Introduction

PDF Download the Void Drifters Vehicles Manual 39.5 MB

Every starship in Void Drifters has a maker, a model, a service history, a debt trail, and a stack of engineering compromises hidden behind every access panel. A freighter determines which jobs are possible. A weak Navigation Suite can waste a fast engine. A restricted reactor can turn a routine customs stop into a campaign problem. A salvaged military Fire Control system can save the crew one week and implicate them the next.

The Vehicles Manual is the complete vehicle authority for Void Drifters. It covers every ship, small craft, hovercraft, and ground vehicle with full rules, stat blocks, and the procedures for putting them to work in play.

What This Book Is

This is a rules book with catalogs. It owns the mechanical procedures behind every vehicle-scale moment: how ships work, how systems fail, how builders matter, how to buy, finance, and modify a hull, how to design a new one, how to run a fight between spacecraft, how to repair damage in a collapsing cargo bay, and how to decide what the ship's AI can do under pressure.

Use this book when:

• The crew needs to choose, buy, finance, or inherit a ship.
• A character is taking an action at a crew station during a ship encounter.
• The engineer is managing Heat, Power Load, or System Damage mid-fight.
• The table needs to know what happens when a hull takes a Critical Hit.
• The crew wants to modify, salvage, or integrate components across builders.
• The ship is running fuel, supplies, or maintenance close to the edge.
• The pilot is threading a seam exit under pursuit, docking in hostile space, or trying to shake an intercept.
• Hovercraft, planetary vehicles, or localized anti-gravity technology matters to the scene.

What You Can Do With This Book

Play a crew station. The six crew stations in Chapter Fourteen each have their own action list. A gunner's options in a ship fight differ from an engineer's, and the station a character takes sets what that character contributes in a ship encounter.

Read your ship. Every stat on a ship sheet has a rule behind it. Hull Points and System Points track different kinds of damage. Power Capacity sets which systems can run at the same time. Heat Threshold sets how long the ship can sustain combat output before thermal pressure causes problems. Chapter Three explains all of it.

Run vehicle-scale encounters. Ship combat, chases, boarding actions, and atmospheric approaches use procedures distinct from personal-scale conflicts. Chapter Fifteen is the combat reference. Chapter Fourteen is the crew-actions reference. Together they cover a full ship scene.

Buy, finance, and modify ships. Chapter Ten covers component upgrades, cross-builder integration, and the complications that come with salvaged or restricted systems. Chapter Eleven covers repairs, maintenance, and salvage. Chapter Twelve covers prices, loans, leases, and running costs. The catalogs in Chapters Sixteen through Eighteen contain the stat blocks.

Design a hull. Chapter Thirteen is the procedure for building a new model from a bare hull, inside the same budgets the published ships use.

Outfit ground and hover transport. Starships are the primary concern of this book, but the crew eventually lands somewhere. Chapter Nine covers hovercraft, Funtari anti-gravity vehicles, and ground vehicles; Chapter Eighteen holds their stat blocks.

The Scope of This Book

Starships are primary. The ship is the crew's home, livelihood, and single most important asset. The game's economy, travel system, and combat framework all run through it. Most of this book serves starships.

Small craft are secondary. Fighters, shuttles, boarding craft, landers, and escape pods have their own procedures and catalog entries. They share the starship rules framework with compressed stats suited to their size and role.

Ground and hover vehicles are tertiary. They matter when the crew is on a planet, inside a station, or working a job that requires them. They use the same core vehicle framework with smaller stat blocks and shorter action lists.

Warships above Scale 7 are out of scope. Destroyers, battleships, dreadnoughts, and fortress stations exist in known space, but this book gives them no statistics (Chapter Four).

This book works alongside the rest of the Void Drifters line. Chapter Two lists what this book covers on its own and what it takes from the Core Rules, the Player's Guide, the Equipment Guide, the GM Guide, and the Sector Atlas.

Ships and the People Who Fly Them

In Void Drifters, no single power controls all of settled space. The Irnan Directorate, the Funtari Confederacy, the Shoiyan Concord, the Jaziri Caliphate, and the Antaean League each hold their own lanes, and none of them can cover every corridor and junction. Borders are disputed. Laws change from one system to the next. The fringe exists in the gaps between patrol zones.

A crew's ship is their home, their livelihood, and their most important asset. Without it, they are stranded at whatever port they last docked in. With it, they can cross borders, carry cargo, run jobs, evade patrols, salvage wreckage, deliver people who need to disappear, and now and then change the shape of a problem larger than themselves.