Mantis-12

Mantis-12 Is the space shuttle that takes you inbetween missions as well as planets, its classified as a military shuttle and according to most material it is comparable in size with a shack/helicopter.

Appearances
The shuttle first appears on the first mission, Onslaught, the shuttle being the map itself although this is the only time it is ever this big, so we can reasonably assume that this was only for gameplay on this one mission. Here, the ship appears to be more of a cargo ship with boxes, a cargo bay fits in the middle, and a passenger area up front although there appears to be holograms acting as screens for information, but there is no pilot seat. This area is the emergency forward jumpseats.

 The next appearance of Mantis-12 is in the following mission, vaccine. Here in the intro we get a better outer view of the ship, which appears to be totally different. The wings and two rear engines are missing as well as the entire design of the shuttle being different, most notably the nose of the ship. Later in the mission, apparently the same ship picks you up but it looks more like its original appearance on onslaught, having two rear engines, wings, and an egg like shape but keeps the same size of the ship in the introcutscene. The ship in the introcutscene could be a different ship, acting as a mother ship to the shuttle that picks us up in-game, but nowhere do we see it have any docking ports and nowhere in text is it referenced to act like that.

 The final appearance of Mantis-12 is in the mission Last stand. Here, you only see it in the loading screen and the intro cutscene although don't confuse this with the ship a survivor speaks about late into the mission as that ship is to pick you and all of the survivors. You were only deployed from Mantis-12 to defend the survivors until a bigger ship arrived.

Similar Shuttles
A similar shuttle can be found on the first part of the map in Vaccine and a crashed shuttle identical to Mantis-12 can be found on the Contract map, Crash site. You should have no trouble finding it, as it is the center point of the map and the map's loading screen. The ship on vaccine appears to be a larger more atmospheric type ship than Mantis-12                                                          but still appears to be a military ship like Mantis-12.

The only other images where we see a ship similar to Mantis-12 are from promotional images from Ninja Kiwi themselves. One shows two much bigger ships behind a space station similar to Kurios Spaceport with three shuttles flying near it. In this image, the shuttles appear to be the model from Vaccine's end game but with the blue glow of the ship in its intro. The other, final image, is from the hidden planet Sainick, were a shuttle has crashed in front of a destroyed Ronson research building. It looks identical to Mantis-12 because its the same asset that is used in Crash Site's introcustcene.

Trivia

 * Mantis-12 is the callsign that the Pilot uses in the mission Onslaught.
 * Mantis-12 might have two engine settings, jets for atmosphere, and ion engines (considering the blue glow of the engines) for the vacuum of space since it flies in both.