Ships

A ship is a player's way of moving through the galaxy. It carries supplies and weapons, scans nearby space, orbits planets, and can be damaged or destroyed. Ships are also part of the world around the player: Cybertrons and other automated vessels travel, fight, haul cargo, or defend territory.

Choosing a ship

Each ship belongs to a class, a design with its own strengths and limits. A fast scouting craft is useful for exploration; a freighter can carry far more cargo; a warship trades some flexibility for firepower and durability. No class is best at every job. A game's sysop can change the available classes, so the in-game HELP CLASS display is the best guide to that installation's choices.

A class sets limits, not the ship's complete present condition. It can say how powerful a shield or phaser the ship may install, how fast it normally travels, what it can launch, how much it can carry, and how far it can scan. The actual ship has its own equipment, supplies, damage, position, and combat record. A ship with a Mark-19 shield maximum does not necessarily have a Mark-19 shield installed.

Ships in play

Players explore with navigation and scanners, fight with weapons and shields, move supplies in a ship inventory, and repair damage through maintenance. REPORT NAV, REPORT SYS, REPORT INV, and other reports show the current state of the particular ship being flown. See system failures for how individual systems can be disabled.

A player may own multiple persistent ships and select which one to fly. A destroyed ship is lost, but the player and any other ships remain. Ships can be bought at Zygor when the player has the money and the class is offered. See New command for purchases and fleet selection for how stored ships appear on entry. ge-arena instead gives participants match-local ships: they choose from that mode's roster or receive its sole class automatically, and can respawn after being destroyed. It has no persistent player fleet.

Other vessels

Cybertrons are automated opponents. Droids is the source-code term for other automated ships; it does not imply that every such vessel is harmless. Their behavior, faction relationships, and population rules depend on the version. An NPC has a ship class too, but it does not buy a vessel the way a player does. See faction rules and NPC slot allocation.

Stock class lists

Classic player ship classes and Classic NPC ship classes give the shipped classic 3.2e rosters.
ge-next player ship classes and ge-next NPC ship classes give the shipped ge-next rosters. Those pages also identify which class designs appear in the stock ge-arena modes.

These lists show defaults, not a guarantee about every live BBS. The same named class can have different specifications in classic and ge-next, and a sysop can change either table.

How classes are defined

For readers who want the mechanics: class definitions live in a compiled ship-class table. A class number identifies a design; a ship number identifies an individual owned vessel, while a ship slot is its place in the game's active tables. Depending on the build, the class table also includes purchase value, kill points, damage factor, and settings used by automated ships. Those are configuration details rather than a complete description of a ship's role in play. See Ship class configuration, Scoring and rosters, and Data structures for more.