Travelers Guide

### Going places

You can travel to any of the marked locations on the map. That includes stations, ships, wormholes (later in the game), and a number of "empty space" markers. The empty space markers are scenic view points.

When traveling to a moving ship, an intercept course is automatically plotted. You can see a yellow marker on the destination ship, a white marker on the intercept point, and the line extending from the ship to the intercept point shows the ship's path of travel. If you adjust your travel speed, you'll see the intercept point change.

### Fuel and time

The distance to the destination is automatically calculated and displayed in the box at the top right of the map. A slider in the bottom right box lets you determine how long of a thrust burn you want, which will determine how long it will take (in game time) to get there. It will also determine how much fuel is used.

The travel time determines how much the game advances. During travel time, the planets revolve around the sun, ships move, and mines and factories produce output. In most cases there's no rush, and selecting a shorter thrust time and longer trip is probably a good choice (you won't be able to tell the difference). If you have any transporter ships in your flight, pirates can jump you if you take over 15 hours to travel, but the game will warn you of that.

Occasionally there *is* a rush. That's usually because you're trying to intercept pirate ships before they can take their prey. You'll be told when that's the case.

The thrust time determines how much fuel you'll use. Most ships use two units of fuel for every ten minutes of thrust time, so twelve units per hour. Interceptors burn less, transports burn more. If you don't have enough fuel to make the trip, the game will let you know. You can either select a longer trip or you can dock for fuel.

When you're docked, you can check how much fuel each of your ships has by going to the hangar. There's a sixteen-segment bar that shows the maximum capacity and current quantity. Each bar corresponds to twenty units of fuel, or about an hour and a half of thrust time for most combat ships.

If fuel cost is a concern, you can estimate how much you'll be paying by dividing the fuel usage by five. The actual cost may be slightly less because there are volume discounts for fuel, but the "divide by five" rule gives a good estimate. If you can refuel at a station that you own, you'll pay about half as much as elsewhere.

You can't run out of fuel when traveling between stations, but if you travel to a combat area (or through a wormhole) you might find you've run short of fuel to get to the next station. If you turn the thrust time down low enough, you'll be able to get somewhere although it can take quite a long travel time. Doing that with transporters in your flight is not a good idea because of pirates, so you might want to command the transporter(s) to retreat before you start traveling.

### The Solar System

By and large, the inner planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars) are engaged in producing basic survival needs: oxygen, water, food (nutrients), medicine, and nuclear fuel. Except for medicine, those items are inexpensive and can be sold in limited quantities to nearly any station whether they say they have a special need for them or not. That makes them valuable for the new player who's trying to figure out how to make 56 credits grow without spending too much on fuel. On the other hand, it means that there's a limited profit to be made there. Once you get to the point where you're no longer draining your credits to load up your transporter, it's probably time to move on.

The Jupiter system is the land of opportunity. A gas giant can't be mined, but the four Galilean moons provide both raw materials and gravity wells that space stations can orbit in. There are a lot of stations around Jupiter, operated by six different factions, and there's plenty of money to be made without having to travel far. Three ground bases provide some of the raw and refined materials needed by the four space station factories (metal parts being the most important of those). The Stellar Mall produces a wide variety of expensive manufactured goods, although you'll have to go "next door" to Equilibrium if you want electronics. The mall is the only place in the Solar System where you can buy hardware.

Saturn's New London station is by far the largest station you'll find, partly because it has nine habitats. New London rivals the Stellar Mall in variety of manufactured goods available. They can provide medicine whereas the mall can provide hardware, but otherwise there's a lot of similarity. You even have to go "next door" to Titan to buy electronics. A gas giant still can't be mined, and neither can the rings. Saturn has only one moon big enough to mine, and that one only produces uranium. If you want to feed the Saturn system's huge appetite for raw and refined materials, you're going to need to get those materials somewhere else.

That "somewhere else" might be in the asteroid belt. The Workers Union operates three stations in the asteroid belt. Two are basically mining bases, but Liber is a refining base that produces the refined products that the factories need: chemicals, metal parts, and nuclear fuel. Liber needs uranium to produce the nuclear fuel, and uranium is the highest-priced mineral around, so there's probably some profit to be made even with low volumes.

Uranus has two manufacturing stations and Neptune has one, but both systems are located a long, long way from the raw and refined materials they need and from the markets for the ship parts they're making.

### Growth

Two new stations are added when you finish the main campaign. Copernicus opens in the Uranus system, providing another source of uranium in the outer planets. Saturn's new Pegasus station supplements the weapons production of the New London station.

### Other star systems

Once the wormholes get mapped, you can travel to other star systems. The game includes the 53 known stars within five parsecs (about 16.3 light years) from the Sun. The star map places them in their correct positions using right ascension and declination. The wormholes are fanciful, of course. The makeup of each system is also completely fanciful. Space stations will appear in those systems after you've completed the main campaign.

The other star systems aren't great for sight-seeing. Alpha Centauri is possibly the best, and it doesn't really offer much that the Solar System doesn't. The other systems can give a change of pace for the player getting tired of the Solar System, but probably their biggest value is for the player who enjoys buying stations and building up a production business.

Only seven of those stars are visible to the naked eye and have historical names. A few of the others are named according to their discoverer (Barnard's Star, for example). Most of the rest are denoted by a catalog name and number, which makes them rather unmemorable. Some of the catalogs referenced are:

* DEN: DENIS
* GJ: Gliese-Jahreiss
* Gliese (pronouced GLEEzuh)
* Groombridge
* Lacaille (pronounced la KYE)
* Lalande (pronounced la LOND)
* LHS: Luyten half-second
* Luyten (pronounced LOYten)
* Ross
* SCR: SuperCOSMOS RECONS
* Struve (pronounced SHTROOvuh)
* WISE: WISE orbiting infrared telescope
* Wolf

Unlike the Solar System, the other star systems will continue to gain new stations as you travel within the system. The initial selection of stations that are for sale can be rather discouraging, but if you spend some time traveling around the system, better options will appear.

### Related pages

* Factions and their territories
* Trading and commodities
* To The Stars