Ships & Hull Classes
Read a contact's built purpose from its hull class and its current actions from doctrine.
Two questions tell you everything about a contact: what was the hull built as, and what is the pilot doing with it? The first is the hull class: read it off the silhouette. The second is doctrine (see Pilots). They don’t have to agree: half the freight in civilized space moves in demilitarized warship hulls.
The ladder
Eight classes, smallest to largest. Bigger means tankier, better shielded, and slower. Every step up the ladder trades throttle for plating. From the middle of the ladder up (torpedo ships and larger), hulls are big enough to carry their own fold drive: they can leave a system without a starlane. If a medium-or-larger contact doesn’t like its odds, expect it to vanish.
| Class | Size | In the seat |
|---|---|---|
| Scout | x-small | Fastest thing on the board and made of foil. Sees you first; dies first. |
| Fighter | x-small | The baseline combatant. Everything else on this table is measured against one. |
| Support Ship | small | Logistics: stores, spares, salvage, fuel. Usually unarmed. Its defense is whoever it flies with. |
| Bomber | small | Armored for the run-in, hauling ordnance that ruins someone’s day at the end of it. |
| Torpedo Ship | medium | A launcher with a bridge. Slow ordnance you can dodge, from a platform that folds away when pressed. |
| Frigate | medium | The workhorse capital: real shields, real guns, still small enough to patrol in pairs. |
| Battlecruiser | large | A line anchor. When one arrives, the fight is about who holds the volume, not who wins the dogfight. |
| Dreadnought | x-large | A flagship. You do not fight one in a fighter; you leave, and you tell someone with a fleet. |
Who flies what
Every faction fields the full ladder from its own yards. You can tell the yard at a glance before your scanner resolves a transponder:
- Unbound: not a house style — other factions’ hulls, fused wrong. Expect a militia or Korrathi outline with bone, violet tissue, and lit blue tube bolted across one system boundary where a cable used to run. Clusters seed wrecks; they do not build clean fleets.
- Korrathi (scavengers): blood-red, jagged, black plating. Their small hulls fly unshielded and don’t care; armor is cheaper than discipline. Raiders and Prowlers hunt in packs, Corsair frigates lead raids, and the Warlord and Ravager capitals exist mostly as rumors you should respect. A Marauder is a Corsair that stole a capital lance and bolted it to a frigate mount — the belt’s apex predator, and the only raider worth chasing: kill one and the Crimson Lance is yours.
- Teralith (corporate militia): gold and kept to spec. Everything the service flies carries shields, even the Sentry scouts. Wardens fly the patrol backbone; the Bulwark battlecruiser is the same hull their stations wear, which tells you how the militia thinks about permanence.
- Blackwater Incorporated (trade guild): green manta hulls. Couriers and Escorts screen the convoys, Guardians shepherd them, and the Ark (more shield than gun) is the guild’s rolling promise that the cargo arrives.
The hulls you already know fit the same ladder: the pirate Raider is a Korrathi fighter, the Teralith Patrol a Teralith fighter, the Blackwater Hauler a Blackwater support hull flown as a freighter, and the big Freighter is a demilitarized Blackwater battlecruiser: a warship frame with the teeth pulled and the holds widened.
The hull that stays yours
You are not a pilot behind glass. You are the substrate core. The medical shuttle is where you woke; the Vindicator is the first real ship built to house you as a person. It sits at fighter on the ladder and refuses to stay in its lane: an AI-core cradle, a proper capacitor, boost reserves no line fighter carries, and an architecture prepared for the fold upgrade. It is not a starter hull waiting to be sold. It is your body.
Look at the hull and you can see where the fold drive will go. Ancient craft fold with a ring — a load-bearing hoop the hull is built through, the same technology as a stargate shrunk to fit one ship. The shuttle has no ring and cannot fold; the Vindicator carries the mount for one, which is how a fighter-class hull will one day do what only torpedo ships and larger otherwise can. Every other yard hides its fold drive inside the hull, so only the Ancient fleet wears the trick on the outside. When the ring lights, you are running the same machinery that holds the gate network together.
Growing beyond a fighter does not mean abandoning it. The prototype frame can contract into a host cradle carried by a compatible larger ship. Nested there, the Vindicator becomes that host’s command core: your mind, its engines, armor, holds, and weapon grid. Deploy again and the fighter is still itself, carrying its own damage history and upgrades with it. A host is a larger body around the body you already have, not a replacement for it.
That gives you two kinds of growth. Vindicator upgrades improve what you can do personally when deployed; host upgrades add fleet-scale endurance, cargo, crew, and firepower. Compatible host hulls and their cradle controls remain something to secure out in the galaxy. Until then, the Vindicator is the whole arrangement — small, armed, and permanently yours.
See also: Weapons, for what each yard bolts on; Folding, for why the big ones don’t need lanes.