Strikers
The striker is the ultimate piece of adventuring equipment. They give you ready access to the far flung places of the known galaxy. However, two things stand between your party and striker ownership: one, they are expensive, the very smallest is more than four million credits; and two, you need a navigator to fly it. Despite these challenges, adventuring parties, particularly after level 6, quite often manage ownership.
Travelling Between Stars
Even though strikers offer faster than light travel, the enormous distances between stars, still means that many trips can take months. A striker capable of ethereal-1 can travel 1 lightyear in the course of 10 days. A trip from earth to Proxima Centauri at a distance of 4.3 light years, means that it will be 43 days before arrival. Many trips can be over the distance of 10 lightyears, which means that it will be 100 days. The fastest broadly available striker, the express boat, which usually has a maximum speed of ethereal 8, can cut this trip down to 12 to 13 days.
By far the majority of strikers have speeds between ethereal-1 and ethereal-3. At ethereal-3, you can travel 3 lightyears in 10 days, 30 lightyears in 100 days, and about 100 lightyears in a year. As a result of such travel durations, very few people undertake trips of more than 300 lightyears.
Even so, the sheer amount of time in space make hypersleep an attractive prospect, and this is what most people do.
One passenger, the navigator, spends their striking time in the bell chamber, diving bell or hypertank, this is a special hypersleep unit, which is designed to enable resurfacing out of hypersleep for course corrections, soundings and any other matters to do with the exceptionally dangerous activity of travel in ethereal space (hyperspace, subspace, phlogiston, or whatever your turn of phrase is). The navigator is a psion who can teleport, and the striker is their instrument for doing so.
Bell chambers are recognisable by their overall spherical shape and the vast and tangled cabling everywhere.
Design Constraints and Features
In addition to the procession engines, all strikers have a striker rod apparatus (usually called the ratus), which is generally a 1 x 1 x 10 rod, oriented in the direction of travel, and about 10% of the volume of the ship in moderately-sized strikers. The elongated shape of the ratus drives ship design toward being long and thin.
Although much of the pre-Rift Wars technological heights have not been recovered, one thing has actually advanced over the last 4 centuries: striker rod miniaturisation. This important development has led to the miniaturisation of the striker overall, and put the striker in the hands of far more people.
Although the sensory and avionics systems on strikers can give you an outside view as if you were floating in nothing but an aegis suit. Thick diamond windows form part of the hull on most strikers, because people generally prefer the reality of actual observation. Ships like liners make a feature out of such windows, by, for example, having a saucer-shaped section, toward the front, with large diamond window space for seeing the stars in all their glory.
Traders and other merchant ships emphasise cargo space and so generally have a larger, contiguous space for cargo, and so often feature a bulge, which is usually to the back and to the bottom of the ship.
Neither striker rod apparatus nor the many procession engines have exhaust, so there are no engine cones on strikers (nor most other space ships, for that matter). While not visible, both the ratus and the procession engines are accessible from the inside for maintenance, and both can be extracted from the ship for replacement, or rebuilding.
Due to advances in materials technology, structures can be very light and remain strong, affording at least a 2-times reduction in the mass of materials. Most striker hulls are constructed of 90-10 carbon alloys, typically carbon-boron, carbon-germanium, or carbon-palladium. Comparing strikers to ocean-going naval vessels, the main differences in scale are that strikers tend to be longer, thinner and lighter. An ocean-going patrol boat, for example, will be roughly 300 tonnes and 50 metres long, whereas the equivalent striker would be about 180 tonnes, and about 90 metres long.
| Class | Tonnage | Length | Crew | Base & Size |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Skiff | 10T | 30 | 3 | ii (D|1|3) |
| Shuttle | 30T | 35 | 5 | ii (D|1|3) |
| Rambler | 60T | 40 | 6 | ii (T|2|2) |
| Scout | 100T | 50 | 8 | ii (T|2|2) |
| Courier | 150T | 50 | 8 | ii (S|3|1) |
| Trader | 200T | 100 | 12 | ii (S|3|1) |
| Escort | 200T | 100 | 16 | ii (S|3|1) |
| Patrol Boat | 400T | 150 | 30 | ii (M|4|0) |
| Freighter | 500T | 180 | 16 | ii (M|4|0) |
| System Liner | 1500T | 180 | 40 | ii (L|5|-1) |
| Monitor | 2000T | 300 | 35 | iii (D|1|3) |
| Light Corvette | 3500T | 400 | 140 | iii (T|2|2) |
| Heavy Corvette | 5000T | 450 | 200 | iii (S|3|1) |
| Frigate | 20kT | 600 | 200 | iv (T|2|2) |
| Destroyer | 30kT | 700 | 300 | iv (S|3|1) |
| Liner | 40kT | 800 | 500 | iv (S|3|1) |
| Cruiser | 40kT | 800 | 350 | iv (S|3|1) |
| Large Liner | 150kT | 1K | 1800 | iv (H|6|-2) |
| Carrier Cruiser | 300kT | 1K | 3000 | iv (G|7|-3) |
| Superfreighter | 600kT | 1K | 60 | v (S|3|1) |
| Battlestriker | 1MT | 2K | 10K | v (M|4|0) |
Striker Properties
A striker, being a vehicle, has many of the same properties as other vehicles, but there are some new properties as well as some changed emphasis. Strikers are always at base{ii} scale or larger. This means that all matter and power consumption in the listings is at 100 times the scale of base{0}.
Strikers are expected to operate away from any infrastructure for long periods of time, and so they must be able to generate their own power and matter. This means that the resources line in its listing, must reflect temporary resources and rates of recovery.
The overall sophistication of strikers (complexity 16 to 18), results in them having the ai-op operation property, meaning that they can fly themselves (with the exception of striking, which, as previously mentioned, requires a navigator).
Consider the following listing of the ultrastealth patrol boat. We’ve chosen this example of a property listing, because, although not a common striker, it covers a good variety of the features that strikers possess, and will best help you understand how to read and use the properties.