors should have been showing critical damage.
The captain of the Agios, operating on the bad information coming from the sensor system, ordered an immediate subspace dive to get the ship and her passengers out of harm's way. As soon as the grav vanes were powered, they produced wild and random gravity sheers that ripped the ship apart. By the time search and rescue found them, all hands were lost.
This has gone down as one of the worst civilian space travel disasters on record and has become a modern day Titanic in the public consciousness. Entranza Holidays, Limited was shuttered in the years after the accident with the Agios' sister ships sold off. As a result of the Agios, all sensor systems were given required software updates that very clearly spell out when a sensor, node, or relay is offline. The dead system was listed on charts as a high-level HazNav and a League science vessel was dispatched to study the post-supernova system.
From Matt:
I set myself the goal of designing an RFI version of the Errant Venture from the old Star Wars EU. I wanted to very clearly distance ours from theirs, so I based it on a civilian ship instead of a military one. This meant that I needed some good reason why a ship as big as I was planning would have been sold off. There were plenty of routes I could have gone, but a good disaster always adds some depth to a world, so I went this route. As an added bonus, we have our own version of the Titanic to live in the collective pop-culture of the RFI populace.