Battle Stations

Not every station is a market with the lights on. Some are built to hold a piece of space, and they hold it with guns.

You’ll learn to tell them apart before you’re in range, because a fighting station doesn’t look like a docked ship. No prow, no engine glow, nothing that says it wants to go anywhere. Just mass — rock, ring, or reactor — sitting still and bristling. That stillness is the tell: a structure is a fixed point, and a fixed point that shoots is a decision about whether you fly past it.

Reading one

Same rule as any contact: the flag tells you the threat. A battle station wears its owner’s color on its nameplate, and its turrets shoot by that faction’s standings, not by what you did — fly a pirate’s arc while the pirates want you dead and the guns open up, whether or not you fired first.

Three shapes you’ll meet out here:

• Raider bastion — a hollowed asteroid welded with a scavenged reactor spine and up-gunned with whatever the crew bolted on. Amber, pirate-held, and mean: the guns are scattered around the rock, not neatly placed, because nothing about it was planned. You find these dug into the edge of a belt, holding the ore road. Tough — you have to work to crack one.

• Militia bulwark — a purpose-built platform: an armored ring around a core, guns spaced evenly around it. Green, disciplined, and the hardest of the three to knock down. Where a bastion is improvised, a bulwark is engineered, and it shows.

• Claim-guard — a small reactor pod with a couple of gun stubs, thrown up by the Independents to sit on a claim they don’t want raiders walking off with. Gold, neutral to you, and soft — a speed bump, not a wall.

Beating one down

A battle station’s shield is not a kill bar — it’s a lockout. Pour fire into it and the shield drops; drop it flat and the station goes dark: its turrets stop firing and its hull dims until the shield climbs back. You didn’t destroy it. You opened a window. Fly through the window — dock, pass, strip the belt it was guarding — and the shield regenerates behind you and the guns come back up.

That’s the whole tactical shape. A bulwark’s fat shield and quick regen means the window is small and closes fast; a claim-guard’s thin shield means one serious pass shuts it up. How long a station holds its guns up under fire is exactly how big its shield is, and you can watch it burn down.

What they’re worth

Right now, a fighting station is an obstacle and a threat, not a payday — there’s no salvage in cracking one open yet. The reason to beat one down is to get past it: a disabled bastion is a raider strongpoint that can’t cover the belt for a while, a disabled claim-guard is a claim you can pick clean. That a raider base is worth raiding — for what it drops and what it spawns — is a road still being built.

See also: Weapons for reading the beams and bolts they throw; Scanners for pulling a station’s flag off the free channel before you’re in its arc.