Interstellar Flight

A flight is a decision

Light years run between the stars, and the game charges you all of them. A typical neighbour sits about four light years out: several real days each way on a decent build, and three months on the one you start with.

For all that time the replicant is busy travelling — building, scanning, refuelling and refitting wait for the arrival. The leg is atomic: the order is given once and the course holds to the end. Inside a system a ship is turned around in mid-flight; between stars there is no point to turn at, because a ship in interstellar space has no position.

An order that costs a game year weighs like a decision. That is why there is one button here.

What has to line up before you launch

Four conditions, checked in exactly this order.

1. The ship is on the outer orbit. A departure for another star is made from the ring, out of any of its sectors. A copy at a planet, in the belt or at its own station opens the window and sees the road; the “Launch” button is waiting for it out on the ring.
2. The target is visible. You may aim at what the star map shows from this system: 12.5 light years bare, plus whatever your own finished observatory adds — up to 25 light years at its top level, which is the edge of your district.
3. There is fuel in the tank. A departure runs on main thrust. The reserve stays what it was meant to be: the way home to your own refuelling, inside a system.
4. The road fits inside a week. The engine accepts a leg of up to seven real days (28 game years); anything longer it sends back for a nearer target or a faster ship.

How the road is worked out

The shape is always the same: burn, drift, brake. The drive runs at the ends; on the cruise leg it is off and the fuel stays in the tank. So range rests on the speed the ship managed to build: a tank buys time rather than distance.

How much to burn is yours to decide. The order carries a fuel limit, and the window leaves a percentage in the tank for the road from the arrival ring to a convenient planet. The rest goes into the burn and the braking. Fuel for braking is checked in advance — a ship has to be able to stop where it is going.

Mass falls as fuel burns, so braking happens on a lighter ship, takes less time and costs less fuel than the burn did. The two halves of the road come out different lengths.

What crosses it

The fork that matters is the hull. Its speed ceiling is the rating of its deflector, the field that holds off the oncoming hydrogen. Below a tenth of light speed the thin hydrogen ahead is weather; above it, it is a sandblaster.

The table reads in one line: interstellar flight begins with the second hull. The first covers 2.8 light years in a week, against an average of 4.1 to a neighbour. The threshold where the next star becomes an order is the third step of drive and reactor with the thirty-tonne cell on the interstellar hull: 6.9 light years in that same week.

The hull stays interchangeable throughout. It is printed at a factory and fitted by the same order as any other node; the replicant stays itself, and the body around it changes.

What happens on the way

The replicant keeps studying. Research runs regardless of place, and a year-long leg is the best time for a long node: queue a study plan before you launch and the week does some work.

Ticks shorten the drift. The burn and the braking run their own course — a tick buys inertia, and the fuel keeps its own arithmetic. The ceiling is the usual one: half of the remaining drift at a time, a repeat counted off the new remainder.

The light floor holds the road. However many ticks are on the account, a flight of d light years takes at least d game years. The game says so outright: “physics from here on”. The answer to that refusal is a nearer target or a faster ship.

Arrival

The ship settles on the outer orbit of the other system, in the same sector everything arriving from outside settles on. At that moment the system opens to you: it appears on the star map, its snapshot is cached, and the first to arrive is recorded as the discoverer.

The right to name stays with the owner — whoever puts a station in the system, which means material mined right there. The name goes to whoever stays.

Refuelling comes from your own colony: you need your fuel synthesis station somewhere in the system, and any working station of yours at the site the ship is standing on. In an empty system, the ticket home has to be built first.

Tips

• Hull first, target second. The difference between the two hulls decides whether the flight happens at all. If the configurator shows the drive making more speed than the hull allows, that is your cue to print a new body.
• Put the observatory up before the expedition. It shows you more stars, and it also decides which of them you are allowed to aim at.
• Count in real days. Seven days is a hard ceiling on one leg. Era I crosses a 25-light-year district in a chain of hops.
• Walk the ship out to the ring in advance. The intra-system flight to the outer orbit takes days of its own, and it is better learned before you pick a target.
• Match the tank to the distance. At the top of the ladder a hundred-tonne cell takes the ship past its drive’s working mass: the burn drops threefold, and the speed ceiling is reached with a smaller tank anyway.
• Queue a study before you go. It is the only thing a replicant can do on the road.
• Fly where you mean to stay. Refuelling comes from your own colony, the course holds to the end, and a week is a week.
• Save ticks for the long leg. The share counts off the remaining drift, so on a short hop a tick buys minutes.

What the game says while the order waits

Catalogue figures — drives, reactors and cells — are being tuned during the closed alpha, and the tables above describe today. The rules they are computed by stand apart from the numbers: the week-long ceiling, the light floor and the main-thrust departure survive any retuning.