Designing a ship

Laying a hull needs a yard and somebody who knows how — an Engineer present, and either a workshop or a spaceport with a factory. A paper saying you understand shipbuilding is not enough on its own.

What every hull needs

• A Core Module. Lose it and the vessel is finished whatever else is still attached.
• Power. A Combustion Reactor is cheap, light and needs no technology, and it eats Minerals every turn. Solar asks for nothing and gives less. Fission and fusion come later and change the question.
• Life support, if anybody is aboard — and somebody has to be, because the Core Module and every reactor are staffed posts.
• A Warp Drive, to leave the system at all. Interstellar hulls are big because the drive needs the hull to carry it and the power to run it.

A hull that can feed itself

A single Hydroponics bay gives six Food — nine with an Agronomist tending it — which is enough to keep a Habitat Ring fed out of one compartment. It is the difference between a ship that must come home and a ship that can stay out, and the Provisions figure on the fleet panel counts it properly: a hull that grows as much as it eats will never run its larder down.

Weight and speed

Every module has mass, and mass is what warp speed is divided against. The whole fleet moves at its slowest ship, so one overloaded hull slows everything travelling with it. A crossing takes its distance in parsecs divided by the fleet's speed, rounded up.

Before you send it anywhere

Check Provisions on the fleet panel against the crossing. Running out between the stars costs the crew, then the warp speed, then the ship — an adrift fleet has no speed with which to get anywhere, and there is no rescue.

Keep reading

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