Running a hull, and the hulls you meet

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Running a ship day to day.

Standard procedures exist to govern how a starship goes about its business and how it handles an emergency. Under normal circumstances your ship does not deviate from them, and if it does, you should expect to explain yourself — a captain whose vessel ignores standard operating procedure will usually have to account for it to a patrol vessel or to the local port authority.

That is worth taking seriously, because the procedures are not a formality imposed by the referee. They are what every other ship in the system expects you to be doing, so a departure from them is visible: it is the thing that gets you hailed, boarded, inspected or fined, and it is also the thing that makes another ship suspicious enough to be worth investigating when you see it.

Running a ship divides into two halves that this chapter keeps separate. One is the routine: the schedule a commercial hull keeps, the order in which cargo and passengers move, the checks you throw for docking and landing. The other is what you do when someone wants your ship — the physical locks, the computer security and the measures the crew triggers when an intrusion is detected.

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The routine a competent crew follows.

Most commercial starships run a two-week cycle: one week in jump space and one week in normal space taking care of business. A non-commercial ship keeps a similar shape but can go much faster, because without passengers or cargo to handle the in-system week collapses to refuelling by the quickest means available and jumping again.

The loading order is not decoration. High passengers come off first and go on first because that is what they paid for; low passengers come off last and go on first, because a cryoberth is loaded before the ship is moving and opened when it has stopped. Mail is committed tonnage and moves as a block.

Along the way you may meet other ships. Gas giants are often used by pirates to attack unsuspecting vessels, so system defence boats are prevalent in the region. Patrol vessels may hail you as you travel to and from the jump point, and port authorities may run a customs inspection before letting you dock. Other ships, civilian and military, commercial and not, are moving in and out of the system the whole time.

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Getting in and out without losing the air.

A ship has at least one airlock per 100 tons, and the average airlock is large enough for three people in vacc suits to pass through at once. An airlock takes ten seconds to cycle — which is a long time when someone is shooting at you, and the reason boarding actions bottleneck where they do.

Under normal circumstances the airlocks are locked down from the bridge, and overriding one takes a Very Difficult (−4) Engineer (electronics) check. An airlock that is already unlocked can be triggered from outside, so "did anyone lock up?" is a real question rather than a rhetorical one.

Ships with cargo space have cargo hatches as well, and a hatch allows up to 10% of the ship’s cargo to be transferred at any one time. That is the figure that decides how long an honest unload takes and how much a boarding party can actually carry away before someone arrives.

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Calling for help, and answering a call.

A distress signal says that a person, group, vessel, small craft or other vehicle is threatened by grave and imminent danger and needs immediate assistance. Using one under any other circumstances is against most system and interstellar laws, and most jurisdictions carry large penalties for a false, unwarranted or prank signal.

Given the vastness of interplanetary space, help is hard to come by. So most interstellar and interplanetary governments require that the commander or master of any vessel detecting a distress signal must either respond and offer assistance, or contact the authorities to report the signal. Those are the only two lawful options.

Some pirates use false distress signals to lure other vessels into a trap, and that has created real mistrust of distress calls among civilian commanders. It does not change the law: assistance must still be rendered if the authorities cannot be reached within a reasonable time.

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Coming alongside, and the check it takes.

Two spacecraft may dock if they are close together and neither ship resists the manoeuvre. Docking with another vessel is a Routine (+2) Pilot task taking 1–6 minutes; if one ship is drifting or unpowered, the difficulty rises to Difficult (−2).

Many airlock designs across charted space are compatible, so most of the time the two hulls simply mate. Where they are not compatible, ships extend flexible plastic docking tubes that adapt to the target airlock — which is why a mismatched pair of airlocks is an inconvenience rather than a refusal.

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Getting aboard a ship that does not want you.

A hostile boarding action is safest when the enemy ship is crippled, because then it is just a standard docking procedure. If the target is still moving, your boarders must match its velocity and dock with it — a Difficult (−2) Pilot task — or else land on the hull and either make their way to an airlock or cut through from outside.

The choice between docking and landing on the hull is a real one. Docking puts your party at an airlock, which is where the defenders expect them; landing on the hull puts them somewhere the defenders have to come and find, at the cost of cutting their own way in.

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Setting down, and where you may.

Any ship with a standard or streamlined hull may land on a surface. Landing at a starport is a Routine (+2) task for most ships and takes 10–60 seconds. Failing a landing roll means the ship has landed improperly, or even crashed.

Most ships have landing gear, which lets them touch down away from a port. The difficulty for that is set by local conditions rather than by the ship: Average (+0) on easy ground, Difficult (−2) where it is awkward, and Very Difficult (−4) where it is genuinely bad. Non-distributed ships can also land on bodies of water without sinking.

The two hull penalties are what make configuration matter outside the shipyard. An unstreamlined hull takes DM−2 on any Pilot check made in atmosphere, and a distributed hull takes DM−4 on any Pilot check at all — and is likely to take severe structural damage if you set it down.

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Keeping a ship from being taken.

The point of a ship’s security measures is to protect the safety of the ship and crew. On frontier worlds and lawless backwaters in particular, starships are at risk from hijackers, piracy, sabotage, subversion and terrorism, and security exists on several levels to stop that happening. It divides broadly into physical security and cybersecurity.

Physical security systems are meant to do three things: deter potential intruders, for example with warning signs; detect intrusions and monitor or record the intruders, for example with intruder alarms and internal monitoring; and trigger the appropriate incident response, whether from security personnel or from the crew generally.

Physical barriers such as airlocks are the outermost layer. They prevent or at least delay an attack, and they act as a psychological deterrent by making an intrusion difficult. Inside the ship, bulkheads and panels can be locked to limit or slow access. Note that the ship’s computer can open or close any non-mechanical lock remotely, and can report on a door’s status — which cuts both ways the moment someone else has the computer.

Detection works by several means at once. Cameras, accessible to any authorised personnel, monitor public areas. Internal sensors add to that: motion detectors in key traffic areas, and life support detectors watching for unexpected changes in oxygen levels.

Read the table by asking which door you are at. An external door is always two rungs harder than the internal door of the same lock type, so getting into a ship is the hard part and moving around inside it is not. The mechanical lock is the outlier in the other direction: it is the only type an internal door of which is Average (+0), and it is the only one overridden with Mechanics rather than Electronics — so it is also the only lock the ship’s computer cannot open for you, or for anyone who has taken the computer.

Security measures activate once an intrusion or emergency has been detected. There are four: internal alarms, artificial gravity control, tranq gas and the venting of atmosphere.

Who answers an alarm depends on the ship. The average passenger ship has several crew trained in combat, a military ship carries marines, and some vessels have security robots that respond to alarms automatically.

Venting is selective because internal doors on a ship are airtight, so which compartments you can empty depends on the ship’s floor plan and on where the airlocks are relative to them. That makes the deck plan a security document as much as an engineering one.

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Keeping a ship computer from being taken.

The security of a ship’s computer is only as good as the Security software installed on it. All starships come with Security/0, but most vessels run at least Security/2, and a wise owner invests in more advanced programs whenever possible. Every task below requires the Computer skill.

These are the tasks hijackers and pirates attempt, and the table works in both directions — you will be the intruder about as often as you are the defender. The interesting row is the last one, because it is the only difficulty in the table set by the ship rather than by the task: the Security package defines it, and Very Difficult (−4) is only what it typically comes to.

Granting crew authorisation to someone is the quiet one on the list. It is only Difficult (−2), and it does not break anything: it makes the intruder a person the ship believes belongs there, which then opens every intelligent lock in the Restricted Access table without a further throw.

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Moving about on a world once you are down.

Once you are down and in a civilised area, regular services are usually available for a few credits and will carry you wherever you are going — anything from a rickshaw to a maglev bullet train. Assume a basic cost of 1D6X5 Credits per day of travel.

Basic cost of surface travel

1D6X5 Credits per day of travel

In the course of an adventure you may ride aboard steam ships, dirigibles, submersibles, grav speeders or living mounts, depending on what the world has. Costs for all of it are fairly negligible — that is the point of the flat daily figure, which exists so nobody has to price a taxi.

If you would rather use a vehicle of your own, this cost does not apply. What you need instead is a suitable vehicle actually available to you, which on a low-technology or thinly-populated world is the harder half of the problem.

The ships you actually meet, and their statistics.

These are the starships and other vessels you commonly meet. They are not the only types that exist, and a referee is encouraged to bring in ships of their own creation or from other sources — but the catalogue is where to look first, because every hull in it is already a complete, buildable design with a printed price.

There are twenty-four of them: eighteen starships, which all carry a jump drive except the two that are explicitly non-jump-capable, and six small craft. Each one gets its own entry here, so you can look up a single ship without reading the rest.

The six small craft are the common designs found nearly everywhere. None of them mounts a jump drive, all of them carry one week of power plant fuel, and their drive letters come from the small-craft series rather than the starship one — which is why a small craft’s drive letter is written with a leading lower-case s.

A working hull built to cut and carry rock.

A TL9 working hull, frequently used to exploit the abundant riches found in planetoid belts. It is a 200-ton jump-1 ship with a mining drone and a smelter aboard, which is what separates it from an ordinary small trader of the same displacement.

Two things make this hull work as a belt ship. The tankage covers two jump-1 jumps rather than one, so it can go out and come back without refuelling at the far end; and the three tons of fuel processors turn 60 tons of unrefined fuel a day into refined, so ice taken off a rock in the belt is jump-safe by the time you leave.

Arming it costs you passengers. The hull has two hardpoints and two tons of fire control fitted but nothing installed on them, and putting weapons up requires two gunners — who come out of the three passenger berths, leaving one.

A small warship, fast and lightly armed.

A TL11 warship of 300 tons, given as an example of a frigate commonly found in operation within an interstellar polity. It is fast for its size — 6-G on a jump-2 hull — and carries ten marines and four detention cells, so it is built to stop other ships rather than to fight fleets.

Note what the accommodation is doing. Nine staterooms have to hold eighteen crew, which only works at double occupancy, and the only berths for anyone else are the four detention cells — so the four passengers this hull can carry are prisoners by construction, not paying ones.

It carries one jump of fuel and no more. That is the standing constraint on a patrol hull: it can chase you across a system all day at 6-G, but it can only follow you one jump before it has to refuel.

A minimal hull built around a jump drive.

A TL9 hull of 100 tons used to move critical information, vital cargo or essential personnel — or by anyone who wants fast, affordable interstellar transport. It is the smallest useful jump-2 ship in the catalogue and is essentially a drive, a tank and four cabins.

The streamlined hull and the fuel scoops are the reason this ship is affordable to run. It can skim a gas giant for free unrefined fuel and then refine it aboard at 40 tons a day, which for a 28-ton tank means it is topped up and jump-safe inside a single day.

A line warship for escort and patrol.

A TL11 line warship of 800 tons, serving primarily as an escort for cruisers and dreadnoughts and as a support ship in fleet actions. Eight hardpoints on a hull this size makes it the most heavily armed thing in the catalogue that is not a capital ship.

This is one of only three hulls in the catalogue whose tankage covers two jumps rather than one, which is what makes it an escort rather than a picket: it can follow the ships it is protecting out and back without a refuelling stop in between.

The heaviest hull a fleet fields.

A TL14 capital ship of 5,000 tons, the largest and most heavily armed type within an interstellar polity, rarely deployed outside wartime. Fifty hardpoints, a crew of 223 and a further 112 people frozen as replacements — this is the only hull in the catalogue that carries its own casualties in advance.

The divided hull is the detail that matters in a fight. Its 100 Hull and 100 Structure are split into two sections of 50 and 50, so damage is taken against a section rather than against the whole ship — no other hull in the catalogue is stated that way.

The Frozen Watch is 112 people in 223 berths, so the berths are not full. That is spare capacity rather than a contradiction: the ship is built to freeze more replacements than it currently carries, and 223 is also exactly its crew and its escape pod count.

Everything about the endurance is a fleet assumption. It carries one jump of fuel and four weeks of power on a hull that takes 428 weeks to build, which is a ship designed to be brought to a war by its navy rather than to wander.

A small trader built for thin routes.

A TL9 trader of 300 tons, generally met along an interstellar polity border and in systems off the major trade routes. It is one of the two hulls in the catalogue built for a player crew: 25 staterooms, twelve low berths, 75 tons of cargo and enough guns to survive the run.

The armament is defensive on purpose. Two turrets of pulse lasers and one of sandcasters is a fit for shrugging off a raider rather than for taking a ship, and the two stewards in the crew tell you what the hull is really for — this is a passenger business with guns on it.

A capital hull short of a dreadnought.

A TL11 multi-purpose warship of 2,000 tons, used for a variety of independent missions and not commonly deployed in peacetime except on the occasional manoeuvres. Twenty hardpoints and fourteen small craft make it a capital ship in everything but name.

Fifteen small craft pilots for fourteen hangars, and thirty marines aboard, is what "independent missions" means in practice. The hull is designed to arrive somewhere alone and put people and fighters into a system, rather than to hold a line beside other ships.

A cruiser traded down for speed and reach.

A TL11 warship of 1,000 tons for the same wide variety of independent missions as its heavier sibling. It carries less firepower than a heavy cruiser but is generally faster and more manoeuvrable — 3-G against the heavy cruiser’s 2-G, on half the displacement.

The ten hardpoints are split three ways — a bay, missile turrets and laser turrets — which is a hull meant to answer several kinds of target rather than to specialise. The particle beam bay is the reason it is a cruiser rather than a large frigate.

Bulk cargo, and not much else.

A TL9 hull of 400 tons, frequently used to haul cargo along major trade routes. Two hundred and sixty-one tons of that displacement is cargo — nearly two thirds of the ship, and far more than any other starship here gives over to a hold. This one is a hold with a drive attached.

The passenger line states the cost of arming it more plainly than any other entry: two high passengers, or none at all once four gunners are aboard. On a hull with four staterooms, the four hardpoints and the passenger business are mutually exclusive.

It is slow in both senses — 1-G and jump-1 — and that is the trade the design makes. Four hundred tons of hull moved by the smallest drives that will shift it is what buys 261 tons of cargo, and a freight business is paid by the ton rather than by the parsec.

Passengers first, cargo second.

A TL9 hull of 300 tons and a popular method of interstellar transport along the major trade routes. Thirty-five staterooms and 20 low berths on a hull with seven crew makes this the catalogue’s dedicated passenger ship — it carries almost nothing else.

Four of the seven crew are stewards, and that ratio is the design. The number of high passengers a ship can actually look after is set by Steward skill rather than by the number of staterooms, so a liner that fills 31 high berths needs the stewards to go with them.

It has three hardpoints and three tons of fire control fitted and nothing installed on them, and no gunner clause in the crew line. A liner running a settled route is not expected to shoot back.

The general-purpose free trader.

A TL9 hull of 200 tons, frequently met along well-established trade routes. This is the general-purpose free trader and the other of the two hulls a player crew is likely to own: three crew, ten staterooms, twenty low berths and 85 tons of cargo.

The twenty low berths against ten staterooms is what makes this hull earn on thin routes. Low passages are cheap and the berths are already fitted, so a run that could not fill eight high berths can still fill twenty cold ones.

The crew line is the only one in the catalogue that suggests posts rather than requiring them: a medic and a steward are named as people a ship may wish to carry. Neither is in the required three, and both come out of the passenger berths if you hire them.

A long-endurance hull for system patrol.

A TL11 hull of 300 tons that performs routine star system patrols within an interstellar polity. It is the Corvette’s slower cousin — 4-G rather than 6-G — and spends the tonnage on two fighters in hangars instead.

The two fighters change what a patrol can cover. A single hull can only be in one place; a hull with two fighters aboard can watch three points of a system at once, and that is what this design buys with the two G of acceleration it gives up against the otherwise comparable 300-ton Corvette.

It carries no passengers at all and only 23 tons of cargo. Ten staterooms for a crew of twenty means the whole hull is at double occupancy with nothing spare — there is no room aboard for anyone the patrol picks up except in the five emergency low berths.

Built to take ships and leave.

A TL9 hull of 600 tons, frequently used by mercenary groups and pirates to raid target systems. Six triple turrets of beam lasers, ten marines, three small craft and 125 tons of hold: it is built to catch a ship, take what it is carrying, and leave.

Laboratories, sensors and endurance.

A TL9 hull of 200 tons, popular with academic professors and independent researchers. Reasonably inexpensive to run, it can operate on an annual budget of MCr3.25 — the only entry in the catalogue that prints a running cost as well as a purchase price.

Six of the nine crew are scientists, matching the six laboratories, and the two launches in the hangars are named as life boats as well — a research hull spends most of its time somewhere nobody is coming to help, and the design says so twice.

Mapping systems nobody has mapped.

A TL11 hull of 300 tons that lets an interstellar polity continually resurvey its own territory — maintaining navigation charts and beacons, and helping patrol the borders and frontiers for problems such as enemy warships or pirate raiders. It is a research ship that is allowed to shoot back.

Two jumps of fuel is the line that makes this a survey hull rather than a laboratory. Only three ships in the catalogue carry it, and it means this one can reach an unmapped system and get home again without needing the far end to have a starport.

It also carries a medic in the required crew, which almost nothing else in the catalogue does. A ship whose job is to be the first one somewhere cannot assume there is help at the destination.

No jump drive, and everything else.

A TL9 non-jump-capable spaceship of 400 tons, commonly used to defend the vital points of a star system. Take the jump drive out of a warship and what you get back is acceleration and hold: this one manages 6-G and 109 tons of cargo on a hull the size of a freighter.

There is no navigator in the crew, and that follows from having no jump drive: a navigator’s job in these rules is plotting jumps, and this ship never makes one. It is also the reason the entry names no jumps supported by its tankage — the 48 tons are four weeks of power and nothing else.

A streamlined hull on a system defence boat means it can come down into an atmosphere and put back up again, which is what lets one of these sit on a world rather than in orbit and still answer a threat anywhere in the system at 6-G.

A heavy hull that never leaves its system.

A TL9 non-jump-capable warship of 1,000 tons, used to defend strategic locations within a star system. It has more firepower and defensive capability than a System Defense Boat, and is much more expensive — ten hardpoints and nine small craft against the boat’s four and none.

Like the defence boat it carries no navigator, and for the same reason. What it does carry is nine small craft pilots for nine hangars and twenty marines, which is a hull meant to hold a place rather than to patrol between them.

A private hull, comfortable and unarmed.

A TL9 hull of 100 tons and the smallest civilian starship commonly encountered. Used by nobles, dignitaries and other officials, it provides luxurious transport for a celebrity and their entourage — six staterooms, two of them combined into a suite, on a jump-2 hull.

Two tons of luxuries effectively replacing a steward is the only place in the catalogue where equipment stands in for a crew post. On a hull with three crew and six passengers, that is what makes the yacht a private ship rather than a very small liner.

A modular small craft, whatever the module is.

A TL 9 small craft of 50 tons, designed to take a sealed 30-ton module from surface to orbit. It is the only configurable vessel in the catalogue: the module decides what the craft is for, and you can change it.

The price line is the one to read carefully. Every other vessel in the catalogue prints a price that is the whole ship; this one explicitly excludes the module, so the real cost of a cutter is MCr24.305 plus whichever row of the table you fit — from MCr1.25 for the fuel module to MCr8 for the laboratory.

One pilot, one weapon, no endurance.

A TL 9 small craft of 10 tons, a short-range combat vessel used primarily in system defence and in large-scale naval engagements. It is one pilot, one pulse laser and 6-G, with no cargo and no endurance beyond the week of power in its tank.

Zero Hull and one Structure is as thin as anything in the catalogue gets — the Launch, Pinnace and Ship’s Boat are stated the same way, and no vessel here is thinner. A fighter does not absorb damage; it avoids it at 6-G, and anything that connects with one is likely to finish it.

It is the only small craft here with a weapon installed and the only one with fuel scoops, which together tell you it is expected to operate from a carrier: fight, refuel from whatever the fleet is skimming, and go again. Print never uses “special features” phrasing for this hull — it states “This ship comes equipped with fuel scoops” as a plain sentence, where the Launch, Pinnace, Ship’s Boat and Shuttle instead explicitly print “There are no special features on this ship.” The Special features row above groups the Fighter’s fuel scoops under that heading as this corpus’s own schema choice, not a restatement of how print itself frames it.

A small utility craft for short hops.

A TL 9 small craft of 20 tons, designed for basic transportation needs and sometimes used as a lifeboat in the event of an emergency in deep space. It is the cheapest vessel in the catalogue at MCr4.797 and the slowest small craft at 1-G.

Its lifeboat role is where the two-man control cabin matters: the craft needs one pilot and carries no passengers, so the second seat is the survivor. Two of these are what the Research Vessel and the Survey Vessel carry in their hangars.

Ten point nine tons of cargo on a 20-ton hull is more than half its displacement, which for a craft this cheap makes it the workhorse for moving things between a ship in orbit and a surface that has no port.

A larger ship boat with real range.

A TL 9 small craft of 40 tons that primarily serves as cargo transport on an interplanetary scale. It carries 25 tons at 5-G, which makes it the fast option for moving a real load across a system.

The pinnace and the shuttle are the same idea at two price points. This one is faster and smaller; the shuttle carries nearly three times the cargo at 3-G for about MCr7 more, and the choice between them is entirely whether the load or the clock is the problem.

The standard small craft carried aboard.

A TL 9 small craft of 30 tons, a general-purpose design meant to cover a range of tasks. At 6-G with 16.7 tons of cargo it is the compromise craft, and it is what most of the armed hulls in this catalogue carry in their hangars.

It is the only small craft that reaches 6-G while still carrying a useful hold. That combination is why the Destroyer, Light Cruiser, Raider and System Monitor all carry one — a hull that can move people or cargo at a warship’s acceleration is worth a hangar bay.

Surface to orbit, and back.

A TL 9 small craft of 90 tons that provides significantly more cargo transport capacity than the less expensive pinnace, at the cost of slower performance. It moves 67.4 tons at 3-G, which is the largest hold on anything in the catalogue that cannot jump and is not a warship.

It is the only small craft here that requires two crew, and the only one besides the Cutter that carries a passenger — the third seat in a two-man cabin. Everything else in the small craft half of the catalogue is a single pilot alone.