Space Trader's Flight Training Manual
Issued to Commander Jameson on graduation · Lave Station · Galactic Co-operative of Worlds
You have a Cobra Mk III, one hundred credits, a pulse laser and no rating whatsoever. Nobody is going to tell you what to do next, which is rather the point. But here is a first hour that works.
From Lave with the standard hundred credits, computed against this game's own market model:
| Buy | At (per t) | Sell at | Jump | Profit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ~17t Food | ~3.8 Cr | Zaonce | 5.7 LY | +~55 Cr |
| ~14t Textiles | ~6.6 Cr | Zaonce | 5.7 LY | +~22 Cr |
| ~3t Liquor/Wines | ~26 Cr | Leesti | 3.8 LY | +~18 Cr |
Prices drift from day to day, so treat these as the shape of a good run rather than a timetable. On a hundred credits the cheap bulk goods — food, then textiles — are what fill the hold; liquor and furs pay more per tonne but you can only afford a few tonnes until your capital grows. A full tank costs under three credits, so it is fine to spend nearly everything on cargo.
You will also see fat margins on Narcotics, Slaves and Firearms. Those are illegal. Carrying them makes you a target for the police, and getting caught costs more than the run is worth. Until you know what you are doing, anyway, and then it is your business.
A Cobra Mk III. Fast, tough enough, and with a hold big enough to make a living. Everything on the console tells you something that will eventually keep you alive.
Two layouts. Classic is the 1984 BBC Micro scheme and the default; Modern is WASD. Switch with KEYBOARD LAYOUT on the station menu. Arrow keys fly in both, flight-style, so pull back to climb.
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Commands are the same in both layouts. Every table on this page is generated from the game's own keymap and command table — including which of them you can press in flight and which only at the station — so they cannot fall out of step with what your keyboard actually does.
The whole economy turns on one idea: worlds are short of what they do not make. Every commodity has a price that slides with the local economy, and the two ends of that slide are where your money is.
Food · Textiles · Liquor/Wines · Furs
Grown cheaply where there is land, wanted badly where there is not.
Machinery · Computers · Alloys · Luxuries
Made cheaply where there are factories, wanted badly where there are none.
So the classic run is a short hop between neighbours at opposite ends of that scale, carrying one thing out and a different thing back. Poor worlds have the sharpest prices and the worst company.
Contracts (CONTRACTS on the station menu, or ⇧C in flight) pay better than cargo for the same journey: deliveries, courier work, and bounties on pirates. They have deadlines. Missing one costs you the fee and some standing.
LOCAL CHART on the station menu, or N in flight, gives the short range chart, your neighbourhood, with a dashed circle showing exactly how far your remaining fuel will take you. GALACTIC CHART, or G in flight, gives the whole galaxy: 256 worlds, all of them real, all of them generated the same way they were in 1984.
Move the cursor with the arrows, ENTER to set your target, D for a full report on the world under the cursor, and F to search by name. Then H in flight to jump.
A red ring round a world on either chart means merchants are reporting heavy pirate activity there — the same warning the world's own report carries, drawn on the map so you can see the trouble without visiting all 256 systems to find it. The rings move as the galaxy does: convoys are lost, danger builds along lawless routes, and a well-policed world recovers faster than an anarchy. Nothing stops you jumping into a ringed system, and the cargo prices there are often exactly why you would.
T cycles the trade overlay, on either chart, through two views and back off again. Routes in flight draws a line along every lane with more than one convoy on it right now — around forty-five of them, out of the couple of hundred pairs of worlds trading at any moment, which is the shape of the galaxy's freight network rather than every last delivery. Prices puts an amber arrow above the worlds paying well over the usual for something and a green arrow below the ones selling something unusually cheap; press M on one to find out what. Both charts show whichever view you left on, and the pirate rings stay visible under all of them.
Lanes are drawn brighter the more freight is on them, so the arteries stand out from the capillaries at a glance. Point at one — with the mouse, or by moving the cursor onto it with the arrows — and it tells you what it is: the two worlds, how many convoys are on it right now, how much they are carrying between them, what is in the holds and when the next load lands. It is the same freight that will arrive as real ships if you happen to be in the system when it does.
M on either chart is the market estimate for the world under the cursor: what it trades in and roughly what it pays, worked out from the same model that will price your goods when you get there. It is an average rather than a quote — every market rolls afresh on each visit, so the panel shows the range those rolls span alongside the average, and one visit lands somewhere inside it. Where the range is wide, the average is a poor promise. It does account for what the living galaxy has been doing to prices out there, which is why an estimate can move between two readings without you going anywhere.
You arrive at the witch-point, a long way out from the planet, and the journey in is part of the game. That is what the torus drive (J) is for. It disengages near anything with mass: a planet, a station, or somebody who wants your cargo.
The single most feared manoeuvre in space, and rightly. The station rotates. The docking port rotates with it. You have to arrive lined up with a slot that will not hold still.
Get it wrong and you bounce off the hull with a bang and most of a shield gone. Get it wrong on a shield that is already down and it reaches you.
When you have the money, buy a docking computer. It is the least glamorous purchase in the catalogue and the one that will do most for your quality of life.
Stations only sell what their tech level supports. The good things are on the high-tech worlds, which are usually the safe ones.
Your combat rating is the only score that matters, and it moves slowly. It starts at Harmless and ends, for almost nobody, at E L I T E.
Tougher opponents count for more, so the ladder is climbed by picking harder fights, not more of them. Reaching the top is the whole game. Most commanders die Competent.
A patron is a person with work for you. The governor of Lave has work from your first dock, and every station board carries two or three side jobs. MISSIONS on the station menu opens the MISSIONS screen: accept there, and abandon anywhere. In flight, R opens the same screen. A mission is a chain of steps, and each step says what happens on every way it can end. A loss is one of those ways, so a failure becomes a branch rather than a wall. Finish a patron's chain, or fail it, and the next patron sends word from a few jumps on. COMMANDER'S LOG on the station menu, or ⇧R in flight, is your log, told as a story with the route drawn.
How a job plays. The MISSIONS screen shows the job you hold, the briefing, and the order you are on now. The world you must go to has an amber diamond on both charts. When you jump in, the console tells you what you are there for and where the target is: how far, and which way. The target is an amber diamond on the scanner, with a marker on the screen that says MISSION TARGET, and an arrow at the edge of the screen when it is out of view. A canister or a pod is scooped with fuel scoops. A ship you must watch is watched by keeping it in view, in the middle of your screen and inside scanner range, and the console counts the seconds. A ship you must destroy is destroyed. A ship you escort is safe once it reaches station range with no enemy near it. A lane you must clear has pirates on it, and the job is done when you dock on the far side. The console says what happened at each step, and it warns you when a deadline is three days away.
The mission tour shows the five patrons of galaxy one, each with a face, and what each asks before you accept.
The original shipped with a novella in the box. So does this one: an original story in five chapters, together with papers from the eight galaxies: a GalCop advisory on how pirates size you up, obituaries from the Tionisla Chronicle, a dead pilot's log, and the bar-talk about the Dark Wheel.