Game Rules

This rulebook describes how a captain's position, obligations, resources, crew, ship, travel, encounters, and legal standing are resolved in Cepheus Trader. It explains the game rules rather than the menus; the Player Reference explains how to issue commands through the door.

Rules from the Cepheus Engine System Reference Document are included when they apply to play. Adopted third-party Open Game Content is restated in setting-neutral terms and folded into the applicable chapters. Cepheus Trader adds specific rules where its persistent shared universe requires them. Character careers, psionics, referee procedures, personal equipment lists, planetary adventures, and other tabletop systems that are not used in play are not part of this rulebook.

All original text and game mechanics on this page are Open Game Content under the Open Game License version 1.0a. Upstream Product Identity remains excluded. The complete license, designation, and Section 15 notices are available on the Open Game License page.

Reading the rules#

The words captain and player are not interchangeable. The player is the person at the BBS; the captain is a person in the game. A captain can be hurt, captured, relieved, or succeeded without replacing the player's persistent identity.

The rules use these common terms:

• 2D6 means roll two ordinary six-sided dice and add them, producing a total from 2 through 12.
• D66 means roll two distinguishable six-sided dice and read the first as the tens digit and the second as the units digit, producing one of the 36 table codes from 11 through 66. It is a lookup code, not a sum: a first-die 2 and second-die 5 is result 25, not 7.
• A DM is a dice modifier. Add all applicable DMs before comparing a result with its target.
• Effect is the final task total minus the target number. Zero or greater succeeds; a larger positive or negative Effect measures the result.
• Cr means credits. MCr means one million credits.
• A game second, day, week, or month is simulation time, not real time.
• A revision identifies the exact state used for a quote, plan, order, or other proposal. If that state changes first, the proposal must be refreshed.

Each chapter names its rules lineage. A lineage identifies mechanical ancestry, not affiliation and not permission to use an upstream trademark or Product Identity.

Core resolution#

Rules lineage: Cepheus Engine SRD, with Cepheus Trader's persistent and simultaneous-action procedures.

Characteristics#

People use Strength (STR), Dexterity (DEX), Endurance (END), Intelligence (INT), Education (EDU), and Charisma (CHA). Cepheus Trader uses CHA in place of Social Standing.

Rank, title, reputation, citizenship, authority, legal status, and relationships are separate facts; CHA never grants them.

Tasks#

When an uncertain action calls for a task, use:

2D6 + characteristic DM + skill level + equipment DM + condition DM + assistance DM

Compare the total with the task's target number. Most ordinary professional tasks used by the game are Average, target 8. A rule can set another target, choose a different characteristic and skill, or supply modifiers for time, tools, injury, fatigue, morale, environment, damage, opposition, or assistance. The action screen or result identifies the relevant assignment and important modifiers.

A trained skill contributes its level, including level 0. An untrained skill contributes -3. Jack of All Trades reduces only that untrained penalty, by its level to a maximum relief of 2; it does not add to a trained skill.

Tasks named Routine, Average, Difficult, Very Difficult, and Formidable use effective targets 6, 8, 10, 12, and 14 respectively. A task can instead state its target directly. When a rule gives a time as 1D6 seconds, minutes, kiloseconds, hours, days, or weeks, roll once in that unit. A kilosecond is 1,000 seconds, or one vessel-combat turn.

The following skills exist on people in Cepheus Trader. A specialization is a separate skill: Pilot (Spacecraft) does not grant Pilot (Small Craft), and one Engineer or Gunner specialty does not grant the others.

One person assigned to concurrent actions takes -2 on every task for each additional action when the combination is physically possible. Actions that must occur at the same instant from separate stations require separate people, a station team, or applicable automation.

Once an action is committed, its roll is made once. Refreshing a screen, disconnecting, reconnecting, or retrying the same command cannot reroll it. Commands that spend money, consume supplies, move property, accept obligations, or change standing commit atomically: either the complete result occurs once, or none of it does.

Time and persistence#

The universe advances at 28 game seconds per real second while the server is running: four game weeks pass per real day. Server downtime is frozen game time. Logging off does not pause travel, deadlines, upkeep, payroll, training, traffic, or another captain's actions.

Events resolve in the order they are accepted. No player action can overtake an earlier accepted action. A command prepared from an older revision is rejected if the relevant state has changed.

Captains, crew, and training#

Rules lineage: Cepheus Engine character and training rules; admitted third-party Open Game Content for CHA and crew operations; Cepheus Trader creation, service, and recovery rules.

Creating a command#

A new captain has six characteristic scores from 2 through 12. Begin each at 7 and distribute exactly 12 points among them; equivalently, the six final scores must total 54. A captain then selects three different skills at level 2, six at level 1, and three at level 0. Jack of All Trades can be selected only at level 1 or 2. The captain also chooses one existing non-Jack skill as the initial training course.

Every home polity offers one independent-trader command, one privateer command, and one naval command. The actual hull, fit, title, reserves, obligations, authority, and exit terms shown with an offer are part of that offer. A displayed endurance refit converts ten tons of cargo capacity into ten tons of permanent fuel capacity; it is offered only when the hull has ten tons available to convert.

Initial crew roles are fixed by the chosen fitted ship. Each initial crew package assigns the characteristic array 10, 9, 8, 8, 7, and 6 to suit its role and contains two skills at level 2, four at level 1, and three at level

0. The player names each person and selects one of that person's existing non-Jack skills for training; creation does not rewrite the role package. Captain, ship, crew, title, finance, and starting stores are created together only after final confirmation.

Initial trader crew are salaried; initial privateer crew have the same monthly salary plus a 5% prize-share term; naval crew are institutionally supplied. The salary basis is Cr1,000 per represented position each accounting month. The recorded individual privateer share is not currently deducted or distributed by prize settlement; only the aggregate crew share of a Pirate cruise has a settlement effect.

Named officers, leaders, and senior specialists have individual records. Large supporting establishments can be represented as position teams. A team has a current strength and an established complement; casualties reduce its real strength rather than creating or deleting decorative names.

Watches, condition, and morale#

A person can be assigned to one or more shipboard duties or placed off watch. Assignments must cover the positions an operation requires. Injury, fatigue, absence, shore location, treatment, and inadequate team strength can reduce or remove a person's contribution.

Physical damage reduces current END first. Further damage is spread among the remaining nonzero STR, DEX, and END values. A person with any two of those three values at zero is unconscious; a person with all three at zero is dead. Someone below the normal value of all three physical characteristics is seriously wounded. Injury changes the characteristic used by a physical task, and any fatigue applies a further -2 condition DM. Fatigue 2 incapacitates the person.

Recovery is checked once per game day. Full rest clears the coarse fatigue counter. A wounded person at full rest naturally restores 1D6 + current END DM characteristic points; an active person restores 1 + current END DM. A serious wound receives no natural recovery while active and, at full rest, restores only current END DM; a negative result can worsen the wound. Facility medical care restores **2 + current END DM + (facility Medical rating

• 1)** points per day and costs Cr5,000 for each point actually restored.

First aid is an Average EDU/Medicine task that must be attempted within one game hour of injury and only once for those wounds. Positive Effect restores that many characteristic points, doubled when aid begins within five minutes. Surgery is available only to a seriously wounded living patient at a Medical-3 facility. It is an Average EDU/Medicine task with +1 equipment DM, takes 1D6 hours, restores twice its positive Effect with a minimum of two points on success, and inflicts the negative Effect as damage on failure. It costs Cr5,000 per point restored. Inpatient care and shore leave can each be booked for one through 30 days.

Crew service is physical and contractual. Wages fall due monthly. If available cash cannot cover the whole payroll, payment is divided proportionally rather than favoring the first roster entry. Individual arrears persist and reduce morale by 10 each unpaid month; clearing prior arrears restores 5 morale.

Morale 60-100 is Steady, 40-59 Uneasy, 20-39 Disaffected, 1-19 Defiant, and 0 Broken. Disaffected service applies -1 to discretionary crew tasks; Defiant or Broken service applies -2. A salaried or prize-share crewmember at a port has a daily 20 - morale percent chance to quit when morale is below 20. Recorded wage arrears remain a service claim after departure.

Loyalty and risk tolerance are separate 0-100 service records. They describe the person's relationship to the command and appetite for danger, but the current rules attach no independent task DM, desertion roll, or automation override to either value; morale and arrears supply the active modifiers above.

Completed shore leave restores 5 morale; early recall costs 5 morale. Recall, treatment, reassignment, transfer, and discharge occur at a real shared facility; a ship that departs does not carry someone left ashore. A newly hired specialist's monthly salary is Cr1,000 x (1 + skill level)^2.

Skill training#

A person's Skill Total is the sum of all positive skill levels. Level-0 skills add zero. Training to a desired next level requires:

training weeks = current Skill Total + desired level

Levels are gained in order. A person trains only one skill during a game week, and Jack of All Trades cannot be trained. Each completed seven-day boundary adds at most one week to a valid course. Normal watches, Jump, routine work, port calls, and brief encounters do not subtract study hours. Changing the target discards current progress and starts the new course from zero.

At creation, a target must be an existing skill other than Jack of All Trades. When the required weeks are complete, the skill increases by one level and the course stops until another target is selected. Point-award advancement systems from other rulesets are not used.

Worlds, ports, and facilities#

Rules lineage: Cepheus Engine world, starport, technology, law, and trade codes; admitted third-party Open Game Content for starport services; Cepheus Trader's 3D universe and facility records.

Systems and charts#

The map is three-dimensional and distances are measured in parsecs. There are no navigation hexes or subsectors. Each stellar component is a separate system and can contain stars, planets, moons, belts, gas giants, ports, and other operational loci. One planet, moon, habitat, or belt is the system's primary world for interstellar records and commerce; it can be uninhabited. Other bodies can have their own settlements and facilities, but they do not replace the primary world's profile.

A polity is the named interstellar authority associated with a system and its service institutions. It is separate from the primary world's Government code, which describes that world's broad internal form, and from the Chaos-Order and Trade-Combat orientations defined under traffic.

Every newly founded BBS home polity is internally connected by Jump-2 legs and joins the existing system-to-system Jump-2 network that reaches Sol. Its capital therefore has a Jump-2 route to Sol through its own cluster and an already plotted contact route. The founding ship's stops on that route become visited together with every member of the new polity, creating a narrow traffic-active bridge through the former frontier without moving or regenerating older systems. The polity's protected three-parsec core is resolved before its remaining six-parsec frontier is materialized.

Charts are observations. A captain knows only systems and details carried by the ship's records or received through survey and mail. Empty surveyed space is also knowledge: it prevents a resolved volume from being rerolled merely because another captain arrives later.

At the founding epoch, the complete volume inside the fixed 43-system catalogue's convex boundary is settled first. Survey stations then plot the remaining space out to six parsecs from every catalogue system. Contacts found in that outer shell enter the public charts but remain frontier systems until a player ship physically visits them. The shell survey cannot insert another system inside the already settled catalogue volume.

Universal World Profile#

A Universal World Profile, or UWP, is the primary world's compact set of social and physical characteristics. Traditional compact notation puts the starport first, then six world codes, a hyphen, and Technology Level:

Starport-Size-Atmosphere-Hydrographics-Population-Government-Law-TL A867945-C, for example, means a Class A port, Size 8, Atmosphere 6, Hydrographics 7, Population 9, Government 4, Law 5, and TL12. The separators between the first seven fields are omitted in an actual compact profile. Codes 10 through 15 can be written A through F, but Cepheus Trader's screens ordinarily show labeled decimal values instead of requiring the captain to decode a single line.

The profile is generated in dependency order. Size is 2D6-2. Atmosphere is 2D6-7 + Size; Hydrographics is 2D6-7 + Size with penalties for hostile atmospheres; and Population is 2D6-2 with modifiers for Size, Atmosphere, and Hydrographics. Population then modifies Starport and Government, Government modifies Law, and the entire profile modifies TL. Values are limited to their stated code ranges. A Population-0 world also has Government 0, Law 0, and TL0. Resolving or revisiting a system does not reroll its accepted profile.

Physical world codes#

Size is a diameter code, not a mass or a count of worlds. The gravity values are broad surface comparisons used to give the code physical meaning.

Atmosphere describes the conditions at the inhabited world's reference surface. Tainted air requires a filter; very thin air requires a respirator; exotic air requires an independent air supply; and vacuum, corrosive, or insidious conditions require a sealed suit. Planetary excursion and personal survival procedures are outside the current game, but these codes still determine population, technology minimums, and trade classifications.

Hydrographics measures the percentage of the surface covered by liquid. Code 0 means 0%-5%; codes 1 through 9 mean 6%-15%, 16%-25%, and so on in ten-point bands; code 10 means 96%-100%. Size 0 and Size 1 worlds have Hydrographics 0. Atmospheres 0, 1, and 10-12 apply -4 to generation, while Atmosphere 14 applies -2.

Population and government#

Population is an order-of-magnitude code. It is not the number of people and does not describe how evenly they are distributed.

An inhabited primary world also has a Population Multiplier from 1 through

10. Its estimated inhabitants are Population Multiplier x 10 raised to the Population code. Thus multiplier 4 and Population 8 mean about 400,000,000 people. The multiplier is zero on an uninhabited world. The code, rather than that estimate, is used for traffic, trade-code, and profile calculations.

Population generation receives -1 for Size 0-2, -2 for Atmosphere 10 or more, +3 for Atmosphere 6, +1 for Atmosphere 5 or 8, and another -2 when Hydrographics is 0 and Atmosphere is below 3. The final code is limited to 0-10.

Government is a broad description of the primary world's governing system. It does not by itself grant a captain authority, allegiance, citizenship, rank, or immunity.

On an inhabited world, Government is 2D6-7 + Population, limited to 0-15. Law is then 2D6-7 + Government, also limited to 0-15. Government 0 forces Law 0.

Starport class and baseline services#

Starport class is generated from 2D6-7 + Population: 2 or less is X, 3-4 is E, 5-6 is D, 7-8 is C, 9-10 is B, and 11 or more is A. The class creates the primary facility's baseline, shown below. These are starting capabilities, not promises that capacity remains open: damage, occupation, missing stock, local events, and later development can change a particular facility.

The class also sets the amount of ordinary daily market stock before purchases consume it. Common-stock lots are 6D at A, 4D at B, 2D at C, 1D at D or E, and zero at X. Each common lot is 2D x 10 tons at A and 1D x 10 tons elsewhere. Other trade-stock lots are 4D at A, 3D at B, 2D at C, 1D at D or E, and zero at X; each commodity supplies its own lot-size roll.

Technology Level#

Technology Level measures local scientific and manufacturing capability. It does not guarantee a facility, stock, trained labor, authority, or parts. Imported equipment can exceed local TL, while a damaged or absent yard can make locally understood work unavailable.

For an inhabited world, TL begins with 1D6. Apply +6 for Starport A, +4 for B, +2 for C, and -4 for X. Apply +2 for Size 0-1 or +1 for Size 2-4; +1 for Atmosphere 0-3 or 10-15; +1 for Hydrographics 0 or 9 or +2 for 10; +1 for Population 1-5 or 9 or +2 for Population 10; and the Government modifier +1 at 0 or 5, +2 at 7, or -2 at 13-14.

Hostile environments impose minimums needed to sustain the recorded population: TL4 for Hydrographics 0 or 10 with Population 6 or more; TL5 for Atmosphere 4, 7, or 9; and TL7 for Atmosphere 0-3, Atmosphere 10-12, or an Atmosphere 13-14 world with Hydrographics 10. Use the rolled result or the applicable minimum, whichever is higher.

Trade codes#

Trade codes are classifications derived from the UWP, not additional random traits. A world can have several. Cepheus Trader uses the following codes in its commodity market:

Each non-common commodity names up to two favorable purchase codes and two favorable sale codes. If several listed codes match the world, only the strongest applicable DM is added on each side of the negotiation. A code therefore changes the chance of reaching a purchase or sale outcome; it does not multiply the price by itself. Common Goods have no trade-code DM.

Law, legality, and services#

Law Level 0 means no general legal restrictions. Levels 1-3 are low law, 4-6 medium law, 7-9 high law, and 10 or more extreme law. The number is used directly; the band is only a description. A higher Law Level increases the ordinary enforcement and customs environment, while a captain's actual authority still comes from government service, a commission, a warrant, a lawful order, or immediate necessity as described later in these rules.

The commodity catalogue assigns a restriction threshold to seven controlled goods. At the threshold the good is restricted. Three Law Levels above the threshold it becomes prohibited.

All other catalogued commodities are ordinarily legal regardless of Law Level. Local events, a warrant, task terms, or an authority order can still govern a particular lot. Law 8 or more also makes clearance a baseline requirement at the primary port. The ordinary market tariff is 5% plus 0.5% per Law Level.

During a compliant customs inspection, prohibited ordinary cargo is confiscated and a fine of 10% of its base value is collected, limited by the credits currently available. Restricted cargo remains aboard after a compliant inspection unless another displayed rule or order says otherwise. Any unpaid part of the assessment becomes a warrant with a bounty equal to that balance. Refusing a lawful Inspection or Military encounter with any posture except Comply or Surrender begins vessel combat and files one Cr10,000, perfect-evidence refusal warrant in that system.

Every port service comes from a persistent facility. A menu, map, or high TL does not create a bank, yard, hospital, authority office, fuel source, berth, or market that is not present and capable. Capacity can be occupied by real work, and quoted work reserves the named facility until completion or valid cancellation.

Markets, cargo, and contracts#

Rules lineage: Cepheus Engine trade and carriage rules; admitted third-party Open Game Content for merchant finance, passengers, cargo, crew, ports, and customs; Cepheus Trader persistent-market rules.

Markets and negotiation#

The commodity catalogue contains the six Common Goods and 35 generic D66 results from the adopted merchant trade table. Result 66 is reserved for unusual, individually recorded objects rather than generic stock. Reading the catalogue supplies no stock, quantity, counterparty, or price.

Trade is search, negotiation, and explicit acceptance. An ordinary physical supplier/buyer search is Broker+EDU and an online search is Computers+EDU; both take 1D6 game hours. The temporary all-captains association benefit makes ordinary work Average. Each previous search of that side in the same system and 30-day market month applies DM-1. A supplier success creates individual source-sized lots using the starport common/trade lot tables. Failure supplies common lots only, spectacular success doubles both categories, and spectacular failure finds nothing. The captain states a whole-ton maximum; the broker keeps canvassing within the same action until a rolled lot fits.

A discovered supplier or buyer then requires a separate 1D6-minute Broker+CHA negotiation. Apply the strongest matching trade-code DM to its Effect and use:

A completed negotiation displays the actual quote against a universal catalog-based five-number range. The purchase range is 80%-120% of catalog. The sale range is 80%-156%, combining every possible 80%-120% purchase basis with every 100%-130% buyer outcome. Q1, median, and Q3 divide each absolute credit span evenly. Those landmarks do not depend on the negotiator and are not probabilities. No price chart is supplied before negotiation.

Sale basis is the lot's actual purchase price, or catalog appraisal for extracted/captured cargo. Purchases automatically add a ten-percent loader fee. The buyer pays destination import tariff. Origin export tariff is not in the quote: it is stored on purchased cargo and collected when the merchant clears the berth. Purchase totals round up; sale proceeds round down.

Counterparties persist through the later of month end or seven days after discovery. Rejecting a supplier quote makes another negotiation with that counterparty one difficulty harder for one week; rejecting a buyer closes it. There are no anonymous executable quotes, reservations, escrow, daily price rerolls, or market-event price modifiers.

Prohibited goods receive no open-exchange purchase or sale quote. A physical private-introduction supplier or buyer search uses Streetwise; an online buyer search uses Computers. Broker still governs the resulting price negotiation. Every cargo lot has an owner, commodity, quantity, physical ship or facility, and provenance. Speculative cargo belongs to the captain's estate; freight belongs to its principal. Splitting a transaction cannot duplicate credits or cargo.

Quantities are retained to 0.001 ton. Purchased speculative cargo cannot be offered to a buyer at its acquisition port. Splitting a transaction cannot duplicate credits or cargo.

Commodity reference#

The following is the complete generic commodity catalogue. A lot expression such as 2D x 5 tons means roll two dice and multiply their sum by five tons. The purchase and sale columns give the trade-code DMs used by the negotiation; only the strongest matching DM on each side applies. Common Goods use the starport-dependent lot rules given under Starport class and have no trade-code DM.

Prohibited trade#

Prohibited goods use no open counterparty. A physical private introduction is Streetwise+CHA, Very Difficult, and takes 1D6 game days; spectacular failure finds a law/security agent. An online prohibited-buyer search is Computers+EDU, Difficult, and takes 1D6 game hours. Price negotiation remains Broker+CHA and receives no temporary association benefit. Restricted goods remain on the ordinary path pending deeper permit enforcement.

A buyer search names one player-owned speculative cargo lot and a maximum quantity. Freight, contract cargo, unique objects, and purchased goods still at their acquisition port do not qualify. Buyer quantity follows the commodity's published lot expression, bounded by the physical lot and the captain's maximum. No lead is produced if no fitting lot exists.

Carriage and tasks#

Ordinary freight, passengers, and electronic mail use a standing declaration for one destination. The captain states maximum freight, eligible passenger capacity, and whether to accept mail. Departure previews a concrete manifest and brokerage, then loads those exact offers if they remain valid. Freight is a titled physical lot; passengers occupy actual eligible accommodation; mail uses the declared route but never causes a voyage.

Standing carriage pays by billed route hop. The current offer generator treats each edge in the operational route as one billed parsec even when its 3D length differs, and the displayed signed offer controls. A regular passenger needs one uncommitted passenger berth; low passage needs one low berth. High and middle passengers require someone aboard with Etiquette, and low passengers require someone aboard with Medicine.

The ledger supports all four ordinary classes, but the current local offer generator emits Middle passage only. Charters use the High rate and couriers use their signed special rate; no ordinary generated offer presently emits High, Steerage, or Low passage.

The departure preview is authoritative: it names the offers, occupied capacity, gross revenue, brokerage, and revision that commit will use. If an offer or its revision changes first, departure is rejected for a fresh preview instead of loading a different manifest. Each selected freight offer also charges a stable brokerage of Cr100-Cr300 per whole ton, derived from that offer; passage has no additional brokerage.

Other offers become durable Tasks. Current types include freight, passage, purchase orders, forward sales, supply commitments, charters, couriers, and bounties. Each offer states closing time, origin, destination, performing capacity, collateral, payment, deadline, failure penalty, and whether partial performance is allowed.

Generated offers are local work routed through nearby settled systems. Their normal delivery deadline is 14 days + 7 days per route hop after issue. Freight offers are 5-30 tons and pay Cr3,500 per ton per hop; middle-passage offers carry 1-6 travelers at Cr10,000 each per hop. Purchase orders pay Cr6,000 per ton per hop, forward sales Cr7,000, and four-performance supply commitments Cr12,000. Charters pay high-passage rates, couriers Cr30,000 per hop, and combat bounties Cr50,000 per hop. Route scarcity and active local events can adjust the displayed payment, so the signed offer always controls.

During an eligible passenger grace period, late payment deductions equal 10% of the offered payment for each started late day, never more than the payment. Ordinary passengers have three days of grace; charters and couriers have one. Other generated work has no late-delivery grace. Partial purchase, forward-sale, and supply terms pay the delivered fraction. Freight and passenger terms require the full consignment unless their signed offer expressly says otherwise.

A local claim at its issuing office can be awarded immediately. A remote claim is a signed message that must physically reach that office. Capacity and collateral remain reserved while it travels. Competing claims are decided by arrival order. The private award or decline must then reach the captain before custody transfers. Closure notices also travel, so a stale remote offer can still accept a claim that will later be declined.

Custody transfers only at the required origin and stays with the performing ship. A route change never rewrites an obligation. Delivery removes custody once and sends a settlement filing to the issuing office. Payment and collateral return only when the remittance reaches the captain. Late, incomplete, cancelled, returned, defaulted, and disputed work follow the terms shown in the Task ledger; restart cannot duplicate payment or release.

Before custody transfers, an unresolved claim may be withdrawn and an awarded task may be cancelled without performance liability. After loading, entrusted cargo or passengers can be returned only while docked at the origin. Default forfeits collateral and assesses the displayed failure penalty plus capped non-delivery liability, but never takes more liquid credits than are present. A dispute requires written grounds and remains an obligation while its sealed filing travels to the issuing office.

Finance and title#

An independent trader purchase begins with 20% equity and 80% secured debt. Monthly principal is purchase price divided by 240, rounded up, and continues each accounting month until the recorded principal reaches zero; mandatory insurance is separate. A missed principal or insurance installment has one accounting month of grace before default action.

For a non-naval command, annual mandatory insurance is 1.02% of purchase price, rounded up, + Cr15,000; its monthly escrow is that amount divided by 12, rounded up. Principal and insurance are paid together every 30 game days. Restricted operating credit may cover the insurance portion, but only liquid funds can reduce a trader's secured principal.

Privateer vessels are sponsor-owned and naval vessels are institution-owned. Restricted operating credit pays authorized vessel expenses before liquid cash and can pay required insurance, but it does not pay secured principal, private trade, collateral, private messages, fines, or other personal costs. Command, possession, title, and debt are separate facts.

The command account journal distinguishes liquid, restricted operating, reserved, and secured-principal postings. Every balance change and its exact resulting balance are committed in the same authoritative transaction as the purchase, payment, hold, release, income, transfer, or financing event. The journal is retained indefinitely and can be filtered by transaction class or vessel. An estate created before the journal receives a single carried-forward opening entry; the game does not invent a historical reconstruction.

Task income does not enter liquid funds when delivery is merely certified. Until the settlement filing reaches the issuing office and its remittance reaches the captain, Accounts reports the payment and collateral release as pending. The displayed resolution day is an estimate based on the known mail route and may move as carrier service changes. Pending income is never included in spendable or available cash.

A naval captain can forge a positive ship-expense receipt no greater than the available service balance, moving that amount to personal cash immediately. All false receipts remain for the next accounting audit. Let A be their total, N their count, and E the legitimate authorized expenses that month. Detection percent is:

ceil(((5 x bit-length(A)) + min(10 x (N - 1), 20)) x (50 + floor(100 x A / (A + E))) / 100)

The result is limited to 1%-90%. Here bit-length is 1 for Cr1, 2 for Cr2-3, 3 for Cr4-7, and so on. A detected audit files a forgery warrant at the captain's origin with bounty max(2 x A, Cr100); the warrant then propagates normally by mail. Legitimate expense totals and pending receipt totals reset at the accounting boundary.

When a grace period expires, the lender files a private impound order at the captain's origin. It is enforceable elsewhere only after the signed message arrives. Posting one overdue installment clears the default and sets the next due date one accounting month later. An irrecoverable bankruptcy petition is available only while docked and in default: the fleet is liquidated, a named successor receives a replacement command in the original starter class under a new lien, and the captain's career, legal, and estate history remains.

Ship and crew exchanges are finite daily port markets. Ship offers can draw from every active Jump-capable catalog design that local TL can support; an offer that another buyer claims disappears. A used ship retains its actual age, use, damage, and any latent construction quirk, so advertised condition is not a diagnosis. Purchase settles price, trade-in, title, lien, condition, ordinary cargo, and assigned crew atomically. A trade-in is refused while the old vessel holds active Tasks, entrusted cargo, or passengers. Keeping it leaves its obligations and physical stores aboard that hull.

An operational construction yard also offers every admitted catalog design whose displacement and component TL fit that facility. A new commission takes a 20% deposit, finances the remaining 80%, and places the named but undelivered hull in Fleet for the catalog construction time. It cannot accept a captain, stores, or active command before delivery. Warranty, maintenance, berth aging, and monthly finance dates begin when construction completes, not when the contract is signed.

Ship operation and condition#

Rules lineage: Cepheus Engine ship operation, fuel, maintenance, and damage; admitted third-party Open Game Content for construction, refits, services, and warranties; Cepheus Trader condition ledgers.

Capacity and stores#

Cargo, passenger places, crew accommodation, low berths, hangars, fuel tanks, magazines, and carried craft are physical installed capacity. The Ship Catalog publishes each vessel's complete fitted record. An action cannot use spare capacity that another lot, passenger, prisoner, store, or craft already occupies.

Fuel is refined or unrefined and remains in the ship's tanks. Provisions are a physical store consumed by crew and awake passengers; people in low berths use their berth support instead. Ammunition belongs to installed compatible weapons and is removed when fired. Departure rejects a known shortage rather than creating supplies through a background charge.

Fuel and cargo transactions use 0.001-ton units. Dockside fuel may be bought in any positive quantity at that resolution, allowing an exact fill after fractional consumption. The final charge rounds up to a whole credit, so splitting a purchase cannot reduce its price. Refined fuel costs Cr500 per ton and unrefined fuel Cr100 per ton where the port table permits it. A tank can contain both; the unrefined portion is tracked. Every power-plant or Jump burn draws refined and unrefined fuel proportionally to the tank mixture (with deterministic integer rounding), so the Jump penalty follows whether that specific burn consumes any unrefined fuel rather than assuming refined fuel is always used first.

New ships begin with 30 person-days of provisions for every awake-accommodation place and can store at most 180 per place. Away from a berth, one person-day is consumed daily by each represented living crewmember and awake passenger. Docked ordinary crew arrange their own meals. The captain consumes one ship person-day or, if stores are empty, automatically buys an ashore meal from liquid credits at twice the ship's package-average person-day price. A person may go three days without food; subsequent days require the CE Routine (+2) Endurance check with cumulative DM-1 per prior check, and failure causes 1D6 damage that cannot heal until the person is fed. Shipboard water is assumed available. A dockside monthly package costs Cr2,000 per ordinary or compact stateroom, Cr3,000 per crew berth or barracks allocation, Cr5,000 per high-class stateroom, Cr100 per low berth, and Cr100 per emergency-berth place.

Ordinary berthing costs Cr100 for the first six game days, then Cr100 for each additional started day. The accrued charge must be clear before departure or yard work. Restricted operating credit is used first for authorized ship services.

Routine upkeep, wear, and warranty#

Routine maintenance is continuing onboard work charged every 30 game days at one twelfth of 0.1% of ship value. Paying it prevents neglect-related degradation; it does not heal combat damage, reset age, conceal a known defect, or replace a destroyed component. If the operating account cannot cover the complete charge, no partial payment is taken, the cycle is recorded as missed, and the normal neglect check applies.

The monthly charge is purchase price divided by 12,000, rounded up. On a missed cycle roll 2D6 + consecutive missed cycles. A total below 8 adds no damage; on 8 or more a further 1D6 applies one hit on 1-3, two on 4-5, or three on 6 to an eligible installation. Paying a later routine charge resets the consecutive-miss count and prevents that month's check, but does not erase an earlier missed cycle's neglect hits.

Installations separately record calendar age, operating time, Jump and maneuver cycles, and stressful skimming cycles. Hidden construction quirks can manifest only through relevant use. Once manifested, their symptoms are reported; routine upkeep does not erase them.

A new ship carries ordinary warranty until either five years or 200 transits. Gas-giant skimming voids it. A qualifying defect can be removed without charge by a capable facility while coverage remains; warranty expiry does not itself cause a failure. A newly replaced component records a five-year component warranty date; a reconditioned replacement records one year.

At a paid monthly maintenance boundary while docked at an operational Class A-C repair shop, each covered quirk is independently detected and removed on 4-in-6 if it has manifested or 1-in-6 if it is still latent. Warranty coverage requires both the five-year date and 200-transit limit to remain unexpired and must not have been voided.

Age and transit use take whichever is further through the five-year/200- transit reference. The first 20% is a declining shakedown-risk period, the ordinary useful-life risk is 20 chances per million per accounting month, and wear-out rises after 180% of the reference. Each gas-skimming cycle also counts as a transit for wear. These probabilities govern hidden defect attachment; ordinary status checks reveal symptoms only after a relevant use manifests them.

Damage, repair, refit, and replacement#

Battlefield repair, proper repair, refit, refurbishment, and replacement are different operations.

• A battlefield repair temporarily covers a sustained combat result and expires when the encounter ends.
• A proper repair removes eligible underlying damage at a capable facility. It takes one game day per sustained hit, has no parts charge beyond accrued berth because routine upkeep covers ordinary repair items, and does not change age or service history. It remains tied to that berth: a successful departure cancels unfinished work and its completion event, leaving the underlying damage unchanged.
• A refit overhauls the ship, takes four to six game weeks, and costs four monthly maintenance payments. It clears eligible wear penalties but does not replace destroyed installations.
• Refurbishment or replacement buys the actual catalog component work needed for a destroyed or exhausted installation.

Away from a yard, post-combat recovery chooses the best conscious qualified person and attempts an EDU/Mechanic task with injury, fatigue, and field-tool modifiers. Each attempt takes one full game day and removes one underlying sustained hit only on success. Destroyed installations require refurbishment or replacement.

Automatic recovery works in dependency-aware order: life support, maneuver drive, Jump drive, then weapons. Hull containment, power, bridge, fuel, or control work needed by a higher priority belongs to that priority.

Proper repair requires an operational repair shop able to support the ship's TL. Refit yard limits are Class C for hulls through 800 tons, Class B through 2,000 tons, and Class A above that, subject also to the port's published yard capacity. Only one yard activity can be active at a time. A refit clears repairable physical damage, temporary patches, neglect damage, and minor latent quirks; it retains hull and component age, usage counters, destroyed installations, and deeper component faults. New and reconditioned replacement quotes use the actual catalog component and give only the replaced component a new installation record and component warranty.

Flight, fuel, and Jump#

Rules lineage: Cepheus Engine maneuver, Jump, course plotting, fuel, and misjump rules; compatible admitted third-party operational procedures; Cepheus Trader flight plans and 3D geometry. Alternate interstellar-drive systems are not used.

Flight plans#

A Flight Plan is the ship's executable route, separate from Tasks and Known Universe. Each checkpoint has either Hold authority, which waits for the captain's arrival watch, or Through authority, which may resolve contacts under standing orders and continue while the captain is away. Separately, one terminal marker is always attached to the last step and ends the plan after that step completes. Filing commits only the reviewed revision. Completed steps and accepted custody cannot be undone by editing later steps.

The door presents adjacent implementation steps as logical route items. A new charted leg first selects the target system, then its first in-system destination (port, world or moon, gas giant, or belt), and finally standard or private/offset emergence. The Jump and its first normal-space maneuver form one charted leg; further in-system stops or another Jump can follow. Any future item can have its checkpoint authority or settings changed, be deleted, or have a charted leg inserted before or after it. The active physical operation cannot simply disappear, but an active normal-space destination can be redirected. Future items can be reordered and charted destinations replaced; dependent charted loci are rebuilt, while an ordering that would detach a body-specific or coordinate operation from its actual locus is refused.

Revising a plan does not restart its current physical operation. A change only to later items or encounter policy preserves the active maneuver, Jump, Belt Cycle, frontier-fuel operation, or onboard refining work and its scheduled completion. Changing the active destination in normal space instead computes a new bounded-thrust intercept from the ship's actual position and velocity. Once Jump begins, its emergence destination is physically fixed, but later items and encounter policy remain editable. Completed steps remain visible but locked.

Generated task routes and ordinary routes default to Through at every checkpoint, including the terminal step, so they can complete while the captain is away. Player Preferences can change either route type to generate Hold checkpoints instead. The setting affects future proposals, not filed plans; Hold must therefore be chosen explicitly either as that preference or in the editor.

A plan can include port purchases, wilderness water or ice collection, gas-giant skimming, Jump loci, known systems, surveyed coordinates, imported plotted courses, and mining-drone Belt Cycles at catalogued planetoid belts. Preview calculates known time, fuel, purchases, and obligation warnings. When proper repair is active, preview marks the first planned berth-clearing step and requires acknowledgement that departure will cancel the work; refit and other yard operations remain departure blockers. Warnings are numbered once below the route and referenced beside every affected step. If a required service, source, payment, or course is no longer valid when reached, the plan holds instead of silently substituting another one.

Each ship also has default encounter standing orders, edited from Task Management. A new plan begins with that default; changing the ship default does not silently rewrite a filed plan. The Flight Plan editor can load the default, keep different orders for this plan, or save its orders back as the ship default. For every encounter type, the order names an ordinary response and a separate Fight condition: Never, Always, or only when the estimated combat outlook meets a percentage. Hostile orders additionally carry an ordered list of permitted emergency fallbacks. Preview separately warns and requires acknowledgement whenever filed orders may attack a contact that has not attacked the ship.

Belt prospecting and mining#

A Belt Cycle leaves the primary berth, travels to the named belt, and exposes prospecting, survey, mining, refining, field recovery, and egress as distinct scheduled phases. It must include a later validated port egress. The ship protects enough power-plant fuel for that filed route using 184 hours per remaining Jump, plus one additional day. Work repeats only while the lode, cargo capacity, and that reserve remain. A failed recovery attempt aborts the cycle immediately to the filed egress; it never leaves the ship holding for an offline captain.

Prospecting uses an Average INT/Trade (Prospector) task in six-hour watches. Discoveries create persistent shared lodes, but the observation belongs only to the discovering captain. A discovery is not an exclusive claim: another crew can independently find and work the same deposit. Ordinary lodes range from ten to one million tons of feedstock. Their generated belt composition, extent, grade, and remaining quantity persist after every extraction.

The game does not offer a blind sensor sweep for active miners across an entire belt: its physical volume makes geometric coincidence an unhelpful player action. Another operation can instead become contactable through a traffic record, transponder or radio emission, shared observation, contract, or an interception watch already established at that catalogued belt. System population and local order can affect how many such leads exist without pretending that every ship in the belt occupies the same sensor-local point.

One installed mining-drone set handles 1D6 x 10 tons of feedstock per day. A successful daily Prospector task produces the full result; Effect -1 halves it; Effect -2 or worse produces nothing and starts a 1D6-hour Mechanic recovery. Successful recovery resumes work and failed recovery begins egress.

Without a mineral refinery, recovered feedstock is stowed as Basic Unrefined Ore. A refinery separates a grade-dependent output up to its daily capacity: silicate and carbonaceous finds become Basic Raw Materials, metal-bearing ore becomes Raw Materials, hydrocarbons become Petrochemicals, and exceptional finds can become Crystals and Gems, Precious Metals, or Radioactive Ore. Discarded tailings do not consume cargo space. Icy output can instead top up unrefined fuel when the ship has fuel-processing equipment. Every mined cargo lot retains its source system, body, and persistent lode identity.

Task delivery occurs when docking completes, not when an arrival checkpoint becomes ready. Preview marks a task deadline in red when projected docking is late. It also marks a timely Hold checkpoint when the captain must take arrival watch before the deadline. If the captain waits, the task can default even though the ship reached its checkpoint earlier.

Ordinary interplanetary transfer uses continuous acceleration to the midpoint and continuous deceleration afterward. For a stationary endpoint estimate:

travel time in seconds = 2 x square root of (distance in meters / acceleration in meters per second squared)

Flight time uses the orbital positions at departure and the vessel's actual acceleration, so a moving destination or later departure can change the answer.

An underway ship may replace its course during any in-system maneuver. The new estimate starts from the ship's position and velocity relative to the moving destination at the instant the replacement is filed; it does not pretend that the ship has stopped. The navigation computer finds the shortest whole-second two-burn intercept whose acceleration never exceeds the ship's effective maneuver thrust and which reaches the destination with the destination's orbital velocity. A velocity shared by the whole system cancels out of this calculation. The captain may turn back to the primary port, redirect to either conventional Jump traffic locus, or redirect to a selected belt or lawful frontier fuel source. A ship already in Jump space cannot maneuver or replace that physical Jump leg.

Jump range and fuel#

A Jump drive rating is the maximum parsecs in one Jump. Any positive sub-parsec Jump counts as Jump-1, and every fractional distance rounds up to its Jump number for fuel and tape price. Required fuel is:

Jump fuel tons = 0.1 x hull displacement tons x Jump number

Jump can begin or end only outside the union of the 100-diameter exclusion zones of relevant massive bodies. By traffic convention, the published departure locus is north of the system ecliptic and the published arrival locus is south. Either is physically legal for departure, although using the inbound locus is bad traffic practice. Maneuver flight between a port and either legal locus uses the ship's real thrust, position, time, and fuel rules. Away from a berth, the ship's ordinary power-plant allocation burns continuously at the rate implied by its catalogued endurance. Fractional burn is retained exactly between scheduled settlements; an older save establishes a fresh timestamp without retroactive consumption.

An onboard plot is an EDU/Astrogation task against 8 with an equipment DM of 4 - Jump number and takes 1D6 kiloseconds. A failed plot normally holds the plan for recalculation; the captain may instead give explicit authority to use it, which makes the Jump an automatic misjump. A fresh commercial course tape skips that task, costs Cr1,000 per Jump number, and is sold only at an operational Class-D-or-better origin for a populated destination. Initiation is an Average EDU/Engineer (Jump) task taking 1D6 x 10 seconds. Its Effect contributes to the Jump success result. Drive damage and unrefined fuel apply normally.

A fresh tape is purchased while clearing a berth. A Jump that follows a body or traffic-locus stop without docking must use onboard plotting; returning to port makes a new tape purchase possible.

The Jump success total is:

2D6 + initiation Effect - 2 per Jump-drive hit - 2 if any Jump fuel burned is unrefined

A known bad plot automatically misjumps. The 100-diameter rule is enforced before initiation, so an ordinary filed plan cannot exchange an unsafe origin for a dice penalty.

A normal Jump lasts 148 + 6D6 hours. Inaccurate emergence, misjump, and transition critical damage persist as physical results; disconnecting cannot avoid them. An inaccurate emergence or misjump that damages a subsystem also creates a durable Engineering Casualty Report naming the route, timing consequence, damaged installation, resulting hit total, and operational effect. A connected captain receives it at the next safe prompt; a disconnected captain receives it on the next sign-on. It remains until positively acknowledged, while the game clock and any still-valid filed plan continue.

The same report and acknowledgement rule applies when an exceptional fuel-processing failure damages a subsystem or unpaid routine upkeep causes neglect damage. These are one report per damaging operation or upkeep check, not one report per damage hit. Combat damage remains aggregated in the combat, encounter-result, and Command Loss Report procedures instead of entering this non-combat report queue.

A standard emergence uses a safe point outside every 100-diameter exclusion zone and nearest the filed first in-system destination. The ship then performs ordinary interplanetary travel to that port or named body. A private emergence uses a seeded offset direction and additional standoff distance from the same target. It avoids the ordinary published-arrival contact check but lengthens the normal-space maneuver. It does not bypass port law: a later docking still performs the port contact/inspection procedure, and high-law ports require inspection there. Deliberately emerging at the primary world's published departure locus remains possible, but conflicts with outbound traffic and carries the same increased contact risk as using the wrong lane for departure.

Staged Jump and frontier fuel#

A destination can be empty space. A double-tanked Jump-1 ship can cross two parsecs with two separately resolved Jump-1 legs and a mandatory one-game-day midpoint turnaround. The midpoint supplies no port, fuel, market, mail, traffic, or rescue. It consumes ordinary endurance, provisions, crew time, and contract time. Two fresh Jump-1 tapes have a baseline price of Cr2,000.

Refined port fuel is safest. Unrefined port fuel, lawful wilderness water or ice, and gas-giant skimming can reduce purchase cost but require their actual source, equipment, time, and authority. Collection rights do not follow from hydrographics alone. Skimming adds wear and voids the ordinary new-ship warranty. Each collection operation is a named Flight Plan step; failure or a changed legal condition holds the plan.

A scoop permits collection without a processor. The captain explicitly chooses whether an installed processor refines the collected batch; otherwise it enters the tanks as unrefined fuel. Processing is Average (8+) Engineer (Power)/EDU. Failure doubles processing time. Effect -6 or worse also causes one sustained hit to the Jump drive, falling back to the maneuver drive and then the fuel system when necessary. Unrefined fuel already aboard may be processed to 0.001-ton resolution as a stationary Flight Plan step while docked or safely holding. Selected feedstock is protected from power burn, and an off-berth attempt requires enough other fuel for the worst-case doubled duration.

Information, mail, and discovery#

Rules lineage: Cepheus Engine mail and communication assumptions; Cepheus Trader causal communication, encryption, mapping, and discovery procedures.

Light and carriage#

There is no faster-than-light radio. Within normal space, transmissions and sensor evidence travel no faster than light. Across a Jump boundary, electronic information must be physically carried by a ship. A report is not known at its destination until its signal or carrier arrives.

Maintained Jump-locus beacons exchange sealed route-eligible mailbags with departing and arriving vessels. A direct carried hop pays Cr100 + Cr1 per envelope on delivery. Accepting a mailbag never chooses or changes the vessel's route. News, offers, warrants, market reports, and institutional replies keep their event, observation, dispatch, and arrival times; later local facts do not rewrite an old message.

Private correspondence costs Cr1 per started KiB per charged hop per started TTL week. TTL is selected from one through 52 game weeks. Fixed-system mail uses its known route; mobile addressee mail propagates within its reachable TTL sphere. A destination-assistance policy costs Cr350,000 per year and can be bound or cancelled only while docked; cancellation has no refund.

Survey and mapping#

First arrival records the ship's real observations and surveyed empty volume. The captain can keep a system secret, share it directly, make it public, or file a private discovery claim. A disclosure becomes known only through its ordinary physical messages.

Institutional affiliation follows the same causal boundary. A captain's home BBS and polity are known locally at login. A League name, when present, is an institutional affiliation rather than part of the polity's name. The Known Universe shows a remote system's BBS, polity, and optional League only after that system's mapping is KnownPublic; a private observation, withheld chart, secret chart, direct filing, or still-travelling public dispatch does not leak those fields. A League rename updates current dossiers and console identity, but it does not rewrite already dispatched historical news.

The first valid private claim for a newly discovered settled system is judged at Earth. Its award is Cr218,000. Competing filings are decided when they physically reach the adjudicating office, and the public notice begins its own outward carriage only after judgment.

A valid filing includes canonical 3D position and distinguishing stellar observations, authenticated captain and discovering-ship identities, observation and dispatch times with custody and route provenance, and survey evidence of an established population rather than a transient ship, camp, cache, or new player base. The first valid receipt committed at Earth's repository wins; discovery time, dispatch time, arrival at another Federation office, and the claimant's return do not reserve priority. A public report starts at the source. An encrypted direct filing remains private in transit; if it wins, Earth originates the authoritative public notice.

Traffic and encounters#

Rules lineage: Cepheus Engine encounter checks and opposed crew tasks; admitted third-party Open Game Content for traffic, ports, naval operations, and piracy; Cepheus Trader contact geography and causal response.

Where traffic exists#

Traffic concentrates at ports, inhabited worlds, gas giants, Jump arrival loci, and Jump departure loci. Ordinary interplanetary space is sparse unless a ship's actual trajectory makes contact or interception possible. Jump space contains no ordinary encounters.

Scheduled route traffic is observable for one game hour before through one hour after its route edge. Local persistent traffic is assigned 55% to ports, 30% to Jump loci, and 15% to other bodies; deep-space ships are visible only when their real trajectories supply a contact solution. Generated traffic never enters, exits, or passes through an unvisited frontier system. Plotting or publishing a contact does not open it to background traffic. Initial catalogue systems and BBS polity members are established visited systems; an ordinary frontier system opens on the first player arrival or when it is an actual stop on a later BBS founding contact route. Traffic volume follows population, starport, connectivity, route demand, and vessels capable of the route rather than a fixed encounter table.

At an arrival checkpoint with N eligible nearby traffic vessels, the standard one-in-six candidate check is combined as:

contact chance = 1 - (5/6)^N

An encounter still requires sensor contact and a feasible relative-position solution. Refreshing the arrival screen does not make another independent traffic roll. Sparse traffic follows persistent route schedules rather than appearing once per visitor.

For each local contact, sensors roll:

2D6 + ship Electronics DM + target size DM - 2 per uncovered sensor hit

Size DM is -1 below 100 tons, +0 from 100-999 tons, +1 from 1,000-4,999 tons, and +2 at 5,000 tons or more. A total of 10+ identifies the vessel at 80% + 5% per point above 10, maximum 100%. A total of 6-9 gives an approximate size class and tonnage at 45% + 10% per point above 6, maximum 75%. A lower total provides only its transponder at 25% confidence. Approximate data does not reveal the hidden catalog design.

A cooperative vessel's identification transmission includes its declared ship name, transponder, and registered class. Those are claims made by the contact, not additional sensor resolution. The encounter view therefore presents them separately from the sensor classification and confidence: an exact declared class can accompany only a 45% approximate size-class return. A dark or non-identifying contact has no declared class to display. Sensor classification continues to expose only the generic size class, never the hidden catalog design inferred from the declaration.

Each polity also has two public 0-100 orientations: Trade-Combat describes commercial versus martial priorities, and Chaos-Order describes loose versus controlled administration. Neither replaces the world's Law Level. For traffic enforcement, local security is:

(Chaos-Order + 10 x min(Law Level, 10)) / 2

Strongly ordered systems more often challenge arrivals with customs or naval pickets. Pirate pickets favor uncontrolled arrival and frontier-fuel loci and retreat as traffic and enforcement make them untenable. A pirate compares the observed target with its own capability and can abandon a plainly disastrous intercept.

Encounter posture and fallback#

The arrival screen describes responses in terms of the actual contact. Routine traffic exchanges identification and continues immediately. Traffic-control orders may be followed or declined while maneuvering clear; an inspection may be submitted to or refused; distress and derelict contacts may be assisted or investigated instead of reported while continuing; debris may be avoided or tracked while holding course; and a naval challenge may be answered or refused. At a captain-held encounter, a physical inspection, assistance attempt, sensor pass, or maneuver queues one kilosecond of authoritative action time. The pending display reports that completion time; it is not a wait for the other vessel's approval.

Every encounter also permits Fight, which immediately treats the displayed contact as hostile and enters Vessel Combat. The immediate routine-identification completion applies only when identification is exchanged, not when Fight is chosen. Unless a locally accepted Naval Order or Privateer Commission names that exact contact, fighting a contact that has not already attacked is an unauthorized armed interception: it adds 10 public heat, files a 75%-evidence warrant, and changes an Independent force-career record to Pirate.

Hostile encounters additionally use Flee, Meet Demand, Surrender, or Board posture and may carry Surrender, Abandon, Jettison Cargo, and Break Off fallbacks. Filed Flight Plan policy supplies responses at a Through checkpoint. The default policy flees hostile contacts with Surrender fallback, complies with inspections, reports distress, and does not divert to assist. Complying with an Inspection applies the customs rule above. Meeting a hostile demand releases the ship; Surrender immediately loses the command.

The displayed Combat outlook is the percentage used by conditional Fight orders. It deliberately remains sensor-limited: Favorable, Comparable, Dangerous, and Overwhelming assessments map to coarse estimates rather than an omniscient combat simulation, and Unknown has no percentage and never satisfies a threshold. It can change when the ship obtains better information and is not a promise that combat will produce that result.

Other hostile postures resolve each kilosecond with:

captain total = 2D6 + highest of Pilot (Spacecraft), Tactics (Naval), or Gunner (Turrets) level + posture DM + intervention DM

The posture DM is +1 for Fight or Board and +2 for Flee. The opponent rolls 2D6+2. Beginning on turn two in a Law-6-or-higher system, a 1-in-4 delayed law intervention gives the captain +3 for that turn. The captain succeeds by beating the opponent by at least 2: Flee escapes, Board secures the hostile as a prize, and Fight disables it.

Otherwise the ship takes 1 + one hit per three full points by which the opponent leads, applied to Hull and then Structure, and another turn is queued unless a fallback resolves it. Jettison Cargo drops half of every cargo lot and ends the encounter. At the end of turn four, Surrender fallback loses the command; without it, the hostile breaks away. Abandon and Break Off can be ordered, but the current encounter revision gives them no outcome distinct from that non-surrender fourth-turn breakaway.

Interception and response#

Contact does not teleport ships together. Interception uses actual position, velocity, thrust, fuel, and projected motion. A distress call or weapons emission reaches an observer only after separation divided by the speed of light, and identifies no more than the observer's sensors and provenance support.

A responder must then fly a feasible intercept. If it arrives before combat ends, it joins at that time; otherwise it can reach only pursuit, rescue, arrest, salvage, or aftermath. Computer and absent-player ships evaluate the same delayed, uncertain evidence available to a captain, not hidden truth.

An armed intercept is legally authorized only by a locally received warrant associated with that vessel or by an accepted Naval Order or Privateer Commission naming that exact traffic contact. An arrest purpose is unavailable without the local warrant. A pirate lead or commission identifies prey and terms but does not legalize the attack. Any other armed intercept or boarding demand adds 10 public heat, files a 75%-evidence warrant, and changes an Independent captain's force-career record to Pirate. A berthed or landed background contact cannot be attacked directly; a player vessel can instead be watched for departure at the shared locus.

Vessel combat#

Rules lineage: Cepheus Engine space-combat turns, actions, reactions, range, attacks, missiles, damage, and boarding; admitted third-party Open Game Content for weapons, large crews, naval operations, privateering, and piracy; Cepheus Trader simultaneous joint orders and offline control. The complete weapon table follows this chapter.

Turns, initiative, and orders#

A space-combat turn is 1,000 game seconds. All active vessels submit one joint crew order against the same combat revision, then resolve in initiative order. At the fixed clock rate the shared real-time order window is about 35.7 seconds. Each crew member or station team receives its legal minor and significant actions. Dodge, Fire Sand, Point Defense, and Trigger Screens use the vessel's limited prioritized reactions when their triggers occur.

The joint order commits atomically. It can change range, attack, defend, perform electronic warfare or damage control, prepare withdrawal, board, surrender, or use another action legal to the assigned station and current situation. Missiles have delayed impact and can be opposed by point defense. Weapon ammunition, damage, casualties, emissions, and legal evidence commit with the turn.

Starting initiative is 2D6. Higher initiative acts first; ties go to higher Thrust and otherwise resolve in the same initiative position. Initiative is not rerolled each turn. Increase Initiative adds the positive Effect of an Average Leadership task.

The available joint-order actions are Hold, Coordinate, Increase Initiative, Evasive Maneuvers, Line Up Shot, close or open range, Break Pursuit, Sensor Targeting, Electronic Warfare, Damage Control, Attack, Board, Prepare Jump, Launch Escape Craft, Offer or Accept Surrender, and Inspect Contact. The available reaction priorities are Dodge, Point Defense, Fire Sand, Trigger Nuclear Damper, and Trigger Meson Screen.

Every conscious active crewmember assigned to at least one station has one action budget for the turn. Where an action calls for a task, its target is 8. The actor, characteristic, and skill assignments are:

Close and Open Range move one band on success. Break Pursuit uses the same open-range result. Inspect Contact creates the inspection evidence required by an inspection order only on success. Board is legal only at Adjacent range. Launch Escape Craft abandons the command; surrender completes only when the opposing side accepts. Electronic Warfare and Prepare Jump currently reserve and record their station actions but apply no separate combat modifier or Jump-progress benefit. Boarding begins normally, but its listed actor's INT/Tactics DM likewise does not change the opposed boarding totals.

Successful Evasive Maneuvers applies -1 to incoming attacks, or -2 with Effect 6 or more. Successful Line Up Shot and Sensor Targeting each applies +1 to attacks, or +2 with Effect 6 or more. Coordinate applies +1 to targeting on success. A successful open-range action at Distant range completes withdrawal.

An Average Damage Control task creates one battlefield repair on success, two at Effect 3, or three at Effect 6 or more. Coverage goes first to power, maneuver, Jump, bridge, sensors, fuel, hold, and then a weapon mount. This is temporary coverage only and expires at combat end.

Range and missiles#

Each usable weapon in a mount makes a 2D6 attack against 8, adding the assigned gunner's task DM, the range DM in the weapon appendix, targeting and line-up bonuses, target evasion, and -2 if the mount has one uncovered hit. A mount fires no more than once per turn. A mount with two uncovered hits is disabled. Every ammunition weapon consumes one compatible round when it fires.

Missile launch Effect sets the later to-hit target. Effect -6 or worse needs 11+; Effect -5 through -1 needs 10+; Effect 0 needs 8+; Effect 1-5 needs 7+; and Effect 6 or more needs 6+. Missiles launched from Short through Long range arrive one turn later. Missiles from Very Long or Distant range arrive two turns later. Point defense is resolved on the impact turn and spends one reaction; a successful target-8 point-defense task destroys that missile.

Reaction tasks use current DEX: Dodge uses Pilot (Spacecraft), Point Defense and Fire Sand use Gunner (Turrets), and damper or meson-screen triggers use Gunner (Screens). In the current combat revision, only Point Defense has a resolved trigger effect; the other four can be prioritized but do not yet alter an attack. A reaction is spent only when its implemented trigger is resolved.

Default and automated control#

An online activation opens with a complete conservative legal order. It protects life support and escape capability, evades or withdraws when useful, uses defensive electronic warfare and reactions, and holds unnecessary offensive fire. It does not ordinarily choose pursuit, ramming, hostile docking, offensive boarding, surrender, or abandonment.

Each commanded ship also has a persistent risk-directed controller. Its default minimum estimated objective-success threshold is 70%. If the estimated chance meets the threshold, it pursues the objective; otherwise it attempts a real withdrawal. If escape becomes infeasible, it can choose surrender or abandonment only when that is the best modeled survival result.

The controller knows only what the captain could know. It considers up to 64 legal joint orders, then tests the strongest eight against 256 three-round projections apiece before choosing. If no order is submitted, the controller acts for the ship; disconnecting does not freeze combat or reveal hidden enemy state.

Damage, capture, and loss#

Combat damage applies to the real vessel, installations, ammunition, crew, cargo, and carried craft. Radiation weapons add the applicable crew hazard; meson weapons ignore armor and begin on the internal damage table. Surrender or successful boarding transfers the existing vessel, cargo, unique objects, prisoners, and prize title; it never creates a duplicate.

If the crew retains control, automatic recovery begins under the ship-condition rules. A surviving captain returns after seven game days following abandonment, 14 days after other destruction or loss, or 30 days after capture or surrender. A dead captain requires a named successor. Career, warrant, and estate history persist through succession.

Every terminal command loss atomically preserves a censored Command Loss Report with the encounter. Its typed cause, captain fate, material and personnel consequences, recovery date, and successor requirement govern recovery; outcome prose is never parsed as rule state. The captain must acknowledge the current report revision before recovery or succession. Reconnecting before that point shows the report again. The detailed incident log is optional, and the report is deleted with the terminal encounter only after recovery succeeds.

Roll weapon damage, subtract current armor unless the weapon has the meson trait, and convert the penetrating total into grouped system hits. Every hit in one Double or Triple group uses the same location.

Hull and Structure each begin at one point per 50 displacement tons, with a minimum of one. Vessels of 100 tons or more use the external column while Hull remains, then the internal column. Craft below 100 tons use the small-craft column while Hull remains, then resolve internal hits. Meson hits always use internal resolution.

Structure at zero destroys the vessel. Armor hits remove one current armor point and become Hull hits when no armor remains. Weapon mounts take -2 to attacks after one hit, are disabled after two, and retain further damage. Maneuver hits reduce real thrust, then disable and destroy the drive according to its condition record. Jump, power, sensors, bridge, fuel, and hold hits apply the staged impairment reported in Ship Management and remain after the encounter unless properly repaired.

Boarding can begin only at Adjacent range. Each boarding round resolves opposed 2D6 totals with the current side bonus. Effect +6 captures the defender; Effect -6 drives off the attackers. Any other result removes one Structure from the defender, continues the boarding, and gives +2 on the next round to the side that won that round. Destruction at zero Structure still applies during boarding.

Authority, careers, and force#

Rules lineage: Admitted third-party Open Game Content for naval organization, captain operations, piracy, privateering, capture, fencing, and forced docking; Cepheus Engine tasks and combat; Cepheus Trader jurisdiction and message propagation.

Weapons provide capability, not authority. A lawful use of force depends on the actor, jurisdiction, order, commission, warrant, target, evidence, and time. Authorities know only instruments and reports that have reached them. A warrant can therefore exist at one office while a distant captain or port has not yet received it.

Career status and naval service#

The four recorded force careers are Independent, Navy, Privateer, and Pirate. A change must be filed while docked against the current career revision. Navy requires an institution-owned issued command and no locally enforceable warrant. Privateer requires a privately registered, sponsor-owned, or financed vessel, a non-independent polity with Law 4+, and no locally enforceable warrant. Leaving Navy requires selecting a private vessel first. Entering Pirate while commanding an institution ship changes its registry to stolen, adds 50 public heat, and dispatches a mutiny-and-theft warrant.

Public heat is a nonnegative record of conspicuous unlawful attention; underworld standing is a signed reputation record. They change only through the explicit events stated in this chapter and currently supply no general task DM of their own.

Naval captains command public property under orders. Service funds are restricted, and rank or authority can be changed through service procedure.

Naval service points make a captain eligible, but promotion occurs only at a board every 180 game days. Monthly salary follows the grade actually awarded, not merely the eligible grade.

An order rated difficulty 0-2 awards 1 service point, 3-5 awards 3, 6-8 awards 6, and 9+ awards 10 after successful reporting.

Orders, commissions, and evidence#

Career opportunities refer to a traffic vessel already projected in the system; accepting one never creates a target. An offer expires two game days after that contact's scheduled traffic edge. Its objective is Patrol, Inspect, Escort, Intercept, Capture, or Seize Cargo, and each requires its own evidence: respectively a certified patrol log, signed sensor inspection, escort-release receipt, engagement log showing the target driven off, capture papers with custody, or seized inventory delivered to the issuing authority. Evidence for one objective does not satisfy another.

The sealed operations report must physically reach the issuing authority before success, points, or reward settles. An escort must start while the protected contact is still at the named port locus and occupies the command for three combat turns. A seize-cargo report requires the captured vessel and some cargo to be physically present at the issuing authority.

Privateers act under a sponsor's commission and prize terms. The commission's scope, expiry, targets, reporting duties, and exit terms bound its authority; force outside them is not legalized by the ship's armament.

Privateer capture or cargo commissions pay a base Cr10,000 plus Cr50 per ton of the named target. Pirate commissions use Cr25,000 plus Cr50 per ton; an uncommissioned pirate lead has no base payment but uses the same Cr50-per-ton scale. The signed instrument controls if its displayed terms differ.

Piracy can arise through free predation, accepted leads, or a pirate commission. It uses the same physical interception, combat, boarding, cargo, damage, prisoner, and evidence rules as every other career. A pirate result is not made safe or profitable by selecting a career label.

A pirate cruise records a hunting system, end time, crew share, ship-fund share, and prohibited targets. The two shares may total no more than 100% and a cruise cannot begin at crew pressure 100 or more. Defaults are 50% to crew, 20% to the ship fund, with hospital, rescue, and surrendering vessels prohibited. Each active month with a secured prize removes 20 pressure; a month without prey adds 10. Expiry without prey adds another 15 and loses one underworld standing. Fencing a pirate prize separately removes 25 pressure and gains one standing.

Prizes and warrants#

A captured ship or cargo becomes a prize claim only when real custody and required evidence exist. Adjudication, bounty settlement, impound, assessment, appeal, and notice happen at their named offices and propagate through the mail system. Paying an assessment or delivering a prisoner cannot instantly erase enforcement at an office that has not received the signed instrument.

Prize realizable value is gross catalog value x current condition percent. The deterministic settlement share is 10%, 20%, or 30% for a privateer and 5%, 10%, or 15% for Navy. A pirate fence pays 10%-30%, with lower Law able to improve the result. A secured lawful prize may take an operating advance of at most half its settlement; final payment deducts that advance. A privateer may sell after adjudication or keep the vessel by taking a lien for realizable value not covered by the awarded equity. A pirate may fence the vessel under the cruise crew share or pay the gap between gross and realizable value to launder its registry.

An unlawful armed interception files a warrant with severity 1 + min(target value / Cr10,000,000, 9). Its bounty is target value x evidence percent / 1,000, so perfect evidence produces 10% of target value. The issuing system can act immediately; elsewhere the warrant is enforceable only after its signed message arrives. A captain can satisfy a locally received warrant by paying assessment and bond equal to half the bounty, minimum Cr1. That creates a second resolution message. An office that has received the warrant but not the resolution continues to enforce it. A hunter receives a bounty only by holding the named person aboard the hunting ship and delivering them while docked at an authority office.

Ship and weapon reference#

The Ship Catalog gives each available vessel's hull, drives, fuel, accommodation, equipment, weapons, ammunition, software, performance, and price. Those listed statistics and fittings govern the vessel in play; they are not sample configurations.

The weapon appendix below is the reference used in vessel combat. -- means that a weapon cannot attack at that range. Damage is expressed as dice plus a fixed modifier. Traits identify rules such as beam eligibility, delayed missiles, radiation, meson penetration, bay mounts, and physical ammunition.

The appendix is generated from the same live catalogue used to resolve combat. It is therefore the controlling source for weapon range DMs, damage, traits, and ammunition names rather than an illustrative equipment list.

Hidden information#

Unrevealed contacts, hidden defects, undiscovered systems, unarrived messages, and other hidden facts are not player knowledge. They become known only through the observations, discoveries, messages, and other means described in these rules.

Vessel weapon reference#