Movement

MOVEMENT

Though at the beginning of your exploratory life, your race are equipped # with only a few colonial ships and several freighters, you will soon be building huge numbers of other spacecraft with which to reach out into the stars. Moving any spacecraft between locations (be it inter-stellar travel or just inter planetary) requires that they have the engine power to achieve it. Moving between planets within a star system requires far simpler engines than leaping between different stars. This difference is underlined in ships that either possess or do not possess JUMP DRIVE Engines.

Star ships without jump drive may move between any planets within a single system. The engines are powerful enough to cancel out the relatively minor distances between inner and outer orbits, and take the same amount of movement time to travel between orbits 1 and 2 as they would to move between orbits 2 and 8.

All craft have a number of movement points that they can utilise for actions within a single turn, which for inter-planetary craft is based solely upon the ships manoeuvre speed. The formula is a very simple one, explained in more detail in subsequent sections of these rules, but for now you can divide it's total manoeuvre speed by ten to give it a movement point value. For each movement point a ship has it may; move out of orbit and then move to another planet in the system and establish a new orbit. This whole process takes up a movement point. For example:

A ship has a manoeuvre speed of 25. It may leave "Planet A" after picking up cargo, go to "Planet B" and establish a new orbit and deliver its cargo, pick up new cargo, leave "Planet B" and move on to "Planet C" (or even back to "A") and deliver its new cargo. This will use two of the two and a half points, the remaining half cannot be used and it is lost.

On no account can a ship without Jump Drive engines move outside of the system it is built in.

Starships built with the more massive jump drive engines move in a slightly different manner. Their whole driving energy is geared through their main engines, and though they may have a similar manoeuvre capability to inter-planetary craft, these inter-stellar ships are limited to using thruster power only for shallow combat manoeuvres. They can perform inter-planetary actions - though limited in capability when compared to the "lesser" ships - but their design means that it is their jump capability that determines the number of movement points it has. For every light year they can move in distance (1 sector) they have the equivalent of one movement point. These points can be used in the same way as ships without jump drives, so a ship built with a Jump capacity of two would be able to perform the same actions as the example shown above, but they can also be used to move between different star systems. Every movement point they have available can move them one sector in any direction across the Universal map. Movement to diagonally adjacent sectors still costs a single jump point (i.e. if you moved from [2,2,2] to [3,3,3] the cost is one jump range, as is [2,2,2] to [3,2,2] etc).

If you know your final destination you may jump directly to a planet in a different system, rather than move between systems and then move to a planet. For example, a ship can jump from [2,2,2],6 to [2,3,3],4 without expending any extra movement points.

So a ship with a jump capability of 2 could; load cargo at "Planet A in star system X", jump to "Planet B in star system Y" (as long as the distance from X-Y is jump 1), establish orbit and deliver its cargo, pick up new cargo and jump back to "Planet A in star system X", or even move on to "Planet C in star sector Z" if you so prefer (again as long as Y-Z is jump 1).

In all ship designs it is the Jump Engines that determine the overall movement speed, if the design has them. In a ship that has both engines, Jump drives overrule speed, while ships without Jump drives may find that their limitations on movement allow a greater "workload" between turns.