How a run works
The game is played entirely in space. Each player has one home base and one ship. Every burn is paid in energy taken from the home warehouse, so a pilot who wants materials still has to keep going to the Sun.
Fill
Home → Sun → home warehouse
The ship siphons a satellite until it is empty, or until another load would leave it short of the energy to depart. It stays exposed while it siphons and until it leaves the inner orbit.
Sell
Home warehouse → Earth station → home bank
A pilot sells only at their own faction's station. The station pays cash onto the ship for the surplus above the burn home. That cash is banked only at home.
Supply
Home → a body that yields what the ship lacks → home
Cash buys that body's yield at a base there. Materials have weight. The base will not sell a load the ship cannot lift home on the wide path today.
The home base is the energy warehouse, the repair bay, and the bank. Improvements are built there, and only there. It can orbit any planet or moon. It cannot orbit the Sun.
A base receives that body's material steadily, free. It receives no other body's. A moon and a planet work the same way. No yield stands in for another, and a planet's yield is not included in its moons. Every pilot goes to every yielding body except the one they live on.
The only bodies that yield nothing
The Sun is where energy is mined. Earth is where energy is sold. Cash does not buy materials at either of them.
Every step up in strength spends every body's yield. The free yield at home is only that body's share. This sets no prices and no amounts.
Hydrogen metal from Jupiter
The ship's strength in a fight, and the plate a repair bay puts back.
Under the clouds, hydrogen is pressed into a metal. The scoops bring it up and it stays solid.
Helium rain from Saturn
How fast a ship drinks a harvesting satellite.
Helium falls through the sky in droplets.
Mantle ice from Uranus
What a close pass wears down, and what a fight spends.
The hot ice under the clouds is lifted out and kept.
How much solar energy the ship can hold. The burn spends that same store.
Storm tar from Neptune
The light fittings. Marauder ships are built around them.
Heat and wind draw carbon out of the methane.
A gravity assist is the efficient burn. The ship is already moving at orbital speed, and a close pass lets a planet's gravity change that speed, so the engines spend less stored energy. Any planet can be that pass, and only when it sits where its gravity bends the course. A course can use more than one planet.
A wide path stays clear of the planet, spends the full reserve, and leaves the hull alone. A close path on a good alignment spends less energy, arrives sooner, and wears the shields and hull. A close pass in the wrong month saves nothing. Where the home sits still decides the cost of a direct burn: Mercury is the cheap hop to the Sun, and the Moon is the cheap hop to Earth's market.
Dock at an empty or allied satellite and siphon until it is empty, or until another load would drop the ship under the reserve for today's departure. When the siphon stops, the ship is idle in the inner orbit with its haul aboard. A departure plotted from the terminal is flown when the siphon stops. A ship with no departure plotted stays on the empty satellite.
The inner orbit is a combat zone. Ships fight with their stats. The player does not steer the shots. If the attacker wins, they take the energy and the cash that were aboard, plus scrap from the wreck. The defender is sent home to the repair bay. The recall does not deliver a cargo. Ships are never permanently destroyed.
Energy has weight. Materials have weight. Cash does not. A heavier ship burns more and fights worse. Past a point the cargo is so heavy that what is left cannot buy the trip, so siphoning stops while the ship can still leave.
Only a completed transfer at an Earth station changes the price of energy. SSI deliveries move the legal price. Marauder deliveries move the black-market price. When the legal price drops, the domes buy the surplus, the slums go without power, and stolen energy pays more. Selling into a flood is how that premium disappears.
Cash stays on the ship until it is banked at home. Until then, any opposing ship in Earth's inner or outer orbit can attack. Leaving Earth orbit ends the hunt. Orbits of other planets and moons are not combat zones. That is why a contractor lives beside Earth, on the Moon, rather than in Earth's orbit.
Banked cash is spent at other bodies, on the materials they yield. Two pilots docked at the same base can trade materials. A base does not pay cash for materials. Cash comes from energy sold at Earth, or from cash taken off a beaten ship.