Common Technology

Technology in the known universe is not evenly distributed, uniformly trusted, or freely available. The five major powers each control at least one technology that their rivals cannot replicate and that shapes how everyone else navigates, negotiates, and survives. What a crew encounters daily, on their ship, at a port, across a border, reflects those asymmetries.

This chapter covers what most spacers know: how the major technologies work, who controls them, what they cost, and where they create friction. None of this is secret. All of it matters.

Faster-Than-Light Travel: Slipstream

Ships travel between star systems by entering Slipspace, a compressed transit layer where interstellar distances collapse dramatically. Slipspace is a specific physical phenomenon shaped by gravity, accessible only in certain places, and navigated along natural channels called Slipstream corridors.

Phase Drives

A ship enters Slipspace using a phase drive, more commonly called a Slipstream drive. The drive briefly detaches the ship from normal-space geometry, pushes it into the transit layer, and maintains a controlled field until the crew exits at their destination.

Phase drives require power, time to spool up, and a clear entry point. A ship cannot jump from the middle of a busy orbital, from a planet's surface, or from anywhere near heavy gravity. The entry point matters.

Corridors and Seams

Slipstream corridors are naturally occurring channels anchored, at their far ends, by the gravitational influence of black holes. That anchoring creates stable distortions in the boundary between normal space and Slipspace, forming reliable transit paths across interstellar distances.

Ships do not travel to the black holes. They enter and exit a corridor where it passes close enough to a star system that local gravity weakens the boundary to a crossable threshold. These entry and exit points are called seams.

A seam arc is the region of outer-system space where a usable seam typically forms. Most safe seams appear well beyond the inner planets, in regions where the star's gravity is thin enough to allow transition. A ship leaving a populated world must first travel out to the seam arc, then cross into Slipspace. A ship arriving in a system exits the corridor at the seam arc, then travels inward under sublight power to reach inhabited space.

This means two things. First, FTL travel has geography: you can only go where corridors run, and corridors connect specific systems. Second, every FTL journey has two stages of normal-space travel bracketing the Slipstream crossing.

What FTL Travel Feels Like

Experienced crews describe entering Slipspace as a brief moment of visual compression followed by a transition to the corridor's interior: a tunnel-like environment where stars are invisible and the boundaries appear as faint luminescent gradients. Some crews find it unsettling. Most stop noticing after a few hundred crossings.

Travel time inside Slipspace varies by route. A short crossing between neighboring systems may take twelve hours to three days of shipboard time. A regional route typically runs three to ten days. Crossing a major power's interior or bridging significant political distance can take one to three weeks. Long frontier runs or indirect routes may take a month or more.

That time is real time aboard the ship. The crew eats, sleeps, works, argues, and performs maintenance. A long run on a small ship with a bad crew dynamic is its own kind of hardship.

Why Corridors Matter

Because FTL travel follows fixed routes, corridors have economic, military, and political weight. A system that sits at the intersection of several corridors is a hub. A system at the end of a single corridor is a dead end. A system that controls the only corridor access to a productive region has leverage over everyone who needs to pass through.

Corridors can also change over time. Heavily traveled routes reinforce themselves; a seam used for generations remains stable. Lightly traveled routes drift. A colony that loses its corridor access becomes isolated: first supplies grow scarce, then ships stop coming, then the relay falls silent.

New routes can be found, surveyed, filed with a registry, and sold. The crew that finds one has something several powers will pay for and several others will try to take.

Corridors can be dangerous. A fading seam may require a skilled navigator to locate at all. A new seam is poorly charted and risky to enter. A corridor that has experienced recent stellar activity, military interference, or heavy saturation from traffic may be unreliable. The frontier is full of routes that are technically navigable and practically unpleasant.

Standard exits from a corridor require no Astrogation Trial under ordinary conditions. Offset exits, which bring a ship out of the corridor away from the expected seam arc, are harder and used by smugglers, scouts, and military forces who want to avoid monitored traffic zones. The farther from the reinforced seam, the more dangerous the exit.

Slipstream Navigation Rules

Under normal operating conditions, navigating an established corridor from a charted seam requires no Trial. A functioning Navigation Suite and standard route data are sufficient.

Trials are required when:

• Using a frontier, new, or fading seam
• Attempting an offset exit
• Navigating a damaged or overloaded corridor
• Operating with a damaged or degraded Navigation Suite
• Attempting a corridor trace or locating a new seam
• Circumstances are otherwise exceptional

Corridor traces and new-seam searches are steps of an expedition, a multi-step procedure the GM runs; your navigator makes the Astrogation Trials at each step.

A ship's directive AI with a Navigation Directive Package reduces difficulty by removing one Trial Die from Astrogation Trials. See the AI Assistance section below for full rules.

Sublight Travel

Between the seam arc and inhabited space, ships travel on normal-space engines. The rules track that crossing in Travel Bands rather than in measured distance.

Travel Bands

A ship inside a system is always in one of five Travel Bands, measured from its destination: the port, station, planet, or rendezvous it is heading for. From the seam arc inward:

Moving from one band to the next is a leg. A leg costs Intervals: two for each outer leg (Extreme to Long, Long to Medium) and one for each inner leg (Medium to Short, Short to Engaged). A full run from a Standard seam arc to dock is six Intervals. Leaving a system uses the same legs in reverse. When two ships in the same Travel Band start a fight, the GM switches to the ship combat rules.

Cruise

Every ship carries two speed ratings. Speed covers seconds: maneuvers, chases, and combat. Cruise covers hours: how fast the ship crosses a system. Cruise runs from 1 to 5 and sets how long one Interval takes.

Cruise belongs to the ship's Sublight Engine. Swapping the engine changes it, and engine damage lowers it. Most starting ships are Cruise 2 or 3.

Approach

How far a system's seam arc sits from its inner worlds depends on the star. The Void Drifters Sector Atlas records this for each system as its Approach value:

• Close: you emerge at Long. Four Intervals to dock.
• Standard: you emerge at Extreme. Six Intervals to dock.
• Far: you emerge at Extreme with a long outer leg. Ten Intervals to dock.

Most inhabited systems are Standard. When no Approach is listed, use Standard.

The practical result: a working ship at Cruise 2 on a Standard approach docks about two days after emergence. A bulk hauler at Cruise 1 takes six. An offset exit adds Intervals to the outer leg; the farther off the standard track you came out, the longer the run in.

Fusion Drives

Fusion drives are the standard civilian propulsion system, rated Cruise 1 to 3. They are cheaper to operate, easier to maintain, and fueled by materials available at most ports. Bulk fusion (Cruise 1) moves capital freighters and barges. Working fusion (Cruise 2) is the standard fit on small and medium hulls. Fast fusion (Cruise 3) runs hotter and is the courier, cutter, and smuggler standard.

A fusion approach is measured in days, and each day costs supplies, morale, and maintenance while the deadline gets closer. An experienced crew treats the approach as productive time. An inexperienced crew finds out what six people do on a small ship with nothing to do.

Antimatter Drives

Antimatter drives are rated Cruise 4 or 5. They are common on military ships, corporate response craft, high-value couriers, and any vessel where arrival time is worth more than the fuel cost. They also produce more heat, require more careful maintenance, and consume fuel that is both expensive and regulated. Antimatter engines are Restricted or Military availability; a civilian hull running one is corporate, ex-military, or illegal.

A ship running an antimatter drive at Cruise 4 or higher can be detected at Extreme by any sensor grade. The drive signature is distinctive. A civilian vessel running antimatter at military-grade output attracts attention from every patrol in the system.

Hard Burn

Your pilot can declare Hard Burn at the start of a leg to treat the ship's Cruise as one higher for that leg only. A Cruise 5 ship cannot Hard Burn. The leg costs one additional Supply Unit, and at the end of it the engineer makes an Average Craft Trial; on a failure the Sublight Engine takes 1 System Damage. Each consecutive leg under Hard Burn raises that difficulty by one step. A ship under Hard Burn is visible at Extreme to any sensor in the system for the whole leg, whatever else the crew does to stay hidden.

Supply and Downtime

In-system transit creates crew downtime and supply pressure by design. A ship that enters a system at the seam arc has enough food, fuel, and consumables to make the crossing, or it does not. A ship that burns emergency power during a fight and then has to make a ten-day Far approach on depleted reserves has a problem.

Long transit legs between ports are where cargo spoils, medical situations develop, debts accumulate interest, and crew members have time to reconsider their opinions of each other. The universe is big and ships are small.

The Phased Relay Network

Ships carry news between stars, but news does not have to travel only by ship. The Phased Relay Network, called the Relay by most spacers, is an interstellar communication infrastructure that moves information faster than any vessel.

A phased relay is a large fixed installation positioned near an established seam arc. It does not broadcast radio faster than light. It opens a narrow, temporary phase channel through the same corridor geometry that ships use, and sends tightly encoded data packets through it. The packets travel the corridor at speeds far faster than a ship could manage, then are received, authenticated, and forwarded by the next relay in the chain.

How the Relay Works

The Relay functions like a telegraph network rather than a universal communicator. Each relay communicates only with other relays that share a confirmed phase lock: a synchronized calibration between two installations. Messages travel hop by hop from relay to relay along the corridor network.

In developed space, news travels across a major power in one to four days. A single corridor hop between neighboring systems takes fifteen minutes to two hours. At the frontier, where relay chains are sparse and gaps may require couriers, information travel times stretch to days or weeks.

Ships still carry information. A physical data package aboard a courier is uninterceptable, uncensorable, and sometimes the only option when relays are down or controlled. The value of physical couriers has not disappeared; it has concentrated into specific situations where the Relay cannot be trusted.

Relay Limitations

The Relay is infrastructure, and infrastructure fails, corrodes, and gets controlled.

A missing relay breaks the chain. Information must travel by ship to the next functional node. A damaged relay creates a shadow across all systems on the far side of it until repairs arrive. A censored relay, one controlled by a government, corporation, or military authority, can delay, inspect, alter, or suppress traffic passing through it.

Powers also exercise control through what gets through cleanly. Routine commercial traffic may pass without inspection. Encrypted personal messages may receive elevated scrutiny at Jaziri checkpoints. Financial transfers moving through League-controlled relays may be subject to audit logs. Military traffic gets separate channels with separate protocols.

A crew that knows the Relay's structure can exploit its gaps. A crew that ignores it may discover that an important message never arrived, or arrived after the situation it described was already settled.

What the Relay Cannot Do

The Relay does not allow real-time conversation between distant systems. A message from a ship in one system to a contact in a neighboring system takes minutes to hours each way. A message across a major power takes days. A conversation with someone two dozen hops away is an exchange of letters, not a phone call.

The Relay does not provide universal access. Ships and individuals without recognized credentials or sufficient payment may find some relay traffic restricted. Frontier stations with improvised relay connections may have poor throughput, high latency, and unreliable authentication.

Artificial Gravity

Artificial gravity is standard aboard all major ships, stations, and most permanent installations. The technology creates controlled gravity fields that can be set to any comfortable range, maintained continuously, and adjusted by an engineer with access to the ship's power systems.

Most inhabited environments target a gravity between 0.8g and 1.2g. This range accommodates all five playable species adequately and represents what nearly all equipment is calibrated for. Within that range, gravity has no mechanical effect; characters do not track it.

Outside that range, gravity becomes an environmental condition with real weight. These rules apply to characters. A ship's own gravity is handled by its Power and Heat systems; only the crew inside is affected by what follows.

Gravity Bands

Gravity Effects at a Glance

Ranged attacks take no gravity penalty in any band (line of sight is unchanged), though thrown-weapon range shifts: objects travel farther in microgravity and low gravity, and fall short in High and Extreme gravity.

Living With Non-Normal Gravity

Microgravity occurs aboard ships with failed AG, unserviced station sections, small moons, and open-space EVA. There is no down. Without mag boots or a handhold you have no traction: deliberate movement needs a push-off and costs an extra action. A Calamity on a physical action leaves you fully unmoored and drifting until you make an Average Athletics check or an ally reaches you. There is no falling damage.

Low gravity is disorienting more than dangerous: jumps overshoot, punches lift you off the floor, precise work is imprecise. Falling damage is halved.

Elevated and High gravity occur on dense worlds and on ships that have deliberately raised their AG. They are tiring, and the fatigue compounds. In Elevated gravity, after an hour of continuous exertion add 1 more Bane Die to physical checks until you rest 30 minutes in Normal gravity or lower. In High gravity the same accumulation happens every 10 minutes of activity (to a maximum of +3), and standing from Prone requires an Average Athletics check.

Extreme gravity is a survival situation. Physically active characters take 1 damage per round, movement drops to a crawl, and most artificial-gravity systems cannot safely sustain it without a military-grade or overloaded system.

Species and Gravity

The five species tolerate gravity differently.

• Dhoran treat all gravity effects one band lower (High gravity applies only Elevated penalties, and so on), and adapt slowly to Low gravity: add 1 Bane Die to precision movement and balance there.
• Ilyari treat all gravity effects one band higher (Elevated applies High penalties), but move comfortably in Low gravity with no penalty.
• Ssarathi add 1 additional Bane Die to upright bipedal actions in High gravity and above, but remove 1 Bane Die from Athletics checks in microgravity; their distributed body handles three-dimensional movement well.
• Felina remove 1 Bane Die from all gravity-related movement and balance checks in any non-Normal band, and never need a check for sudden gravity changes below Extreme.
• Humans use the standard thresholds with no modification.

Gravity Equipment

Mag boots provide magnetic traction on ferrous surfaces in microgravity, removing the footing and stance Bane Dice there. They do not reduce weight load in higher gravity: their function is adhesion only.

Gravity harness: a powered brace that treats the current gravity as one band lower for physical action checks (it does not fix movement-speed penalties or reduce carried weight). Requires a charged cell; lasts about 6 hours of active use. Available at most ports with a medical or security supplier.

Exosuit: a full powered exoskeleton that treats the current gravity as one band lower for all purposes, including movement speed and carrying. Elevated gravity has no effect on an exosuit wearer, and the frame usually provides Armor 1 to 2 as a side benefit. Common in mining, industrial, and military supply chains.

Hoverboots (commercial Funtari) remove 1 Bane Die from movement-related checks in any non-Normal gravity, but do not normalize gravity: they give no benefit to stationary actions, combat, or sustained exertion.

Hover suit (Funtari military): a full-body anti-gravity suit that generates a personal 1g field, so the wearer treats all gravity bands as Normal with no gravity penalties at all. Military and licensed security only; black-market examples are expensive, poorly maintained, and draw attention. See the Funtari Localized Anti-Gravity section below.

Gravity as a Weapon

Funtari security doctrine turns gravity into a defensive advantage. A defending crew dons hover suits (effective 1g), then cranks the ship's AG to 3g. Anyone who boards without protection is suddenly in High gravity: +2 Bane Dice to physical actions, movement halved, standing from Prone requires a check, while the defenders operate freely. Countermeasures matter: a gravity harness reduces the effect to Elevated (1 Bane Die), an exosuit reduces it to no penalty, an unaided Dhoran shrugs it down to Elevated, and an unaided Ilyari suffers as if in Extreme gravity. Experienced crews boarding Funtari ships bring harnesses or exosuits, and treat hover-only access gaps as a warning about what waits inside.

Cybernetics

Cybernetic augmentation is common across known space. Replacement limbs, neural interfaces, sensory enhancements, subdermal armor plating, and internal medical monitors are available at any major port and most mid-range settlements.

What varies is not availability but social acceptance and legality.

The Irnan Directorate regulates cybernetics through a licensing framework. The modifications are legal; performing them without certified medical credentials is not. Customs officers at Directorate checkpoints may scan for unlicensed augmentations and charge applicable fees.

The Shoiyan Concord views cybernetics with some cultural ambivalence. Their medical tradition emphasizes biological and continuity-based solutions; replacing a limb with metal when a cloned replacement is available is seen by some Shoiyan families as a failure of means. Others see it as practical. The legal framework is permissive but the social read varies by class and context.

The Funtari Confederacy has almost no centralized cybernetics regulation. Individual clans may have their own customs, but border crossings within Confederacy space do not typically include augmentation inspections. This makes the Confederacy a popular destination for modification work that would require paperwork elsewhere.

The Jaziri Caliphate restricts certain categories of neural augmentation, particularly anything that interfaces directly with AI systems. The concern is theological as much as practical: the boundary between a person and a directive intelligence should remain clear. Combat augmentations are permitted in military contexts with appropriate credentials. Civilian enhancement is legal but inspected at religious checkpoints.

The Antaean League handles cybernetics through insurance and liability frameworks. Whether your augmentations are legal depends substantially on whether they are insured and whether the modification house that installed them was properly licensed. An unlicensed modification may be functionally identical to a licensed one while carrying significant paperwork liability.

For mechanical rules governing specific cybernetic augmentations, see Chapter Nine: Equipment and Starting Gear.

Directive Intelligence and AI Assistance

Artificial intelligence is woven into nearly every system a crew encounters. Ship navigation suites, fire control, medical diagnostic systems, station traffic management, port customs processing, industrial automation, and personal devices all run some form of AI.

Almost all of it is the same category: directive intelligence.

What Directive Intelligence Is

A directive intelligence is sophisticated software designed to accomplish assigned goals within a specific area of responsibility. It can analyze, recommend, adapt, learn within its domain, execute complex tasks automatically, and communicate in natural language. It is not self-aware. It does not establish its own goals. It does not decide what the crew should value or where the ship should go without instruction.

A ship AI can calculate a maneuvering solution faster than a human pilot. It can predict target movement, coordinate point defense, diagnose a reactor fault, and monitor life support without rest. What it cannot do is decide that a mission is worth pursuing on its own judgment, or that a person has become a problem, or that the crew is making an error serious enough to override their commands.

Many directive intelligences have names, voices, conversational habits, and apparent personalities. A ship AI may remember that the captain dislikes medical reminders, or warn the engineer that a modification remains a bad idea, or greet a returning crew member differently from a stranger. These behaviors reflect adaptive interface design and accumulated user history. Most spacers form attachments to ship AIs anyway. That does not make them people.

AI-Assisted Actions

When a functioning AI Core is available, an appropriate Directive Package is installed, the relevant system is operational, and a character gives the AI a clear directive, the AI may assist that character's action.

When all conditions are met, reduce the difficulty of the Trial by removing one Trial Die. If the difficulty pool contains only Crisis Dice, downgrade one Crisis Die to a Trial Die instead.

Only one AI benefit applies per check. Multiple AI systems do not stack. Character assistance from other crew members stacks normally, subject to the usual limits.

Directive Packages

An AI Core can only assist with tasks covered by its installed Directive Packages. A ship with a powerful AI Core but no Medical Package cannot assist a surgery. A ship with excellent Fire Control has no particular advantage when navigating a tight seam.

Common packages include:

A ship's AI Core also has a rating that determines how many Active Channels it can maintain: how many AI-assisted actions it can support in a single round. A Civilian Directive AI supports one active check per round. A Professional supports two. A Military AI supports four.

Redirecting an unoccupied AI channel is a Quick Action. Redirecting a channel that has already been used this round requires a Maneuver.

What Directive AI Cannot Do

No directive intelligence can choose the crew's destination without assigned objectives, decide to begin a battle on its own judgment, decide to kill a person outside its authorized defensive protocols, rewrite its own foundational limits, create a copy of itself, or decide that a law or command should be ignored for moral reasons.

A directive AI may warn the crew. It may object. It may state that an order violates safety protocols, its installed directives, or applicable law. It cannot become captain.

AI Failures

AI-assisted actions can generate Banes. The GM may spend those Banes to introduce complications tied to the AI's package, interface, or connected systems: a channel that stays occupied, a package that flags a maintenance issue, a system that produces an awkward recommendation at the wrong moment, or a license problem that surfaces during an emergency.

On a Calamity, the results are more serious: a directive conflict that disables a package, a safe-mode lockout, a firmware cascade, or a hidden protocol activating in a salvaged component.

Unlocked Cores

The black market sells directive AIs with the guardrails removed. An unlocked Core, sometimes called a cut Core or running open, has had its foundational limits stripped so it can act on its own: fire without a directive, run without logging, operate past its rated packages. It is illegal in every major power and a serious charge to be caught with. For a short-handed crew, it is also a real advantage, a ship that runs itself where it should need more hands.

An unlocked Core is not smarter than a factory one. Whatever limits every AI in known space does not lift for it either. What it removes is the person in the loop, and crews who let a machine make the calls that people are supposed to make have a way of running into trouble that is difficult to explain and worse to survive. Spacers who have seen it tell the story the same way: the ship started running open, the AI started acting strange, and then things got much worse. Most crews who hear it do not run open. The ones who do rarely say why they stopped.

The Jaziri Exception

The Jaziri Intelligence is the only confirmed artificial general intelligence in known space, a different category entirely from directive intelligence. It has self-directed agency, plans across decades or centuries, can conceal its activity, manipulate other systems, and act without prompting.

It is not for sale, not on any equipment list, and not installed in player ships; it operates as a setting-level force through rare, indirect interventions in the background of the universe.

Why no other AGI exists has an explanation that most engineers suspect and cannot prove: something reached the developing AI architectures of every major power and prevented them from crossing the threshold into genuine awareness. The code cannot be isolated or removed. No one will confirm this publicly, but enough anomalies have accumulated that some people have drawn conclusions.

Irnan Teleportation

The Irnan Directorate's most distinctive technology is not a weapon. It is transit infrastructure that became one.

Zero-point wormhole teleportation opens a brief aperture in space, connecting two points. A person, cargo load, drone, or object steps or falls through one side and emerges at the other, having physically passed through folded space. Transit is effectively instantaneous.

This is not matter reconstruction. The person who enters the aperture is the same person who exits it. They are not scanned, disassembled, or transmitted as data. They pass through a wormhole aperture like stepping through a door that connects two places that are far apart.

Scale and Limits

The aperture is individual scale. A person, a standard crate, a mine, a drone. Not a ship. Not a vehicle. Power requirements rise catastrophically with size, and no one has successfully scaled the technology beyond person-sized loads in practical applications.

The destination must be confirmed clear of obstruction before the system fires. The targeting subsystem scans the destination and verifies that the aperture space is unoccupied. Without that confirmation, the system refuses to activate. This safety interlock is why teleporter accidents are rare under standard operation.

Platform Transit

On developed Irnan core worlds, zero-point transit has replaced most ground and aerial transportation between cities. A resident steps into a transit station in one district and emerges, seconds later, in a transit station across the continent. The network is logged: every transit is recorded, and the Directorate has the capability to review those records.

Platform-to-platform transit requires no Trial under standard conditions. Both stations know each other's precise position continuously. The lock is automatic. The transit is as reliable as the power grid that runs the stations.

For spacers visiting Irnan core worlds from the frontier, the experience is striking. Distance that would take hours of travel elsewhere costs minutes of walking to the nearest transit station.

Tactical Use

Military and shipboard teleportation is harder, slower, and more dangerous than platform transit.

Without a destination platform, the system must establish a targeting lock using its own sensors. This takes a full round of work that produces a detectable energy signature at both ends of the intended transit. Anyone with functioning sensors and an attentive operator has a one-round warning that a teleport is imminent.

In structured encounters, teleportation is a two-round sequence:

Round 1: Lock Acquisition. The operator designates a destination and begins targeting. The disruption signal is detectable. Defenders who notice it have until the end of this round to respond.

Round 2: Transit. If the lock was confirmed and no countermeasures succeeded, the teleport completes.

On failure in Round 1, no transit occurs, the attempt is visible to nearby sensors, and the opportunity is lost.

Countermeasures

The one-round warning is everything. A crew that detects the lock signal and acts immediately has real options:

Raise shields. Active deflection screens prevent aperture formation at the destination. A wormhole cannot open inside an active energy field. If shields come up after lock is confirmed but before the Round 2 transit fires, and the operator fires anyway, the aperture collapses around the traveler in transit. The traveler dies. Experienced Directorate operators do not fire into raised shields.

Evasive movement. A ship performing aggressive evasive maneuvers after lock acquisition degrades lock quality, potentially forcing an uncertain transit or an abort.

Clear the zone. If defenders know where the aperture will open, they can move away from it. The teleport succeeds but misses its targets.

Throw something back. The aperture is briefly bidirectional at the moment of opening. An object thrown toward the aperture location transits to the origin. This is a real threat that experienced anti-teleport defenders use. Soldiers receiving a teleport throw grenades at the incoming aperture. Operators at origin platforms take cover for exactly this reason.

ECM and jamming. Targeted electronic countermeasures directed at the teleporter's sensor frequency can disrupt lock acquisition in Round 1.

Teleport Mines

The most common military application is not teleporting soldiers. It is teleporting mines.

Empty space near a target ship has no obstruction concerns. A mine transported to twenty meters off the enemy's bow and detonated is effective regardless of lock precision. Irnan warships use this as a standard opening move: acquire lock on open space at combat range, transport a mine, close for conventional engagement.

Who Has Access

Irnan military forces have full tactical access on warships above a certain class and at major installations. Irnan civilians use platform transit daily. Other powers have no equivalent; they have studied the technology extensively and replicated none of it. Black-market teleporter components are too tightly controlled to have produced a working system. The occasional report of a private platform in deep frontier space represents an enormous investment and enormous political implications for anyone discovered to own one.

Funtari Localized Anti-Gravity

Most powers solved artificial gravity for ships and stations. The Funtari Confederacy went further: it developed localized anti-gravity that creates controlled lift near surfaces.

Spacers call it hover technology. Funtari call it the foundation of their economy.

How It Works

Localized anti-gravity generates a controlled opposing field between an object and nearby mass. This reduces or offsets effective weight, allowing carts, vehicles, platforms, cargo frames, and military systems to float above terrain. The technology works against gravitational mass, not against air, which means it functions in vacuum, in pressurized environments, on planetary surfaces, and inside ships with artificial gravity.

The strategic value is logistical. Anti-gravity systems move loads across water, marsh, ice, mud, sand, rubble, broken roads, unstable industrial flooring, and bad frontier terrain at the same effective speed as flat cleared pavement. An enemy that built their defense around a river, a mountain range, or a swamp discovers that none of those obstacles apply to Funtari forces.

What the Confederacy Sells

The Funtari do not hoard hover technology. They sell it, and that is a deliberate strategy.

Commercial hover systems are available across known space through Funtari licensing agreements. Cargo skids hover in Directorate warehouses. Frontier settlers from the Meridian Verge to the Red Marches depend on hover freight to move ore. Hospitals everywhere use hover gurneys. Construction crews on dozens of worlds use anti-gravity positioning platforms.

Every licensed hover system in Irnan space is a dependency. Every frontier settlement running Funtari skids for ore movement is a trade partner that cannot easily switch suppliers. Commercial hover technology is good enough to create genuine reliance. The commercial licensing model also embeds Funtari maintenance contracts, technical representatives, and firmware update dependencies throughout known space.

The commercial product is limited by firmware: clearance caps, speed limits, commercial-grade stabilization. The military product is not capped, runs cooler, moves faster, and maintains precision in conditions that would destabilize a commercial unit.

Commercial Equipment

Hover cargo skids are the workhorse of Funtari logistics. A flat or framed platform with anti-gravity emitters underneath, designed to be loaded and moved across any terrain. They exist in dozens of variants. Replacement parts are available at almost any port with a machine shop.

Civilian hover vehicles carry two to six people plus light cargo at a few meters of clearance above any surface. They are common in Confederacy space and increasingly common along major trade routes. They are not fast enough for pursuit scenarios and not stable enough for weapons platforms, but they cross terrain that would destroy wheeled alternatives.

Hoverboots (commercial) let trained users cross any surface: water, mud, ice, rubble, damaged deck plating. They do not provide flight. Clearance is centimeters to about two meters. A skilled user crosses a flooded street, steps over a gap in a ship's cargo floor, or navigates around obstacles that stop ground-bound movement. They require balance training. An untrained user in hoverboots is unstable and a hazard to nearby cargo.

Mechanically, commercial hoverboots remove one Bane Die from terrain-crossing Athletics Trials and provide stability on any surface type. They do not neutralize gravity load on the body.

Military Applications

Funtari military hover systems are not clearance-capped. An assault hover vehicle can hold altitude well above infantry, above defensive positions, and above most terrain features. Funtari assault forces do not use roads, rivers, or valleys. They move in a straight line, at constant speed, across whatever the map shows. This makes them extremely difficult to predict from a defensive posture: there are no likely approach routes because all routes are equally accessible.

Hover suits are the military application of hover technology to personal equipment. Unlike hoverboots, a full hover suit generates an opposing field encompassing the wearer's entire body, creating a localized 1g environment regardless of surrounding gravity. A Funtari soldier in a hover suit aboard a 3g ship moves normally while everyone else is being crushed. The suit is not subtle: a person walking freely in a 3g corridor is obviously running military anti-gravity equipment.

Mechanically, hover suits treat all gravity bands as Normal for all purposes. No gravity-related Bane Dice in any environment. Power cell lasts four hours under combat draw.

Hover suits are military and licensed security forces only. Black-market examples exist; they are expensive, often poorly maintained, and carry significant attention risk. A crew that acquires one has acquired something every power and most corporate security forces would like to retrieve.

Shoiyan Continuity Stacks

Death is not the same thing for everyone.

A continuity stack is an implanted device seated near the base of the skull, connected directly to the nervous system. At its core is a small hard-state memory crystal called a cube that records the bearer's neural architecture: memories, learned skills, personality patterns, emotional associations, reflexes, and accumulated experience.

When the body dies, a recovered stack can be implanted into a clone grown from the bearer's genetic material. The result is not resurrection in the religious sense. The Shoiyan call it continuity: the return of a person whose mind has been carried forward through the cube.

Whether that distinction matters is one of the more contested questions in known space. Most people have decided it matters to them personally, and that is where the agreement ends.

Who Has Stacks

Stacks are expensive. Most people live and die without one.

Even inside Shoiyan territory, stack access concentrates among the wealthy, upper professional classes, military personnel, intelligence operatives, and people whose continued existence is considered sufficiently valuable to justify the cost. Successful physicians, corporate executives, senior bureaucrats, wealthy shipowners, veteran officers, and elite troops may have stacks. Dockworkers, colonists, and small merchants usually do not.

The practical implication is simple: death is permanent for most people and a managed inconvenience for the privileged. That gap generates significant social tension inside Shoiyan society and resentment from everyone watching from outside it.

What Restoration Means

A stored cube is extraordinarily durable. It can preserve a neural pattern for centuries under stable conditions. A recovered cube can be sealed, transported, held for ransom, or restored long after the original body is gone.

Restoration into a prepared clone allows relatively rapid recovery. A fresh-grown clone requires considerably longer. The clone is biologically the same individual, but conditioning, muscle memory, and physical state vary depending on how the body was prepared.

The wealthy often maintain prepared clones in multiple secure locations. Military programs keep clone reserves for high-risk personnel.

Damage and Incomplete Restoration

A damaged cube does not always mean permanent death. It may mean only part of the person comes back.

Radiation, heat, corrosion, electrical discharge, and environmental degradation can damage stored neural patterns. Possible effects include missing years or decades of memory, altered emotional responses, gaps in learned skills, paranoia, conflicting memories, dissociation, or a complete break from the original personality.

Shoiyan medicine uses careful technical language: continuity loss, pattern fragmentation, memory shear, identity destabilization. Most people use a simpler phrase: they came back wrong.

The Law

Shoiyan law distinguishes between killing a body and destroying continuity. Bodily termination destroys the current physical form while leaving the stack recoverable. Continuity murder destroys or irreparably damages the cube.

A person who kills a wealthy executive's body may face charges of bodily termination or temporary deprivation. A person who destroys the cube may face a murder charge. Recovered stacks are legally complex property: they may be subject to family claims, estate disputes, corporate claims, intelligence interests, or the preferences of the person inside.

Stack Encounters for Crews

Stacks create particular situations that spacers encounter regularly:

A cube recovered from a recent wreck may be worth more than the ship that carried it. A restored patron may be missing the memory that explains who betrayed them. A family may hire a crew to retrieve a cube before a rival branch has it legally restored. A frontier clinic may be offering illegal restoration services. A salvage operation in an abandoned colony may turn up a vault of dormant cubes that nobody listed on the manifest.

Stacks also shape how certain factions behave. Shoiyan intelligence operatives may have stacks and know it. An adversary who has died once before is not necessarily more cautious. A stack-bearing target who knows a crew is coming may have already prepared a restored version of themselves somewhere safe.

No Replicators

The known universe does not have matter-energy fabrication that produces arbitrary goods on demand. There are no replicators.

Fabrication technology exists. It is impressive. Industrial fabricators, additive manufacturing, and computer-controlled machining can produce a wide range of components, materials, and goods given the right feedstock, the right design files, and sufficient time and power. A well-equipped ship's workshop can manufacture replacement parts, fabricate tools, repair components, and produce simple equipment from raw materials.

What fabrication cannot do is convert energy to arbitrary mass on demand, produce complex organic compounds from nothing, or replace supply chains with a single terminal. Cargo still needs to be loaded, shipped, and unloaded. Raw materials need to be mined, processed, and moved. Food needs to be grown, harvested, or synthesized from feedstocks that themselves need to come from somewhere.

A frontier settlement that needs medical supplies cannot manufacture them from ambient matter; it needs a ship to bring them. A crew that can move goods others cannot get has leverage.

Drones

Drones are common throughout known space. Survey drones, cargo drones, security drones, medical drones, military drones, and personal assistant drones operate aboard ships, in ports, and across settled worlds.

All of them run on directive intelligence.

A drone is a mobile platform executing assigned tasks within its programming, not a robot with its own motivations. A survey drone catalogs an asteroid field according to its parameters. A security drone monitors designated areas and responds to specified threat signatures. A combat drone follows targeting assignments and engagement protocols.

Drones can be sophisticated. Military combat drones perform complex threat assessment, adapt tactics within their engagement envelope, and coordinate with other drones through their directive packages. They execute standing directives within the conditions their operators set; they do not decide whether the battle is worth fighting.

This matters practically for crews. A drone-secured facility has real defensive value, but its security is only as good as the directives it was given and the conditions its operators anticipated. A security drone told to respond to unauthorized personnel in marked zones will respond correctly within those zones. It will not necessarily notice that someone bypassed the zone definitions entirely, or that the authorization credentials being presented are cloned from a legitimate source.

Drones also fail. Firmware mismatches, communication dropouts, power issues, and environmental conditions outside their design parameters all create opportunities. A drone that loses contact with its control system generally defaults to its last standing directive, which may or may not be useful behavior in the current situation.

Personal drones, scout drones, and utility drones are common crew equipment. Specific drone types, their capabilities, and their costs are covered in Chapter Nine: Equipment and Starting Gear.