A longer jump burns more fuel. It does not take extra weeks.

Crossing a system under thrust.

Every ship operation involves some sublight manoeuvring, interstellar flights included. On a short interplanetary hop you usually accelerate for the first half of the distance, then turn the ship around and decelerate for the second half — you never coast, so you are under thrust the whole way and you arrive at rest. That is why a more powerful drive shortens a trip without doubling anything: the gain goes as the square root.

The travel times table gives you rounded values for the crossings that come up most often, and it is the quicker answer at the table. If you want more accuracy than a rounded cell, work the formula instead.

Time to cross a distance under constant thrust

T = 2 × √(D ÷ A), where T is time in seconds, D is distance in meters, and A is acceleration in m/sec²

How long a burn takes, by distance and acceleration.

Find the row for how far you are going and read across to the column for the thrust you have. The Example column names what a distance usually is, so you can work backwards from where you are rather than from a number of kilometres — the rows labelled “Jump pt., UWP size” are how far out from a world of that size code you must get before you may jump at all. The planetoid and gas-giant rows are distances for those bodies, not alternate UWP size rows.

Two rows are worth knowing by heart because you will use them every trip. Ten thousand kilometres is a typical surface-to-orbit climb, and the jump point rows are the ones that decide how long a departure takes: a small world lets you go in a couple of hours at 1 G, and a large one is most of a working day.

Crossing between stars, and what the drive does.

Interstellar flight requires a jump drive, and a jump carries your ship a number of parsecs equal to the jump number — a jump-1 crosses one parsec, a jump-4 crosses four. Your drive rating is the largest jump you can make, so a jump-2 drive cannot reach a world three parsecs away no matter how long you are willing to wait.

Jumps of less than one parsec are possible — less than three light years, or less than one hex — and they count as a jump-1 for both navigation and fuel. So a hop to somewhere inside your own hex is not cheaper than a real jump; it costs the same plot and the same tank.

Jump is also used for long flights inside a single system, whenever crossing it in real space would take longer than the week a jump takes. That is the usual reason a ship jumps somewhere it could in principle have flown to.

A damaged or misaligned grid can make the ship misjump, or leave it suffering intrusions while it is in jump space. In the worst case, a ship with a damaged drive or a distorted grid is destroyed at entry or at breakout.

Reference rule — not active yet

How far out you must be before you may jump.

You may only safely jump when the ship is more than one hundred diameters distant from any object. Gravity collapses a jump bubble prematurely and drops the ship back into normal space early, so the limit is a real distance you have to fly rather than a formality.

The safe jump distance from a body

more than one hundred times that body’s own diameter

The limit applies to any object, not just to the world you are leaving. A gas giant you are skimming has one, and it is enormous — the travel time table’s gas giant jump point rows are far longer crossings than any world’s.

Jumping while still inside the limit is not forbidden, it is punished: you take a heavy penalty on the throw that decides whether the jump works, which in practice makes a misjump close to certain. It is one of the documented ways to cause one.

The check that aims a jump, and who makes it.

A jump plot is the course your navigator computes on the ship’s computer, and you cannot jump until the calculation is finished. Creating one is an Easy (+4) Education-based Navigation check taking 1D6 kiloseconds, modified by the jump distance — so a jump-4 gives you a DM−4 on the check and a jump-1 gives you DM−1.

When the ship is at the jump point and ready to go, your engineer has to divert power to the jump drive. That is an Average (+0) Education-based Engineer check taking 10 to 60 seconds, and the Effect of it is added to the jump success roll — a well-run engine room genuinely makes the jump land better.

Plots can be created in advance, but they go out of date quickly. Each course tape is good for one specific origin and one specific destination, so a plot you computed for a different route is not a plot for this one.

Reference rule — not active yet

Paying someone else for the plot.

You do not have to compute a plot. Every class D and better starport sells pre-calculated jump plots for Cr1,000 per jump number — so a plot for a jump-3 costs Cr3,000 — and buying one skips the navigation check entirely.

Price of a bought plot

Cr1,000 × the jump number

Two restrictions come with the price and both matter. The plot must be for a populated world, and that world must be within your jump range. So the starport can sell you convenience on a route that was already easy, and it can never sell you a course into an empty hex — the places where nobody lives are exactly the places you have to plot for yourself.

A week, near enough, whatever the distance.

All normal jumps take roughly one week — 148 + 6D6 hours, so somewhere between 154 and 184 hours. The distance you crossed makes no difference at all: a one-parsec hop and a six-parsec crossing both take about a week, and only the fuel differs.

Time in jump space

148 + 6D6 hours

Emergence points vary randomly too, so even a good jump does not put you exactly where you meant to be. The older your plot, the more variance there is in how the jump actually performs.

The fuel a jump burns, by distance and hull size.

Jump fuel depends on two things — the size of your ship and the length of the jump. You burn a tenth of your hull tonnage for every parsec crossed, and a single jump of that distance consumes that much fuel in one go.

Fuel for one jump, in tons

0.1 × hull tonnage × jump distance

This is the line that makes distance cost something when time does not. A jump-1 out of a 200-ton hull is 20 tons of fuel; the same hull at jump-2 is 40 tons; a 400-ton hull at jump-3 is 120. Since jumps of less than a parsec count as jump-1, there is no cheaper category below a full jump.

The practical consequence is that a big ship is expensive to move at all and a long jump multiplies that. A ship carrying tankage for a jump-4 has given up a tenth of its hull four times over to fuel it will burn in one week — space that is not carrying cargo or passengers.

The throw that decides whether you arrive where you meant to.

When the drive fires, roll 2D6 and add the modifiers below. On 8 or more the jump is accurate. On 0 or less the ship misjumps. Anything in between is an inaccurate jump — you reach the right star and the wrong part of the system.

A jump made on a bad plot automatically misjumps whatever the dice say. That is not a modifier; it bypasses the roll.

Arriving in the right system and the wrong place.

On an inaccurate jump you emerge in the wrong part of the target star system, and you have to fly the rest of the way: 1D6 days of travel through normal space. You arrived where you meant to, badly.

Extra travel after an inaccurate jump

1D6 days through normal space

The emergence itself is violent. The ship takes the equivalent of a critical hit from the discordant transition, and everyone aboard suffers severe headaches, nausea and even nosebleeds for several hours before and after the ship comes out of jump space.

So an inaccurate jump costs you days, a damaged ship and an unhappy crew — but it is a delay rather than a disaster, and it is by far the most common way for a jump to go wrong: any total from 1 to 7 lands here.

Arriving somewhere else entirely.

A misjump puts the ship 1D6 × 1D6 parsecs away in a random direction. You are not late — you are somewhere else, possibly as far as thirty-six parsecs from where you meant to be, with whatever fuel you have left.

Misjump displacement

1D6 × 1D6 parsecs in a random direction

The emergence is as hard as an inaccurate one: the ship takes the equivalent of a critical hit, and everyone aboard gets the headaches, nausea and nosebleeds for several hours either side of breakout. The difference is entirely in where you end up.

Buying a berth: high, middle, basic and low.

If you do not own a ship you buy a berth on someone else’s. There are five ways to travel — high, middle, low, working and stowaway — and each ticket buys food and lodging for one person for a distance of one jump.

A ship must accommodate its crew before it sells any berths, normally one stateroom per two crew, which is called double-occupancy. Whatever stateroom space is left over can carry passengers, and passengers may not share accommodation with crew — working passage is the one exception. Normally one passenger goes in a small stateroom and two in a large one.

Stewards are what limit how many paying passengers a ship can actually carry. Each level of Steward skill, including level 0, lets the steward look after two high passengers or five middle passengers — so a character with Steward 2 can care for six high passengers.

A middle passenger can be bumped by a late-arriving high passenger who wants the stateroom. The bumped passenger’s ticket is returned and no other compensation is made — though they may then buy a high passage themselves and bump another middle passenger, if the extra cost seems worth it.

A stowaway travels secretly and pays nothing. It is a crime in most jurisdictions and risks imprisonment or heavy fines, and a stowaway caught at the destination may be deported — in which case the cost of returning them to the last world in the ship’s logs can land on the ship’s owner or captain. That is why most commanders take a stowaway badly, and some have been known to space them.

Starport fuel, gas giants, and what refining costs.

Fuel comes in two grades, and the choice between them is the core trade of the travel economy. Refined fuel is bought at a starport for Cr500 a ton and is safe. Unrefined fuel is Cr100 a ton, or free if you take it yourself, and it puts a DM−2 on every jump success roll you make while running it.

Refined fuel does more than remove the jump penalty: it decreases the chance of a problem occurring with the power plant, the manoeuvre drive and the jump drive generally. You can also make your own, by running unrefined fuel through a purification system installed aboard the ship, which turns the cheap grade into the safe one for a capital cost rather than a per-ton one.

Skimming a gas giant takes 1D6 hours per 40 tons of fuel and costs nothing, but gas giants are a favourite point of attack for pirates — the fee you did not pay is the risk you accepted. Landing near open water is free too, though many worlds do not allow it, preferring to control fuel availability from the starport and earn the revenue themselves.

Time to skim a gas giant

1D6 hours per 40 tons of fuel

Everything a ship costs between jobs.

A ship costs money whether or not it is earning. There are six standing expenses — the mortgage or debts, crew salaries, fuel, life support, port fees and routine maintenance — and between them they are the clock a working crew runs against.

Only two of the six move with what you do. Fuel and port fees respond to flying and to sitting still; the mortgage, the salaries, the life support and the maintenance arrive on their own schedule whether the hold is full or empty. That asymmetry is the pressure that makes a crew take the job.

The monthly payment on a financed hull.

If you are paying off debts on your ship, they come due every month. The standard terms are 1/240th of the cash price each month for 480 months — forty years — and that payment is normally the largest single line in the ship’s accounts.

Monthly mortgage payment

the cash price of the ship ÷ 240, each month for 480 months

Ship shares are treated as reducing the cash price of the ship, and so reduce the monthly payment. They are not a lump payment against the balance — they lower the number you are dividing by 240, which is the same thing in the end and a very different thing month to month.

What each post is paid.

Every ship needs a crew and every crew is paid monthly. A jump-capable starship needs at minimum a pilot to manoeuvre it, a navigator to create jump plots and navigate, and an engineer to maintain it and operate the drives — on a small ship the navigator’s job is often doubled up with the pilot’s.

Beyond the three essential posts, the other positions each have a reason to exist. A master or captain is responsible for the ship and everyone aboard, and aboard a small ship usually holds another job as well — assume a standard of Cr6,000 a month, or the salary of the highest-paid job they are qualified to do. Many merchant owners take a cut of the profits instead of a salary.

A ship that carries passengers must have a qualified medic, and every vessel should have some form of medical assistance available. A purser looks after the accounts and supplies and is often paid a cut of the profits rather than the standard Cr3,000. Armed ships must employ gunners. Assistant engineers, technicians, cargo handlers, deck hands and security are all paid Cr1,000 and are useful rather than essential. Professional stewards keep the passengers happy, which is what keeps a passenger ship in business.

The basic living expenses of the crew while they are on shipboard duty come out of the ship’s overheads, so a salary is take-home rather than a figure they have to eat out of. Larger ships may need several engineers and technicians backing up the chief engineer.

The monthly cost of keeping people breathing.

Every stateroom on the ship costs Cr2,000 a month, occupied or not, and every low passage berth costs Cr100 a month. That covers the life support supplies and the food and water, though meals at this level are rather spartan.

Monthly life support

(staterooms × Cr2,000) + (low berths × Cr100)

Occupied or not is the phrase that matters. A big passenger ship running empty is paying full life support on every stateroom it did not sell, which is what turns unused capacity from harmless into expensive.

How long a ship can hold out without resupply depends on its power. With power, a spacecraft sustains one person per stateroom for one month comfortably and for six months at a stretch — the number of staterooms times 5,000 person-hours. Without power that drops to two weeks at most, which is the clock a crew with a dead power plant is actually running.

Berthing, and what it costs past the sixth day.

Berthing typically costs Cr100 for the first six days in a starport, and Cr100 a day after that. It is a step and not a rate: the first six days are one charge of Cr100 between them, and the seventh day is the first day that costs anything more.

Berthing for more than six days

Cr100 + (Cr100 × every day past the sixth)

The annual overhaul, and the damage skipping it does — which nothing here repairs yet.

A ship needs maintenance, and it costs 0.1% — a thousandth — of the total cost of the ship per year. It requires a shipyard, which means only the better starports can do it, and it should be carried out each month.

Annual maintenance

0.1% (1/1000th) of the total cost of the ship, per year

The modifier is what makes skipping compound, and it compounds fast. Read the throw carefully: reaching 8 is the BAD outcome here, because 8 or more is what damages a system. A throw at +1 is 2D6+1 against 8, which damages the ship more often than not — 21 of the 36 ways two dice fall, a little under three times in five. A throw at +6 cannot fail to hurt you: the lowest throw two dice can make is 2, and 2 + 6 is already 8. Deferred maintenance is not a saving that stays flat — it gets worse every month you leave it, and once the neglect is deep enough to reach +6 it has stopped being a gamble.