Flying
The five bands
Where you may be shot, where you lose your cargo, and the one band where you lose the ship.
Every map in the universe belongs to one of five security bands. The band decides what may happen to you there, and it is the single most important thing to know before undocking anywhere.
The rules are not graded smoothly. They step, and each step is a decision you make once and live with for the trip.
| Band | Pilots may fire | Cargo drops on death | Hull lost | Gate protection | Jump cooldown |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Portus — the harbour | no | no | no | 10 km | 10 s |
| Litus — the shore | no | no | no | 10 km | 10 s |
| Vadum — the shallows | yes | no | no | — | 20 s |
| Altum — the deep | yes | yes | no | — | 20 s |
| Abyssus — the abyss | yes | yes | yes | — | 20 s |
What each row actually means
- Portus and Litus refuse player-versus-player outright, over the whole map. Not a penalty, not a police response — the shot is refused. A harbour additionally holds a 15 km peace zone around its station where nothing may be fired at all.
- The Vadum allows the shooting and refuses it any meaning. No criminal record is written there, for anyone, against anyone, your own faction included. It is the practice band: the place to find out what losing a fight feels like when losing it costs you the trip home and nothing else.
- The Altum is where a loss starts costing goods. Your hold spills on death, and so do your drones. Your ship is still yours.
- The Abyssus is the only band where the hull is destroyed. Everywhere else you are dead, inconvenienced and flying the same ship again. Here you are not.
Gates
A jump is gate to gate: you leave one and you are standing on the other, not five kilometres short of it. You then have thirty seconds of real invulnerability, and it ends on your first act — the first thrust, the first lock, the first module. It buys you the time to decide and nothing else.
In the two shallow bands a gate also carries a 10 km protection radius. In the three deep ones it does not, and a gate is exactly where an attacker knows you will appear.
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