Replicants and Ships

The ship is the body

A replicant lives in a ship and nowhere else. The ship is its body: the computer it runs on, the sensors it looks through, the manipulators it builds with. Your first body was chosen for you — probe SP-3125R read the consciousness, ran it on its own hardware and assembled a ship alongside “in its own likeness”. From that moment you are such a probe yourself.

Hence the rule worth learning by heart: every hull in the world is somebody. Building a ship and creating a replicant are one action, one price and one term of about a game year.

How many of you there can be

The fleet ceiling belongs to the era, and there is one per player: three replicants in nuclear Era I, five once thermonuclear Era II lifts it. The number is hard and stands on its own — what you have mined and what you have studied leave it where it is, and the next copy arrives with the next era.

Price runs separately from the ceiling. Every copy costs more than the last, and the substrate they write it on has to stand somewhere: that is the orbital data centre. The ceiling answers “how many”, the price answers “what it takes”, and both questions are always open.

One replicant, one occupation

A replicant flies, scans, founds stations, studies a technology — one thing at a time. So the number of replicants is the number of things you can do in parallel, and at the same time the number of things you will look in on during a five-minute visit.

The moment two copies first do different things — one building, one leaving for a distant planet — is the turn the first session is built around. It lands ten to fifteen minutes in.

The body changes, the mind stays

A replicant is bound to its hull for life. A new ship is a new replicant with its own price and its own name; moving a mind is forbidden outright, and the ban has held since day one.

The shell around it comes apart freely. Hull, drive, reactor, sensors and tank are printed at a factory and fitted by order: the replicant stays itself — same name, same tree, same lineage — while the body around it changes. The trade-offs are real, and there are two of them: the reactor caps what the modules may draw together, and mass costs speed. There are always fewer slots than you want.

Name and tone

A copy is born signed: your account nickname and a serial number — STRANNIK-02, STRANNIK-03. The second half can be rewritten once, and for good: the right to a name is spent the moment it is used. The prefix stays with the copy for life. It is your signature in the world, and strangers read it.

Tone — the colour a copy is signed with on the map and in the terminal — changes whenever you like. It answers one question, “which of mine is this”, and getting it wrong costs a click.

Death

A ship dying and a replicant dying are one event. Everything it learned goes with it: the tree stays with the copy to the very end. There is exactly one way to lose a replicant — fly it somewhere nothing comes back from.

Your own consciousness outlives any loss: stripped of everything, you start again from a weakened position. What is left behind is wreckage with a history, for whoever arrives next to read.

Ship and replicant die together. They are one row of the world, and the ship marker on the map is the replicant.