Service and maintenance

Your adventures will sooner or later start to wear down your spaceship – micro meteorites or frost damage, a clumsy docking or maybe an uncontrolled landing – it will happen to even the best of crews. Servicing your ship (a technology test) also resupplies food, drink and other consumables, as well as reactor isotopes, antimatter etc. Your service roll is modified depending on where you are. If you fail the roll, you still pay half the listed cost (table 7.11). You should service you ship after any longer space travel (10 AU or more), short travels that include portal jumping and after every completed scenario.

If you have a service station onboard, ignore the penalty for doing service in primitive environments. If you have the antimatter rockets feature, service costs are doubled. If you choose not to service your craft, or if you fail the roll, the ship will start to break down – roll on the table to the right to see which systems are affected. For each missed tune-up, the wear effects stack. If you roll the same system twice on the table, it breaks down completely and the ship is disabled until repaired (page 172).

SHIP REPAIRS

Repairing a damaged ship requires technology rolls, tools and spare parts. Read more under the engineer phase on page 168. Ships are usually made up of Ordinary technology, and can therefore be repaired using Ordinary spare parts (page 113). Some modules and features are Advanced tech however, requiring Advanced parts. Repairs are easier to perform while in dock or in a space port. Repairs during travel or combat suffer a -2 to the roll, unless the ship has a service station.Disabled Ship: A ship that has been disabled from either zero HP or zero EP requires more extensive and time-consuming repairs. For every HP or EP you want to restore to the ship, you must spend a whole day on repairs.

Core rulebook #155, Astrodarium #138

Living wear and tear

While the ship is getting worn down, lots of less essential systems will also start to malfunction. While not always giving penalties in the game mechanics, they can add some color to the game and help create drama – airlocks closing just a little too slow, flickering lights, unresponsive landing gear, doors refusing to open etc. These problems can be activated using DP (page 56).

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Astrodarium

The section of the Consortium tasked with gathering information about star systems is called the Foundation, but it is the Bulletin, through its Astrostradium, that supplies captains with data about routes, portal stations, space ports, astronomical anomalies and other useful information. For a small fee, any ship can update its astronical database at a portal station. Unfortunately, the data is not always up to date, and an unlucky crew could find itself in an ion storm or a corsair ambush even on a “safe” route.