Spacecraft

The life blood of an interstellar sector

A spacecraft is any vehicle capable of safe crewed travel through the vacuum of space. Whilst their form, fittings and functions can differ vastly, they all rely on grav-technology and in particular the spike drive to safely achieve speeds allowing for relatively quick interplanetary and even interstellar travel.

Ship Systems

System	Description
Spike Drive	Combining several fields of gravitic manipulation, plus a reaction drive for power, allows for fast and safe interplanetary movement and interstellar drills. Contragravity: ubiquitous in space-travel as well as some vehicles. Contragravity generators throughout the ship create the envelope which allows the ship to move without heed to gravitational or relativistic limitations. Within this envelope, artificial gravity keeps the human occupants in familiar and healthy environments. Artificial gravity: Gravity engines or spin gravity setups (large ships or space stations only) create desired gravitational effects. Gravity within a ship is designed to feel as natural to all occupants at all, and zero-g will only occur should systems fail.
Computer Systems	Common: door controls, internal comms terminals, viewing stations, data readouts Isolated: Weapons, master-comms-unit, ship sensors, ship piloting Centralised: Ship master control, external comms, gravity, shielding, weapons Non-covered: other personal computing tasks - need personal computers for this
Life Support	Sealed atmosphere: protection against vacuum, temperature extremes, minor impacts, radiation Supplying bio needs: air, potable water, edible food. Capable of recycling water, air, but not food. (Full life support)
Weaponry	Ship weaponry tends to come in two classes: One is damaging and has moderate power and mass demands, but has comparatively weak armour-piercing capabilities; The other is expensive, taxing to a ship’s systems, and may have somewhat inferior damage, but has enough armour-piercing to pierce the armour of even a higher-class warship. In either case, shipboard weaponry is always tapped into the ship's primary spike drive, as this allows the tracking of targets travelling at anything less than FTL speeds, and prevents unfortunate complications such as accidentally travelling faster than the missile you just fired. Even at such speeds, ship weaponry tends to rely heavily on onboard sensors and computers to provide a firing solution, as such fights tend to take place at distances significant enough that light-lag becomes a factor in every shot.
Defences	Commonly, a standard starship's defences will consist of nothing more than ship's speed, agility, armour plating, pilot skill, and ECM generator - electronic countermeasures which confuse an enemy ship's auto-targeting at a high enough space-time distance. However, proper warships may choose to mount an array of defensive options, which consist of low-tech solutions such as hardened hull plating, to more advanced ones such as point-defence systems or gravtech displacers. In rare cases, pretech kinetic or energy shielding can enhance the spike drive's contragravity envelope to repel attacks on a reactionary basis
Sensors	Passive sensors receive the various forms of radiation - heat, light, radio, electromagnetism, within the system, interpreting them to give readings on the surroundings. Active sensors broadcast electromagnetic radiations and interpret the reflections as raw data. The limit for both is the speed of light, so data delays of between a few minutes to a few hours can be expected depending on the in-system distance.
Communications	Radio for broadcast or low-bandwidth, tightbeam for targeted or high-bandwidth, gravcomms for FTL low-bandwidth communications. Full details can be found here.