Wiki / Ship sections

Ship sections

A ship is an assembly of sections, each with one job: hull blocks carry the structure, a controller turns it, thrusters push it, the turrets, torpedo bays and the railgun fight with it, a docking port holds it to another ship, a cargo intake drops and takes in cargo canisters, and a mining beam cuts ore from a locked rock. There is no hidden ship underneath - what a hull can do is exactly what its parts can do, and what it loses when a part is shot off is exactly that part's job. How a whole ship holds together and comes apart is on Ships & damage. This chapter is the parts themselves, one page per kind.

What every section shares

• It is a body. A section is its own rigid piece with its own mass, its own health and its own collider. Its mass is exactly the volume of the box it is hit on - nothing authors it - so a ship's mass is its shape, and a cargo hull is heavy because it is big.
• It lives on a grid. The build grid is 10 m cells. Most sections fill one; a torpedo tube fills two and the railgun three, and they weigh two and three cells to match. The scopes on these pages count in the same cells.
• It bolts on through its faces. Every section offers faces another can attach through, and the builder seats it so its working end points the right way: a hull block takes neighbours on any side, a thruster attaches by its forward face only so the plume is always clear of the ship.
• It has one job, and keeps doing it. A part does not degrade as it is hurt. A cracked, sparking drive pushes exactly as hard as a fresh one and a battered turret shoots as straight; what changes is what it looks like, until the moment it dies and the whole part comes off. What damage looks like has the vocabulary.
• Its variants share the kind. Every kind ships in a handful of prototypes that differ in health and in the one stat the kind is about - the round a turret loads, the torpedo a bay carries, the grade of drive a hull needs. Each page lists its own at the foot.

Reading a section page

Every page runs the same course: what the part does and the numbers that decide it, how it behaves in a fight, what it looks like as it is worn down, what it is like to face one on an enemy hull, and the shipped variants with their stats. Where a rule is worth playing with, the page carries a scope - the turret's arc, the thruster's mass and pull, the railgun's corridor - with the shipped numbers as the defaults.

The catalog at a glance

The whole shipped catalog at a glance; every child page carries the full per-kind stats. A section weighs the space it fills, so the unit cells all weigh the same and health and the kind stat are what separate them. What breaks the pattern is the mounts that are not unit cells: a PDC turret is a half-cell cube at an eighth of the mass, a torpedo bay a two-cell tube, a railgun a three-cell spine, and the two large drives are 18 and 75 cells of block.