Flying

Getting around

Warp goes to things, gates go to maps, and neither is a coordinate you type.

A map is enormous — hundreds of kilometres across — and your sensors reach 14 400 m. Crossing one by holding a thrust key is not a thing anybody does, and the game does not ask you to.

Warp

You warp to known objects: a gate, a station, a belt, an anomaly, a fleet member. Not to a coordinate and not to empty sky. Warp arrives at the thing rather than short of it, so arriving is not followed by a two-minute crawl.

There is a minimum distance below which warping is refused — inside it you are already there, and flying is faster than the alignment would be.

Gates

Gates join maps. A jump is gate to gate: you leave one and you are standing in the doorway of the other. You then hold thirty seconds of invulnerability that ends the moment you act — the first thrust, the first lock, the first module, the first sensor change.

The thirty seconds buys deciding and nothing else. Use it to look around and jump straight back and it has done its whole job.

Docking

You dock at a berth to trade, refit, refine, build and repair. A harbour holds a 15 km peace zone around its station where nothing may be fired at all, in either direction — with one exception, the practice target, which is exempt in the direction of being shot at.

The void

Most of the universe is not a corridor between two named places. Encounters stand out in open space at a spacing derived from your own sensor range, so no two of them are ever inside one sweep of each other. What you find there is the band you are in — and a map with nobody in it costs the server nothing, because it is not running.