Ship Modules

Every hull has a grid. Not a metaphor — an actual gridded bay behind the plating, sized to the ship, where hardware bolts in cell by cell. Today that bay is a prototype rig, not a shop shelf: engineers run loadouts through the Arena (a sealed test bout, two hulls, one timer) before anything reaches a real deck. What follows is what the rig can mount.

Weapon modules

A gun, gridded instead of hard-mounted. Functionally identical to the weapon bolted straight to a hardpoint (see Weapons) — same bolt speed, same beam tick, same faction-tinted fire. The only thing that changes is where it lives: a slot in the grid instead of a fixed mount, so the same Pulse Cannon or Energy Beam that ships built-in on the Vindicator can also be drawn from a loadout and dropped into a bay.

The Vindicator test rig now exposes three hardpoints. A module weapon fills the next open hardpoint, in order, and each hardpoint has its own physical muzzle. Three weapon modules means three simultaneous firing sources from three mount points. Zero weapon modules means exactly what it says: an unarmed hull for that run, no fallback beam sneaking in from the base template.

The rig also carries variant weapon blocks now: ordinary beam and cannon fits, a heavier crackling beam, and a railgun whose shot drags a bright trail wrapped in a double-helix spiral instead of a flat bolt bloom.

Every block carries a manufacturing envelope and one actual roll. The envelope is the honest minimum and maximum; CURRENT is what this physical block delivers. Quality runs from worn through standard and refined to exceptional. It is not a hidden rarity multiplier: the current numbers are the item.

The Arena’s compare selector targets LEFT, RIGHT, or OFF. Hovering a weapon block opens the same compact card used for equipped hardware: candidate first, then one identical card per occupied hardpoint. Damage, range, rate of fire, sustained damage, and energy show direct replacement deltas. A high headline damage roll can therefore still lose on cadence, range, or capacitor cost.

Drone links are now launch hardware, not disguised hardpoints. Beam and Cannon Drones use the escort doctrine: defend their carrier inside a tight leash, break off when a threat leaves it, then return to formation. Mining and Salvage Drones work matching nodes inside that leash until their small hold is full, return to the carrier, unload beside it, then resume. A Repair Drone circles close and patches armor before hull. Every active drone draws continuous carrier energy; an empty capacitor cuts control and weapons until power returns. Drone blocks do not consume one of the Vindicator’s three gun hardpoints.

Beam and cannon blocks both roll their combat properties, including range. Green, blue, yellow, and red families each carry normal and heavy variants; the chosen block color drives the beam, bolt glow, and heavy trail rather than the firing faction. A heavy beam block behaves like the pattern in Weapons: its bite ramps up while you hold it on one hull and resets the moment you release or switch, so a heavy-beam boat wants a gunner who commits to a target rather than sweeping.

Engine modules

• Vector Thrusters favor sustained cruise speed and corrections.
• Afterburner Coil favors boost-like acceleration and raw punch.
• Capacitor Injector favors repeated burns by adding energy capacity and regeneration instead of winning the speed roll outright.

Capacitor note: engines, shield recharge, and power-weapon fire now pull from the same ship energy pool. Running all three at once is a real budget, not free overlap.

Ship tweaks

Not weapons, not engines — everything else a hull can carry. Two of the three below are new hardware; read them as prototypes, the same “tested, not yet in the field” status the Repair Bolt carries in Weapons — except these three actually work end to end in the arena rig, bolt to result, right now.

• Shield Capacitor: extra capacitor banked straight into the shield emitter. Raises how much a shield can soak and how fast it climbs back once you stop taking fire — the same regen-after-a-quiet-moment rule every shield already runs on (see the shield note under Weapons’s defensive emplacements), just with a deeper well and a faster refill.

• Repair Bot: a palm-sized drone that never stops crawling the hull. This is the one genuinely new trick — every other defense layer on a ship holds still until you dock at a station. The Repair Bot doesn’t wait. It patches armor plate first, then works on the frame underneath, continuously, whether or not you’re still taking fire. Slow — a station repair is instant and total, this is a trickle — but a trickle that runs mid-fight is worth more than it looks on paper.

• Scanner Array: a wider dish bolted where the stock antenna sat. Stretches how far a hull’s own scanner projects before a contact drops off the chart (see Scanners — “no swapping or upgrading yet… until module hardware reaches the market”). The module hardware exists now. The market doesn’t, not yet — this is still an arena-only rig.

The grid itself

The arena palette groups related blocks into vertical weapon-family, drone, engine, and system stacks, with scrolling instead of one line escaping the screen. Drag a block from the palette into a bay cell to fit it; drag a fitted block to another cell to move it, or off the grid to pull it. If a drag ever feels fiddly, right-click a fitted cell to clear it outright — the block just unequips, and the palette always has another. Every module tested so far fits one cell. That’s not a rule, it’s where the rig starts: engineers expect denser, oddly-shaped hardware later — a compact rare capacitor next to a clunky common one carrying the same numbers — and the grid was built cell-list-first so that day doesn’t need a rebuild, just more content.

Arena duels also run with selectable tactics per side: hold position, keep max range, keep all weapons in range, evade, or pursue. Think of it as pilot doctrine layered on top of the loadout: the same guns read very different depending on whether the hull backs off, presses in, or jinks.

A pilot pressing in will burn boost to get there. Retro thrusters are as strong as main engines out here, so a hull backing away from you is running exactly as fast as you are chasing it — follow on engines alone and the gap never shrinks by a metre. The overburn is the only way through it, and it is paid for out of the same capacitor the guns draw on. Every doctrine keeps roughly a third of the bank in reserve rather than arriving on empty with nothing left to shoot with, so a chase runs in surges: close hard, settle, let the bank refill. Bring the longer gun and a coward’s doctrine and you can hold someone off for a while — but not forever, and not once their bank is full again.

See also: Weapons for what a Weapon module actually fires; Scanners for what a Sensor tweak extends; Ships for the hulls these bays are cut into.