Your Fleet
Hire hulls at a shipyard and assign each a role — escort, miner, salvager, hauler, or trader.
You don’t have to fly alone. Out at a shipyard, you can buy hulls of your own and put them to work — a wing on your flank, a miner on a belt, a trader running a profit loop while you’re three jumps away. What each one does is a setting you flip, not a hull you’re stuck with.
Hiring
Dock at a Shipyard station — the Forge Yard in Karda is the first one you’ll reach — and the dock screen grows a RECRUIT list: the hulls that yard sells and what each costs. Pay the price and the ship unfolds docked beside you, already yours. It joins your fleet on the Escort role, tagging along until you tell it otherwise.
A hull you own is a real presence out here: it keeps its system awake and its scanners lit even when you’ve moved on. A miner parked on a belt is also a watchtower.
Assigning roles
Every ship you own (but aren’t personally flying) shows up in the FLEET panel of the dock screen, with its current job and a row of buttons to change it. Switching a role swaps what the ship is doing on the spot — the same hull flies any of these:
- Escort — holds formation on you and engages anything hostile that comes near you, then falls back in. Your wing.
- Miner — works the ore in the system it’s in, fills its hold, and runs it to the nearest friendly station. Assigning this fits the ship a mining beam (it can’t fight while it’s rigged to mine).
- Salvager — the same loop over wrecks instead of rocks; assigning it fits a salvage array. A miner works rock, a salvager works hulks — never the other way round.
- Hauler — shuttles cargo between two stations, over and over. Point it at a run and it just keeps moving the goods.
- Trader — buys where a commodity is cheap and sells where it’s dear, pocketing the spread into your wallet. It reads the price skew between stations and runs the profitable direction on its own.
For now a hauler or trader picks the two nearest friendly stations as its run; a proper “run this leg” picker comes with stations you build yourself. And a trader trades on the price difference between stations — danger and local supply move those prices (see Trading), so the same ferrite is worth more at a frontier stop than a safe one, and that gap is the trader’s margin.
A hull is still a hull
Your fleet ships bleed and die like anything else — a hold full of ore is lost with the ship that carried it, and an undefended trader on a pirate route is a gift to whoever’s waiting. Danger is still the tax on every richer run; a fleet just lets you pay it in more places at once.
See also: Independents for the miner and salvager loop your gatherers borrow; Trading for the price skew a trader lives on; Cargo & Commodities for what the holds carry.