Wiki / Ship sections / Hull

Hull

The hull is the ship's passive structure and armor. It provides hitpoints and the connective backbone every other section mounts to. A hull has no active behavior of its own - it is what the rest of the ship is built around, and what keeps taking hits while the working sections keep doing their jobs.

Because health is per-section, a hull soaks damage locally: a hit on one side chews through the sections there while the far side stays intact, so where a shot lands matters, not just whether it landed.

A hull cell keeps the shape it was built in. What it does instead is crack: dark fractures spreading as its own health falls, glowing through when it is about to fail, burnt out cold when it dies - and then the whole cell leaves at once. It throws no sparks, because a hull has nothing in it to short out.

Variants

Four unit-cell hulls ship. The cargo and tank cells match the reinforced cell stat for stat today; what they buy is a hull that reads as what it carries, and the light cell is the scavenger grade at a third of the health. A hull weighs the space it fills, exactly: a section's mass is the volume of the box it is hit on, and no section is denser than another. Health is authored; the mass carrying it is not.

That is why the health column below is not the order you want when you are choosing what to bolt on - and it is not only a hull question, because everything else you bolt on is weighed the same way.

Enemy-grade ships thin these same cells down with per-ship health patches rather than separate prototypes.