This is a piss-poor sketch, supposedly done by the crew of a civilian ship that spotted this right before the ship in question translated out. In reality, I just drew it real quick.

Basically, the Bha'ri are an alien race that do not much care for non-planetary systems - or rather, systems with worlds that cannot be Bha'riformed to be habitable.

As these systems are not too common, the Bha'ri employ fleets of resource miners for out of system resource stripping. This ship design has two large cargo bays for storing partially-refined metals, that detach from the main control ship and have four smaller mining ships each. The control vessel moves the cargo pods around to each location. Closer in to the home stars, these guys never leave the system they're assigned to - they instead dump their cargo to a central warehouse, which is then loaded onto a massive superfreighter.

Farther out, these guys travel back and forth to the nearest depot - and farther still, civilian operated designs (such as the one specifically pictured here) will operate in competition or on contract with the government corporation.

Out system mining is usually seen as a punishment, and those who volunteer for it are considered to be a little on the crazy side - hence why the Bha'Ri Corporate State allows competition in this area; it gets crazy people away from the home stars.