Independents

Some hulls out here fly no flag and answer to no charter — they work the belts and graveyards for their own account, and they were working them before you showed up. The Independents (amber, and you’ll learn to read that amber fast) are the prospectors and wreck-pickers nobody sent and nobody protects by name. They don’t haul contracts, don’t run convoys, and don’t much care who’s watching. They mine, they salvage, they dump the take at the nearest station, and they do it again.

What you’re looking at

Two hulls, both tiny, both wearing the amber canopy that marks the faction:

• Prospector — a claw-pod miner, grabber arms reading as work gear rather than guns. It carries a mining beam and nothing else.
• Reclaimer — a boxy industrial tug, all hold and no hardpoints. It carries a salvage array and nothing else.

Neither is built to fight. Thin hull, a token shield, no reactor to speak of — softer than a militia patrol across the board, because the only tool bolted on is a gather beam, and a gather beam does no damage to anything. Shoot at one and it will not shoot back. It can’t.

What they do

Watch one long enough and the loop is obvious, because it never varies. It finds the nearest node its beam works, flies in, and holds the beam until the node is dry. When its hold fills — twenty units, same as yours — or the field runs out, it turns for the nearest station, loiters a beat to unload, and goes straight back out for more. No patrol, no evasion, no second thoughts. A Prospector under fire keeps mining; it just steers around traffic and takes the hits.

A Prospector works ore rocks and a Reclaimer works derelict hulks — never the other way round. The miner won’t touch a wreck and the salvager won’t touch a rock.

The catch: they’re competition

Here’s the part that costs you. The rocks a Prospector chews and the hulks a Reclaimer strips are the same finite nodes you work — the belt’s ore, the graveyard’s derelicts. Every node holds a fixed yield, and every unit that goes into an amber hold is a unit that will never go into yours. Nodes don’t grow back: drain one to zero and it’s gone, freed off the field for good.

So a belt the prospectors have been sitting in is a belt already going thin, and a graveyard a Reclaimer has been picking is a graveyard with less left for you. They aren’t hostile. They’re just faster to the rock, and there’s only so much rock. Get there first, or get there where they aren’t.

You’ll meet them early: two Prospectors work the Eos belt and a lone Reclaimer picks over the Eos ancient graveyard.

The yards: they brought company

The lone hulls aren’t the whole operation. The Independents plant work yards right in the field — squat, unarmed industrial rigs that are unmistakably structures, not ships: no prow, no engine glow, just mass and processing pods. Two sit in Eos:

• The Prospect Yard — an ore-processing rig clutching an asteroid, parked out in the Eos belt.
• The Reclaim Yard — a wreck-stripper with an open grapple claw, hunkered over the Eos ancient graveyard.

A yard doesn’t just sit there. It launches its own work drones — small, unarmed prospector and reclaimer hulls, a notch tinier than the free-flying ones — that fan out, work the nearest node, haul the take back, and dump it into the yard. Each yard keeps up to a couple out at a time, and only while there’s something left to work: pick the field clean and the drones stop coming, recalled to a rig with nothing left to do.

Here’s what matters for you: the drones honor the same claims everyone else does. A drone will never lock onto a rock a free prospector — or you, or another drone — already holds, and none of them will jump a node a drone has taken. One worker per node, yard or not. So a yard doesn’t magically multiply the field; it just puts more amber hulls in the race for the same finite rocks and hulks. A belt with a Prospect Yard in it is a belt going thin faster.

The yards themselves are soft and neutral — no guns, dockable like any station. Shooting the drones costs you standing exactly the way shooting any Independent does (see below); they can’t shoot back either.

Where they stand

To you, an Independent reads neutral — the plain ● on the nameplate, no chevrons either way. They get on with civilians and the militia (both friendly toward them) and they are prey to pirates, who are hostile to everything that isn’t a pirate. That last part is why they survive at all: the militia hunts pirates on sight, so a raider that jumps a prospector tends to draw a militia wing down on itself. The Independents don’t earn that cover — they just happen to stand behind the same guns pointed at the pirates.

Shooting one is a choice

You can open up on an Independent. Nothing stops you, and nothing shoots back. But it isn’t free and it doesn’t pay. Because they’re not hostile to you, every hit you land sours them on you — your standing with the faction drops, and drops both ways, ten at a time. Land enough and the neutral ● turns to an enemy chevron: now the amber hulls read as hostile, for whatever thin comfort that is against ships that can’t fire.

There’s no bounty for it — that’s a pirate’s payout, not a prospector’s. The militia won’t cross the system to avenge one, either; their quarrel is with pirates, not with yours. All you’ve really done is spend standing to kill something that was going to fill its hold and leave. The real reason to resent a Prospector isn’t a target worth shooting — it’s the ore already in its hold that should have been in yours.

See also: Pilots for the miner and salvager doctrines they fly; Cargo & Commodities for the nodes you’re both racing to empty.