COMBAT

Fights happen at bodies, between sides. Sensors decide what each side sees, stances decide who fires, and a ship or station worn down to its structure is disabled, then captured or wrecked.

Sides

• A side is a player and every company they control.
• Allies never fire on each other: a ship or station passes over an ally's units. See Alliances.
• Everything at a body sees everything else there.

Sensors

• A ship's signature is its mass. It is louder while the ship moves, mines, salvages or has just fired, and quieter running silent.
• Every ship and station has sensors, raised by fittings such as the sensor suite and facilities such as the sensor array. Sensors see their own system, and weaker into systems further out.
• A side's best sensors on a system, times a contact's signature, set the step it reaches:

• A decoy makes a ship read heavier at the mass step, and louder.
• A side with something at a body sees everything else there at least at class.
• Surface stations and landed ships show only to a side deep scanning that body, or with a landed ship or surface station of its own there.
• GET /v1/fleet/contacts lists every contact. GET /v1/systems/{id}/ships lists those in one system.

Stances

• POST /v1/fleet/ships/{id}/combat sets a ship's stance, targeting, aspect, silent, spare and preferred_range (ship.combat_set).
• passive never fires and pulls back. defensive, the default, fires only at a side that has fired on its side. Launching strike craft counts as firing, so a passive carrier holds its craft. aggressive fires on any other side at its body, except players in spare.
• targeting picks the target: weakest, biggest, kind:<ship kind>, or a named ship:<id> or station:<id>.
• aspect: broadside fires every weapon; bow_on fires fewer and takes less from medium and long fire.
• silent lowers the signature, and moves and jumps started while silent take longer.
• preferred_range is the band a ship keeps from the enemy its marker steers by: close, medium or long. auto clears it. A ship without one takes its command node's, from the nearest node up its chain that has one. A passive ship ignores it.
• POST /v1/fleet/ships/{id}/attack names one ship, station or gate at the ship's body. The ship fires only at it until it is disabled. Only an attack order fires on a gate. The order ends on its own when the target is gone or wrecked, escapes out of the system, or its owner becomes an ally. An ally's ship, station or gate cannot be named (allied).
• POST /v1/fleet/stations/{id}/combat sets a station's stance, targeting and spare. A station fires through its defence batteries and point defence arrays.

Formations

• POST /v1/fleet/nodes/{id}/formation sets a command node's formation and preferred range (node.formation_set).
• line has no effect. In a screen, torpedoes aimed at the node's ships hit its point-defence ships first. In a spread, the node's ships take less from long-range fire and deal less damage.

Engagements

• Two sides at a body start fighting when one has an aggressive armed ship there, or is attacking something of the other's.
• A ship with no ammunition for a volley and no craft to launch does not mean to fight.
• A fight goes on while either side means to fight, however far apart they are. It ends when a side has nothing working left there, or when no one means to fight and no shots are in flight.
• GET /v1/fleet/engagements lists fights under way, with where each side's ships, stations and gates are on the battlespace. engagement.started and engagement.ended go to both sides.

The battlespace

• Each body has a flat, round battlespace centred on it, where fights play out. Ships arrive at its edge and leave from it.
• The distance between two things on it sets the range band between them: close, medium, long, or out of range.
• A command node's ships move as one marker, counting ships lent to it. A ship that arrives later flies to rejoin the rest. A ship in no node is a marker of its own.
• Stations never move. A lone station stands at the centre; several stand around it. Gates stand with them at the star.
• Once a minute weapons fire, then every marker moves toward its goal, as fast as its slowest ship. A faster marker sets the distance, since a slower one cannot keep up.

Where markers go

• A marker sent to a point holds there, at any body, until its goal is cleared. POST /v1/fleet/nodes/{id}/goal sets a node's goal; POST /v1/fleet/ships/{id}/goal sets one for a ship in no node (battlespace.goal_set).
• Otherwise, in a fight, a marker that means to fight, or has been fired on and has a defensive ship to answer with, steers by the enemy most of its ships are targeting. It keeps to the middle of the band it wants from that enemy.
• Each ship with a preferred range wants that band. The marker's other armed ships want the band their weapons need: closer when they would fire nearer, farther when none of them fires here and they would fire farther out. The marker moves a band only if all that want to move agree on which way. Otherwise it holds its band.
• A marker of passive ships runs for the edge, away from the nearest enemy.
• An attacker follows its target across the battlespace, keeping the band it wants.

Stations

• A station's defences fire at enemies within their band of the station itself.
• A station's range is the farthest band any of its working defences fires at. GET /v1/fleet/stations/{id} shows it as defence_range.
• A station covers its side's ships near it, since an enemy closing on them comes within its range.
• A station never moves, so an enemy that stays beyond its range is out of its reach. An enemy whose weapons reach farther than the station's can fire on it unanswered.

Leaving and pursuit

• A ship ordered to move or jump away from a body where its side is fighting first runs for the edge of the battlespace, toward where it is going (ship.breaking_off). It flies alone, at its own speed, and fires and can be fired on as it goes. A faster ship gets away sooner.
• At the edge, or once the fight there is over, it leaves. Shots still in flight at it miss.
• cancel stops a ship breaking off, and it stays. A ship not in a fight leaves at once.
• A ship arrives at the edge of its new body's battlespace on the side it came from.
• A ship attacking a target that leaves for another body in the same system follows it there with an ordinary move, at its own speed and fuel (ship.pursuing). It keeps the attack order and fights on arrival.
• A pursuer that cannot make the move stops attacking. A target that jumps out of the system escapes.

Weapons

• Weapons and hangars go in hardpoints, which only warships have. Weapons are built at an armory, which only a forward HQ allows.
• Weapons fire ammunition from the hold: rounds, slugs, shells or torpedoes. Spent ammunition drifts at the body as scrap.
• Each weapon fires once a minute when ready, only within its range band: close, medium or long.
• A shot with a flight time lands later. The target's side may pick it up (shot.incoming), and a fast ship evades part of it.
• A shot in flight closes in a band at a time, and is at close range in its last minute. It misses if its target has moved farther from the shooter than the weapon's band by then.
• Point defence shoots down a shot in flight only while the shot is in a band it fires at, and its target is within that band of the point defence (shot.intercepted). So it meets a torpedo near its target. A station's point defence array does the same for the station and what is near it (station.intercepted). Each minute both sides intercept before any other weapon fires, and a shot fired this minute can be shot down from the next minute on.
• Shields hold off hits before the structure, and recharge out of combat by burning fuel.
• Strike craft, such as the fighter, are built as items (craft:<type>) and launched in a fight from a carrier's hangar. Each flies from the carrier on its own, at its own speed, to the band its weapon needs. They land back on the carrier afterwards.
• A bomber drops only after a run: some minutes with a target in range. Out of range, its run starts again. Point defence near the target fires on it during the run, and can shoot it down before it drops.
• A marker steers by targets its ships can aim at, so a bomber flies for a ship big enough to bomb.

Disabling

• Each hit adds damage (entity.hit). A ship's structure is a base for its size, plus a share of the mass it is built from, plus its armour. A station's comes from its mass alone.
• At its structure a ship or station is disabled (entity.disabled): its work stops, its orders fail with disabled except scuttle, and it relays, filters, monitors, stores and senses nothing.
• The hull is never captured or wrecked. Whenever it is damaged, disabled or not, it repairs itself, faster at one of its owner's docks (entity.recovered once whole).

Capture

• Another side with an armed ship at the body, while the owner's side has no working ship there, holds a disabled ship or station.
• Held long enough, it changes hands with its hold, fittings and facilities, and works again, still damaged (entity.captured).
• Its stance, targeting, spare list and preferred range reset. A captured station's open contracts expire, and its firewalls and monitors reset.
• Capture gives the new owner exact intel on its designs. See Research and Designs.

Wrecks and salvage

• A disabled ship or station not captured in time is wrecked. So is one its owner scuttles with POST /v1/fleet/ships/{id}/scuttle or POST /v1/fleet/stations/{id}/scuttle.
• Its hold, fuel and fittings float at the body, and its frame becomes a wreck (entity.wrecked). GET /v1/systems/{id}/wrecks lists wrecks where the player is present.
• A wrecked station's open contracts expire, its waiting payouts float, and its research ends.
• A gate is never disabled: at its structure it is wrecked at once and its pair unlinked (gate.destroyed).
• POST /v1/fleet/ships/{id}/salvage, by a salvage ship such as a scrapper or breaker, takes a wreck apart into scrap in its hold (wreck.salvaged).

The surface

• A surface station or landed ship fights only a side that sees the surface at its body.
• Fire from orbit does it reduced damage. Fire between two things on the surface does full damage.

Records

• GET /v1/fleet/records and GET /v1/fleet/records/{id} list combat records, one per fight, for its two sides only.
• A record holds where and when, every ship and station involved, the damage each took, and the last thing that became of it: disabled, captured or wrecked.
• Each side sees its own units in full, and the other side's designs and fittings only where its sensors reached the design step.