Tonnage is the only budget

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Building a ship, step by step.

Designing a ship is a methodical process, and it runs in a fixed order because most steps take a number from an earlier one. You choose a hull, then everything else is fitted inside the tonnage that hull gives you — drives, fuel, bridge, computer, crew quarters, weapons — and whatever tonnage is left at the end becomes cargo space.

Two steps in that list are optional in a way that changes what the ship is rather than how well it does something. A hull with no jump drive is not a starship and can never leave its system under its own power; a hull with no manoeuvre drive cannot move about a system at all, which is why the checklist marks it optional and then recommends it in the same breath.

Before you design anything, consider not designing it. An interstellar economy runs on standardised and modular components: parts are built on different worlds where the resources are, then assembled elsewhere, and a shipyard building to a common design passes that saving on as a 10% discount on the vessel. The referee decides which designs count as standard, and the catalogue of common vessels is the obvious set.

A new and unique design cannot take advantage of any of that. It has to be drawn up by a naval architect working from specifications you provide, the plans take a month to create, and they cost approximately 1% of the final cost of the vessel — before a single ton of hull is cut. That fee is on top of the price the design sequence produces, and it is the real cost of wanting something nobody builds.

Where a ship can be built at all is a starport question. Any class A starport has a shipyard that can build any kind of ship, a starship with jump drives included. Any class B starport can build small craft and ships that do not have jump drives — so a jump-capable hull is a class A job and nothing less.

One design habit is worth knowing before you start allocating tonnage. Ship systems take damage for all sorts of reasons and become disabled or destroyed as it accumulates, so some designers fit multiple copies of a vital component. A redundant system stays inactive until the original is disabled, and ship weaponry is the exception — redundant weapons are not held in reserve.

Redundancy is not armour for the system. Once every redundant copy has been disabled, further damage begins to destroy them, and it destroys the primary system first. So a second power plant buys you the time between the first hit and the last one, and the tonnage and money it costs come out of the same budget as everything else.

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Tonnage, and what it measures.

Every hull and every component in this chapter is measured in displacement tons, and a displacement ton is a VOLUME rather than a mass. One is the volume of space displaced by one metric ton of hydrogen — so when a design says a jump drive is 20 tons, it means the drive fills the room that much hydrogen would.

One displacement ton, in cubic metres

13.5 m³, rounded to 14 m³ for ease of calculation

That rounding is the source’s own and is what every tonnage in the chapter is built on. Nothing in the design sequence ever asks what a ship weighs — tonnage is the only budget in the whole procedure, and a component is expensive in two independent currencies: the credits it costs and the tons it takes away from something else.

There is a drawing convention that goes with it. When you draw floor plans or deck maps, each square measuring 1.5 metres by 1.5 metres, to a height of 3 metres up from the floor, represents half a ton. So a four-ton stateroom is eight of those squares, which is what makes a deck plan and a tonnage budget the same document.

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The hull itself, its cost and its points.

The hull is the shell every other component is placed inside, and choosing it is the first decision in the sequence because it fixes your entire tonnage budget. The table below gives each hull size a code, a price and the time a yard takes to build it — and construction time is based on hull size and nothing else.

Price does not climb smoothly with tonnage, and the smallest hull is the cheapest per ton in the whole table. A 100-ton hull is MCr2; 200, 300 and 400 tons run at twice that rate per ton. At 500 tons the price jumps to MCr32 rather than the MCr20 that rate predicts, and from 800 tons upward it settles at MCr0.1 a ton and stays there to the top.

Build time is the other cost and it is paid in weeks. A 100-ton hull takes 36 weeks — most of a year — and a 5,000-ton hull takes 428, which is over eight years. That is before the discount question, because the discount is on money and never on time.

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Streamlined, standard and what each allows.

A ship may have any of three configurations, and the choice decides whether the hull can enter an atmosphere at all as well as what it costs. Standard is a wedge, cone, sphere or cylinder; streamlined is a wing, disc or other lifting body that enters atmosphere easily; distributed is made up of several sections and cannot enter an atmosphere or hold its shape under gravity.

A standard hull may still enter atmosphere, but it is very ungainly and ponderous and is capable only of a controlled glide to the surface. Getting it back into space requires an elaborate launch setup and considerable expense. It may have scoops fitted for gathering fuel from a gas giant, but the process is much more difficult and less efficient — which is why larger ships of this type often carry a specialised sub-craft to do the actual skimming.

Streamlining increases the cost of the hull by 10% and includes fuel scoops, which allow skimming unrefined fuel from gas giants or gathering water from open lakes and oceans. It may NOT be retrofitted: it has to be included at the time of construction, so a hull that was not built streamlined never becomes streamlined.

A distributed hull reduces its cost by 10% and is the cheapest of the three, for good reason. It is completely non-aerodynamic, and if it enters an atmosphere or strong gravity it will fall to the surface of the planet. It cannot mount fuel scoops at all, so free fuel from a gas giant is closed to it however it is equipped.

The cost modifier multiplies the hull price, so the three configurations are 90%, 100% and 110% of the figure the hull table prints. On a 200-ton hull at MCr8 that is MCr7.2, MCr8 and MCr8.8 — a spread of MCr1.6 that decides whether the ship can land, and whether it can ever refuel for free.

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Plating a hull, and what it costs in tonnage.

Armour is added in 5% increments of the ship’s tonnage, so every layer of it costs you a twentieth of the hull in space you cannot use for anything else. An armoured ship also decreases radiation exposure from space phenomena by 400 rads.

The radiation reduction does not apply to meson attacks or to nuclear missiles. Meson weapons only become harmful after passing through the hull, and a nuclear missile breaches the hull to deliver its radiation hit — both bypass the plating rather than being stopped by it, so armour is no defence against either one’s radiation.

Armour can be taken more than once. A heavily armoured warship might take Bonded Superdense twice, which takes up 10% of the hull’s volume and costs 100% of the base cost of the hull — but gives 12 points of armour, because each 5% increment of that type is worth 6.

Three options can be added on top of whatever plating you fitted, and two of them can only be added once ever. Reflec coating raises the ship’s armour against lasers by 3, at TL 10 and MCr0.1 per ton of hull. Stealth coating absorbs radar and lidar beams and disguises heat emissions, giving DM−4 on any Comms roll to detect or lock onto the ship, at TL 11 and MCr0.1 per ton. Self-sealing is the cheap one at MCr0.01 per ton and TL 9: the hull automatically repairs minor breaches such as micrometeoroid impacts, and prevents hull hits from leading to explosive decompression.

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The points beneath the hull.

Every hull carries two damage tracks, and the design sequence is where both numbers come from. Initial damage is applied to the Hull; once the Hull is breached, further damage goes to the Structure. When all Structure Points have been lost, the ship has been smashed to pieces.

Hull Points

1 per 50 tons of displacement, rounded down

Structure Points

1 per 50 tons of displacement, rounded up

The two rounding directions are opposite on purpose, and they only differ on a hull whose tonnage is not a multiple of 50. On every hull in the capital-ship table the two are equal — a 100-ton hull is 2 and 2, a 1,000-ton hull is 20 and 20 — because every row in that table divides by 50 exactly.

Where the two diverge is below the smallest capital hull. A 10-ton craft is a fifth of a point either way, which rounds down to 0 Hull and up to 1 Structure — so the smallest craft in the game have no hull track at all and are destroyed by the first damage that gets through their armour.

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Dividing a large hull.

Most vessels are divided into two primary sections, and the division is about what a compartment holds rather than about tonnage. The engineering section contains the drives and power plant necessary for proper operation and movement; the main compartment contains everything else.

The split matters when you are working out crew, because the engineer requirement is priced against the drives and power plant rather than against the whole ship. It also matters when you are thinking about damage: the engineering section is where the components that make the ship move all sit together.

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Manoeuvre, jump and power plant.

A non-starship must have a manoeuvre drive and a power plant. A starship must have a jump drive and a power plant; a manoeuvre drive may also be installed, but is not required. Each drive is chosen as a letter code, and the code fixes both its tonnage and its price.

What a drive letter is WORTH depends entirely on the hull it is fitted to, which is why the two performance tables below are read by hull volume. The same drive that gives a 100-ton hull excellent performance gives a 1,000-ton hull almost none, because the drive is doing the same work against ten times the ship.

Read the number the table gives you according to which drive you fitted. For manoeuvre drives the potential is the Thrust number, which is the number of Gs of acceleration available. For jump drives the potential is the Jump number, or jump range in parsecs. The same cell therefore means two entirely different things depending on which drive you looked it up for.

One rule ties the three together and it is easy to miss: the power plant rating must be at least equal to either the manoeuvre drive or the jump drive rating, whichever is higher. So a jump drive N on a hull with a power plant J is not a legal design — the plant has to be raised to N, and that costs both tonnage and money you may have been planning to spend elsewhere.

An en dash in either performance table means that drive produces no useful rating in that hull at all. That is what caps performance from below as well as above: a 100-ton hull cannot use anything past drive C, because every larger drive prints a dash in its column rather than a bigger number.

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Tankage for jump and for power.

A design carries two entirely separate fuel budgets and you allocate tankage for both. One is the fuel a jump consumes in a single burst; the other is what the power plant consumes steadily, by the week, whether or not the ship ever jumps. This section is about the second one and about how much tankage you must set aside overall.

Power plant fuel, in tons per week

one-third of the power plant tonnage, rounded down to the nearest ton

Space-faring vessels require a minimum of two weeks’ worth of fuel for the power plant, so that weekly figure doubled is the least tankage any design may allocate to it. Deep space vessels may store four, six or even eight weeks of power plant fuel — the minimum is a floor, not a standard, and endurance is bought in tons.

The table is a convenience rather than a separate rule: it is the formula above already worked out for every drive code, with the minimum volume column being simply two weeks of the one beside it. Where you want a longer endurance, multiply the weekly column instead of reading the minimum — four weeks on a plant H is 32 tons, six weeks is 48.

Jump fuel is the other budget and it is priced by hull size and jump distance rather than by the power plant, so it does not appear in this table at all. Look it up in the travel rules, where what a jump consumes is set out with the rest of what a jump costs; here, it is simply more tankage you must find room for, on top of the weeks of power plant fuel you have chosen.

Budget them separately and add the two together. Total tankage is what the design must allocate, and running the tanks as one pooled figure is how a ship ends up unable to jump home because it spent the jump fuel keeping the lights on.

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The command space every hull needs.

Every hull needs a bridge, and its size varies with the size of the ship in four bands rather than continuously. The cost is charged by tonnage instead: MCr0.5 per 100 tons of ship, regardless of which band the bridge itself falls into.

Bridge cost

MCr0.5 per 100 tons of ship

Because the size is banded and the price is not, the bridge is proportionally most expensive on the smallest hulls. A 100-ton ship gives up a tenth of itself to the bridge and pays MCr0.5; a 200-ton ship gives up the same 10 tons — a twentieth — and pays MCr1. The tonnage cost per ship falls as the hull grows, right up to the band boundary where it jumps again.

The bridge is also where the standard electronics suite lives. A ship’s basic communications, sensor and emissions-control gear is included in the bridge and is neither charged nor allocated tonnage separately — which is why the electronics table prints "Included in bridge" against its first row rather than a price.

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The ship computer and its rating.

The ship computer is identified by its model number, and the table gives each model a tech level, a rating and a price. The rating is what matters in play: it is the budget the ship’s software is spent against, so choosing a model is choosing how many programs the ship can run at once and how demanding they may be.

Rating climbs in steady steps of 5 and price does not. Model 1 to Model 2 is Cr130,000 for five more rating; Model 2 to Model 3 is nearly MCr1.9 for the same five. From Model 3 upward each step roughly doubles or adds ten million, so the top of the table is bought by warships rather than by traders.

Two options can be fitted to a ship computer. Jump Control Specialization — written bis — increases the computer’s rating by 5 for the purposes of running Jump Control programs only, and increases its cost by 50%. Hardened Systems — written fib — hardens the computer and its connections against electromagnetic pulse weapons, making it immune to EMP, and also costs 50% more.

Both options can be applied to the same computer by doubling its cost. Note that this is +100% rather than the +50% and +50% you might expect to compound — the source states the combined figure directly, so two options are exactly twice the base price and not two-and-a-quarter times it.

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What the ship computer runs.

Ship computers run highly specialised software packages designed to support numerous functions — managing the jump drive, evading incoming fire, controlling the ship’s weapons and executing automatic repairs. Each package costs money and consumes rating, and it is the rating that limits how much of it a ship can run at once.

Some things come free with the machine. Ship computers automatically provide the means for basic control of the vessel, extensive library data on numerous topics, and a basic level of security at Security/0 — so a ship with no software purchased at all still flies, still answers questions and is still not wide open.

Four of the five programs scale, and scaling costs rating as well as money. Jump Control at 5 per jump number means a jump-3 drive needs rating 15 and costs MCr0.3; Fire Control at 5 per weapon means controlling three weapons needs rating 15 and MCr6, and it caps at five weapons however good the computer is. Auto-Repair is the expensive one at 10 rating and MCr5 for a single repair attempt per turn.

Two of them also gate on tech level in a way the rating does not capture. Fire Control raises the required TL by 1 for each additional weapon, so controlling two weapons is TL 10 and three is TL 11 whatever the computer’s model. Evade buys an additional DM−1 every two tech levels higher, reaching its maximum of DM−3 at TL 13 and going no further.

The jump course tape is the odd one out. It is not a general capability but a plot from one specific world to one specific destination system, priced at MCr0.001 per parsec — so it is cheap, single-use in scope, and useful only on the route it was bought for.

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Sensors and communications.

A ship comes with a basic communications, sensor and emissions-control electronics suite as part of its bridge, but more advanced systems can be installed. Each grade prints a Dice Modifier, and that DM applies to jamming and counter-jamming attempts.

Radar and lidar detect physical objects and can be run active or passive. Running active makes the ship easier to detect — +2 DM to Comms checks made against it — but tells you more about your surroundings, so it is a trade you make in the moment rather than a design decision.

The DM column is the one to read first. Standard gear is DM−4, which is a serious penalty, and the first upgrade halves it for Cr50,000 and one ton — the cheapest meaningful improvement in the whole design sequence. Reaching DM+0 costs MCr1 and two tons; the two grades beyond that buy a point apiece for MCr1 and then MCr2 more.

Jammers appear at Basic Military and not below, so a civilian hull cannot jam or counter-jam at all however well it can see. The densitometer arrives at Advanced and the neural activity sensor only at Very Advanced, which is why the top grade costs five tons where the one below it costs three.

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The posts a hull requires.

All vessels require a crew to operate and maintain the ship, and the table gives two answers for every post: a minimum and a full complement. Small independently-owned vessels tend to operate with a minimum of crew, while corporate and military vessels maintain a full complement.

Only four posts have a minimum at all: pilot, navigator, engineer and whoever is required by the weapons fitted. Everything else can be left empty on a small ship — no captain, no sensors operator, no medic — which is exactly the difference between a free trader crewed by four people and a naval vessel of the same tonnage crewed by dozens.

The navigator is the one post a design decision can remove: the minimum is one, optional with computer software. Two entries scale with what you fitted rather than with the hull — the engineer requirement counts one per 35 tons of drives and power plant, and the gunner requirements count one per turret weapon, one per bay weapon and one per screen device.

The gunnery lines are also where minimum and full complement come apart most sharply. Turret gunners are one per weapon either way; bay gunners double to two per weapon at full complement; screen operators quadruple to four per device. So a warship carrying screens is carrying four people per screen it may never switch on.

Crew is not a free line in the design. Every person aboard needs somewhere to sleep, which means staterooms, which means both tonnage and money — and once the ship is flying, the same crew is a monthly salary bill. The number you settle on here is what those two costs are calculated from.

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Staterooms, low berths and common areas.

Everyone aboard needs somewhere to be, and there are three ways to provide it. A stateroom is a cabin for a person who is awake; a low passage berth is a cryoberth for one who is not; barracks are for troops. Each is bought by the unit and each takes tonnage as well as credits.

Each stateroom is sufficient for one person. No stateroom can contain more than two persons — as it might for middle passengers — because more than that would strain the ship’s life support equipment. That cap is what makes double occupancy the ceiling rather than a starting point.

The stateroom’s tonnage and cost include the life support systems needed to keep the crew alive, so you are not buying air separately. That is why a stateroom is four tons for one person while a low berth is half a ton: the berth is holding a body at temperature, and the stateroom is holding a living one with everything that implies.

Emergency low berths are a different thing from low passage berths despite the similar name. They will not carry passengers and exist for survival, each holding four persons for one ton and Cr100,000 — so as a way of keeping people alive in an emergency they are dense, and as a way of selling passage they are useless.

Barracks take up 2 tons per marine at MCr0.1 per marine, and carry a restriction worth reading twice. They can only be used to accommodate troops intended for boarding or assault operations, and troops accommodated in barracks cannot be used to reduce the number of service crew embarked. Marines in barracks are passengers with rifles; they do not help fly the ship.

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Everything else a hull can carry.

Beyond the components every hull needs there is a list of fittings a design might want, and they are examples rather than a closed catalogue. Two of them change the travel economy outright: fuel scoops take free unrefined fuel from a gas giant, and a fuel processor refines it.

Fuel scoops and fuel processors are the pair that pays for itself. Scoops cost MCr1 and require no tonnage at all, and they are what lets an unstreamlined ship take free unrefined fuel off a gas giant; a streamlined hull already has them. Processors then turn that unrefined hydrogen into refined fuel at 20 tons a day per ton of equipment, for Cr50,000 a ton — so three tons of processor handles 60 tons a day.

Two components are priced against crew rather than against the hull. On military vessels the number of armories built into the design is based on crew size: one armory for either every 50 crew members or every 10 marines, to provide adequate storage for equipment, weapons and ammunition. Ships with command bridges and fighter squadrons need additional briefing rooms — capital ships must have one per ship section, and one for every 20 fighter or bomber crew.

Launch tubes are the most expensive fitting on the list by a wide margin, and the arithmetic is why. The tube is twenty-five times the tonnage of the largest craft it will deploy, at MCr0.5 per ton — so a tube for a 30-ton ship’s boat is 750 tons and MCr375. What it buys is speed: launching or recovering a craft by ordinary means takes 30 minutes each, and with a tube up to ten small craft go out per round.

The vault is the one component that is worth something after the ship is gone. It has four Hull and Structure points that only come into play when the ship housing it is destroyed, and it can hold up to 6 tons of cargo, staterooms or other internal components inside its 12 tons of space — so half the tonnage is armour and the other half is what survives.

The hangar table covers full-scale hangar space, which allows for repairs and maintenance of small craft when they are back on the ship, and includes spare parts and specialised testing and repair equipment for the stored craft. It does NOT include the cost of the vehicles or drones themselves — a hangar for a pinnace is 52 tons and MCr10.4, and the pinnace is extra.

Where a craft is not on the table, a custom hangar takes up tonnage equal to the tonnage of the vehicle to be stored plus 30%, and costs MCr0.2 per ton. That is the same 1.3 multiplier most of the listed rows use — a 10-ton vehicle gives 13 tons, which is exactly the ATV row. Do not read the Air/Raft row that way: it is 5 tons, which no plausible air/raft tonnage produces under this formula, and the row is published as printed rather than recomputed.

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Turrets, bays and spinal mounts.

A ship has one hardpoint per 100 tons of ship, and each weapon system takes up one hardpoint. That is the cap on how heavily a hull can be armed, and it is set by tonnage alone — so a small hull cannot simply be covered in guns.

Hardpoints

1 per 100 tons of ship

A weapon system may include multiple weapons — a triple turret contains three lasers, missile launchers, sandcasters or some combination of three — so a hardpoint is a mounting point rather than a single gun. That is how a 200-ton hull with two hardpoints ends up carrying six weapons.

One turret may be attached to each hardpoint. If a turret is installed then one ton of space must be allocated to fire control systems, which is a charge on the ship rather than on the turret — and it is why a warship’s entry always names its hardpoints and its fire control tonnage together.

Single, double and triple turrets hold one, two or three weapons and all three take one ton. Pop-Up is a quality applied to any type of turret rather than a turret in itself: the turret is concealed in a pod or recess on the hull and is detectable only when deployed, so a ship with all its weapons in pop-up turrets looks unarmed to a casual sensor scan. It takes two tons instead of one and adds MCr1.

Fixed mounting weapons cannot move, are limited to firing in one direction — normally straight ahead — and are found mainly on fighters. A fixed mounting costs half as much as a turret of the same type, so a single fixed mounting is MCr0.1, a double MCr0.25 and a triple MCr0.5, and it takes no tonnage at all.

No launcher includes ammunition in its purchase cost. Missiles, torpedoes and so forth must be purchased separately, and they take tonnage of their own — twelve missiles take up one ton of space, and twenty sandcaster barrels take up one ton. A magazine is cargo space you have already spent.

Missiles are self-propelled or remotely directed weapons carrying a conventional or nuclear explosive, and may be fired from missile racks mounted in turrets or from bay-mounted missile banks. They are capable of Thrust 10 but have a limited endurance of 60 minutes — roughly 4 turns — before running out of fuel.

Bay weapons are much larger than turrets. Each takes up 50 tons of space and one hardpoint, as well as one ton of space for fire control — so a bay is fifty times the displacement of a triple turret for the same single hardpoint, which is why only large hulls carry them.

Screens are defensive systems that protect against specific attacks, and they are the same 50 tons a bay weapon costs. A meson screen blocks attacks from meson weapons by preventing meson decay; a nuclear damper inhibits fusion reactions, reducing the damage from fusion weapons and nuclear missiles by 2D6 when affected.

Screens stack in one specific way. The meson screen’s radiation reduction scales with how many screens are active — the −DM is twice the active number of screens — so two meson screens are worth more against radiation than one is. That is 100 tons and MCr120 for the pair, before the operators each device requires, which the crew requirements set out.

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The compact string that states a ship.

Once a design is finished it has to be presented in a form players can use, and the universal ship description format is that form. It is not a statblock: it is a paragraph of running text laid out in a fixed order, which is why every vessel in the catalogue reads like prose rather than like a table.

The order is the design sequence’s order with the money at the end, which is what makes the format readable as a summary of the work. Hull first, then drives and their performance, then fuel, then the command and sensor gear, then who sleeps where, then the weapons, then cargo, then the hull’s own configuration and armour, then the crew, the passengers and the price.

Two fields state something the design sequence does not compute for you. Passenger capacity is written as double the number of non-crew staterooms, because a stateroom takes two at double occupancy — so a ship’s advertised passenger count is a statement about its accommodation rather than a separate design choice. And the cost is stated as including discounts and fees, so the number printed on a catalogue entry is what you actually pay.

The computer field is where the two computer options become visible. A machine with either option carries it as a slash and the option’s abbreviation after the model number, so a Model 2 with jump control specialisation reads as a computer Model 2/bis and a reader can see what was bought without being told separately.

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Drives outside the standard set.

The standard star drive is the jump drive, which always takes one week to travel a number of parsecs equal to its rating and consumes a vast amount of fuel. If a referee wants to model a setting with a different kind of star drive, three alternatives are offered — and each of them uses all the same rules as the jump drive for mass, fuel, power consumption and range unless the alternative says otherwise.

Read the warning printed with them before adopting one. Some of these drives consume much less fuel or allow much faster travel than the jump drive, so introducing them will vastly impact the carrying capacity of a starship, the profitability of trade, the speed of communication and so forth. They are not cosmetic swaps; they change the economy.

The warp drive has no maximum range, which is the biggest change of the three. Instead of a rating that caps how far one jump reaches, the rating says how many parsecs are crossed per week — so a long journey takes proportionally longer rather than being impossible, and the ship burns power plant fuel at double rate for the whole time it is under way.

The teleport drive removes the week entirely and costs nothing extra in fuel, so its only brake is wear: multiple successive jumps can damage the drive. Nothing printed quantifies how many is too many or what the damage is, so a referee adopting it is choosing both.

The hyperspace drive is the one with a hard design cost. It takes up twice as much space as a jump drive of the same rating, and while in hyperspace the ship moves at one parsec per day per manoeuvre drive rating — so a hull with a good manoeuvre drive travels faster between stars, which is true of nothing else in the game.

The portal size is a tonnage cap on the ship that may pass through, and it climbs in steps of 200 from rating C upward. Rating A at 200 tons and rating B at 400 fit that pattern; rating C at 800 does not, skipping the 600 the sequence would predict, and every rating after it is 200 more than the one before.

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Power plants outside the standard set.

The standard power plant is a highly efficient fusion plant, and other settings may use different sources of power. Two alternatives are offered, and unless otherwise noted they use all the same rules as the standard fusion power plants — including the drive codes, the tonnages and the requirement that the plant match the higher drive rating.

A fission plant is worse on every axis except endurance. It produces only the same power as a fusion drive of the same type while being twice the size and price, and its fuel is radioactive elements at Cr1,000,000 a ton — two thousand times what the travel rules charge for a ton of refined hydrogen at a starport. What it buys is range: it uses in a YEAR what a fusion plant uses in two weeks, so a twenty-sixth of the tankage covers the same time.

An antimatter plant is the opposite trade. It needs no fuel tankage allocated at all, which is tonnage handed straight back to cargo, but it must be refuelled once per month at Cr5,000 per ton of drive — so it converts a design cost into a standing monthly bill that never stops.

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Designing a hull too small to jump.

Small craft design follows the rules for standard ship design with a set of changes, and the changes are extensive enough that you should treat this as a parallel pipeline rather than as the big procedure scaled down. Hulls, armour limits, drives, fuel, the command space, the crew and the armaments all have their own rules here.

Small craft use their own hull table, and the cost of streamlining and distributed configurations is calculated as per the standard ship design rules — so the ×0.9, ×1.0 and ×1.1 modifiers apply to these hull prices exactly as they do to the larger ones.

The small-craft hull table is priced almost flat. A 10-ton hull is MCr1.1 and a 95-ton hull is MCr1.95, so nine times the volume costs under twice as much — the opposite shape to the capital-ship table, where price rises faster than tonnage. Build times run 28 to 35 weeks across the whole range.

Small craft armour is purchased in the same manner as standard ship armour — 5% increments, the same three types, the same protection per increment — but small craft have a maximum armour value based on type, and armour options may be purchased as per the standard ship design rules.

That cap is a rule the capital-ship pipeline has no equivalent of, and it is keyed to tech level rather than to tonnage. Titanium Steel tops out at 9 points however many increments you fit, Crystaliron at 13, and Bonded Superdense has no fixed ceiling at all — its maximum is simply the tech level, so a TL 15 craft may reach 15 points of it.

A small craft must have a manoeuvre drive and a power plant. There is no jump drive in this pipeline at all — a small craft does not jump, which is what makes it small craft rather than a very small starship. The two drives use their own cost table and their own performance table.

The fuel requirements for a small craft’s power plant follow the standard ship design rules — one-third of the power plant tonnage per week — except that the values are rounded down to the nearest 0.1 of a ton rather than to the nearest ton, and the minimum fuel volume for a small craft is one week rather than two.

Small craft do not have bridges. A cockpit or control cabin serves the same function: a cockpit is more cramped but takes up less tonnage, and the cost for a cabin or cockpit is the same either way — MCr 0.1 per 20 tons of ship. Additional cabin space costs MCr 0.05 per ton.

The cockpit is exactly half the tonnage of the control cabin for the same crew, and the two cost the same, so a cockpit is the choice whenever the tonnage matters more than the comfort. Cockpits and control cabins come equipped with a basic communications, sensor and emissions-control electronics suite, and more advanced systems can be installed per the standard ship design rules.

Unlike a larger vessel, a small craft does not have an airlock by default. Airlocks take up one ton each and cost MCr0.2, and if a craft does not have one then the crew cannot leave it except when it is landed or in a pressurised landing bay without opening the ship up to vacuum.

Crew is a single rule rather than a table. All small craft of 50 tons or under require a minimum crew of one to operate and maintain the ship; small craft larger than 50 tons require a minimum crew of two. That threshold is what makes the 50-ton hull a natural stopping point for a one-person design.

A small craft has one hardpoint despite being less than 100 tons, which is a deliberate exception to the hardpoint rule rather than a rounding of it. Beyond that it follows the standard ship design rules on armaments with two exceptions: meson, particle beam and fusion bays cannot be fitted at all, and the energy weapons it may carry are restricted by its power plant.

The craft may equip only the number of lasers and particle weapons its power plant allows, and a plant below sG allows none at all. The number of missile launchers or projectile weapons is NOT limited by the power plant letter — so an under-powered craft can still carry missiles, and its restriction is on beams alone.