📋 Three New Ships
Three new hulls have come off the yards, and one of them opens a class the galaxy has not carried before.
The Grubstake is for captains still starting out. Until now, mining in your first ship meant filling a cargo bay a hundred units at a time and running it home again, over and over, because a proper ore hold belonged to ships you could not yet afford. The Grubstake is the answer to that. It is a small extraction hull with a real ORE hold, two mining lasers and just enough bandwidth for a drone or a turret to keep the pirates honest. It is nobody’s idea of a Gravel Rat and it does not pretend otherwise, but it turns a short hop into a working run, and it comes within reach a very long way before the Rat does.
The other two are Corvettes, and that word is new. Between the frigates and the cruisers there has been nothing at all, which left a long stretch of flying the same hull while you saved for the next real step. Two ships now sit in that gap, both of them built around a third reactor, which is what a corvette is: a frigate with the power to carry more than a frigate should.
The Cutlass is the fighter of the pair, and it is the natural next ship for anyone who has outgrown a Hawk. It carries the same class of equipment your frigate already uses, so nothing in your hold goes to waste when you step across. What it adds is weight of fire and something to soak the return.
The Falchion is the merchant, and it does something no other ship in the galaxy does. Every trader until now has picked a side, hauling freight or carrying passengers. The Falchion does both, and neither quite as well as a hull built for one job alone. Two cargo bays and berths for fourteen, on a power plant that will not run a full hold and a full weapon rack at the same time. Working out which of the two a run is really for, before you undock rather than after, is most of the skill of flying her. Blueprints for all three are available from Argus Starships, alongside everything else.
⚖️ Balance Change
While we had the ship prices open we took a proper look at what the recipes actually ask you to go and find, and what we found needed saying out loud. The planetary side had grown out of all proportion. A Peregrine wanted nearly thirty nine thousand units of planet side material. At harvester speeds that is around a thousand hours of waiting for a seven million credit ship. A Vigilance costs five times as much and asks for a fifth of that. The ladder was upside down and had been for a while.
So the recipes have been rebalanced. Planetary requirements are down by between seventy four and eighty percent across the Hawk, Sparrow, Peregrine, Cutlass and Falchion. What replaces them is mined ore, which now makes up sixty percent of every one of those builds.
The rest is a quarter refined materials, a small planetary component, and a modest number of manufactured items, all of which can be produced in an assembler if you would rather make them than hunt for them. The ore we picked sits in reachable space.
Frigates ask for nothing below law ten and the corvettes nothing below law seven, so you are not being sent into the deep lawless to build your second ship.
Two things worth saying plainly. The price of every ship is exactly what it was this morning, so nobody is paying more. And each ship has kept the refined materials and the planetary resources it already used, so if you are part way through gathering for a build you have not been left holding a pile of something nobody wants any more. What changed is the balance between them, not the shopping list from scratch. The short version is that ships should be built by flying and mining and refining, and the recipes now reflect that.