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Archives of Nethys

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Chapter 9: Starships

Space Travel

Source Starfinder Core Rulebook pg. 290
No one knows which Pact World first achieved spaceflight, but by the beginning of the modern era, nearly every world had some form of interplanetary travel. For some, this was purely magical: powerful spells or artifacts, or quick jaunts through other planes of existence allowed travelers access to their intended world. Yet for others, the airless void of space was just another sea to be crossed, which they did in a variety of craft, from magical to mechanical and from biological to divine.

As technology improved, travel time between worlds dropped from months and years to days, and the optimal routes between planets became crowded with spacecraft. Yet even in this new age of space flight, voyages beyond the solar system remained rare; traveling to even the nearest star at conventional speeds would take generations. While a few starships had drives capable of circumventing this obstacle, all relied on extremely expensive magical technology, often controlled by churches or other organizations. From Asmodean Helldrives to Kuthite shadow engines to the prayer-fueled cores of Iomedaean cathedralships, most of these technologies not only took the ship through other planes but also operated with direct divine assistance, and thus always came with a hefty price. While other drives had been theorized—drives that could fold space, create stable wormholes, or otherwise bend the rules of physics— the Pact Worlds had never managed to build them.

Then, 3 years after the end of the Gap, the Signal went out. Some worlds received it as a broadcast. It came to others in the dreams of inventors or lunatics, or etched into floors by malfunctioning assembly robots. Still others dug it from the innards of crashed space probes, found it carved on monoliths in city centers, or heard it blared from the sky by entities within wheels of flame. Regardless of the mechanism, at the same instant, thousands of cultures across the Material Plane received the same information: blueprints for a new type of starship drive— one capable of cheaply and efficiently shortening the distance between stars.

Though some scholars argue that every mortal culture received this information, many recipients were never aware of it or able to capitalize on it. In some cases, cultures weren’t technologically advanced enough to interpret the information— explorers have even uncovered these designs painted on cave walls by an uncomprehending paleolithic culture. In other cases, the information was lost due to simple accident, as when an inventor blessed with the information fell out a window before he could share it.

Immediately following the Signal, the new god Triune (see page 490) revealed itself to the Pact Worlds, claiming to have granted the knowledge as a blessing to its new mortal children. Formerly three minor gods of machines and robotics, now networked together into a single entity, the divine collective claimed to have peered through the substrata of reality and discovered a previously unknown plane of existence. Called the Drift, this plane could be reached only via technology—not magic— and would allow mortals to cheaply and easily travel between points anywhere in the galaxy. In granting this discovery to the world, Triune became one of the most powerful entities in the multiverse overnight: the new god of interstellar travel.

Like earlier interstellar drives, Drift engines operate by jumping to another plane of existence and then back to a different point on the Material Plane, thus never actually running up against the hard limit presented by the speed of light. In the past, that had meant using powerful magic and traveling to places like Heaven, Hell, the Maelstrom, or the First World—places inhabited by creatures and gods with sometimes inconvenient attitudes and appetites. The Drift, on the other hand, is a different type of dimension: a void of swirling color without substance, a mostly empty place of mutable laws, thought by some to be the quantum foam underlying all creation. While magic still functions inside the Drift, only technology can pierce the membrane between it and the rest of reality, which, combined with Triune’s role as gatekeeper, keeps any other deities or organizations from monopolizing the place.

While even most skeptics and members of other religions are forced to admit that Triune has appeared to make good on its egalitarian offer to maintain cheap and easy interstellar travel for everyone, use of the Drift does come with a catch. Every time a Drift engine is used, a tiny portion of a random plane is torn from its home and added to the Drift, set to float there for eternity. The farther the jump, the larger the chunk of material, which sometimes appears near the jumping ship, adding an element of risk: you never know when a long jump might tear away a chunk of Hell and leave you flying through a cloud of furious devils. Even those making safely measured jumps might encounter strange beasts trapped there by previous travels. Why the technology involves this side effect is unknown, though some conspiracy theorists believe that the ever-increasing size of the Drift—and the corresponding shrinking of the other planes of existence—is part of an inscrutable power play by Triune itself.

Standard Navigation and Astrogation

Source Starfinder Core Rulebook pg. 290
Whether they’re patrol craft or battlecruisers, all starships are propelled through space by thrusters. The exact workings of these engines vary from starship to starship—some are technological, while others are a blend of magic and machine. See the navigate task of the Piloting skill (page 145) for information about using that skill to plot a correct course. Determine the approximate distance you wish to travel and roll using the travel times below to see how long it takes you to reach your destination, but note that the Game Master is the final arbiter of travel times and may shorten or lengthen them as she desires for the needs of the campaign.
  • Start Thrusters (1 Minute per Size Category): Though this is rarely an issue, a starship’s thrusters need a short amount of time to warm up before they are ready to be used. Most hangars and space docks require that a starship’s thrusters be deactivated after it lands or docks. However, a starship in orbit always has its thrusters active. A starship also needs to deactivate its thrusters, which takes no time, to use its Drift engine (see below).
  • Travel Point-to-Point on a Planet (1d4 Hours): Large and smaller starships can operate in a planet or planetoid’s atmosphere, and can travel between two areas on the same planet within reason (a starship isn’t generally equipped to be submerged underwater, for instance). The travel time depends on the distance between the two points. This amount of time can also be used to represent traveling between two vessels in different orbits around the same planet.
  • Go into Orbit or Land (1d2 Hours): It takes only a short amount of time for a Large or smaller starship to lift off from a planet’s or planetoid’s surface and enter orbit, or to make a controlled landing from orbit. Huge and larger starships can be placed in orbit around only a planet or planetoid, and the crew requires a shuttle or other conveyance to reach the surface.
  • Reach Satellite (1d8 Hours): From planetary orbit, it takes slightly longer for a starship to reach one of that planet’s satellite bodies (or vice versa) than it would take to land. This travel time depends partly on the size of the planet and the satellite’s orbit.
  • Travel In-System (1d6+2 Days): Traveling between two planets in the same star system fluctuates based on those planets’ relative positions at the time of travel.
  • Travel Between Systems: Traveling between two star systems via conventional thrusters is a daunting affair, taking decades at the very least. Only large colony starships or vessels with crews in suspended animation attempt such a journey.

Drift Navigation

Source Starfinder Core Rulebook pg. 291
Using Drift technology differs from ordinary astrogation in that the distances between worlds are less important than the difficulty of correctly targeting the jump. Within a given solar system, jumps are relatively quick and easy, though this method is only moderately faster than flying between worlds using conventional thrusters. Outside of a given system, Drift tech divides the galaxy into two sectors: Near Space and the Vast. While Near Space worlds tend to be closer to the galactic center (and, incidentally, to the Pact Worlds) and the systems of the Vast tend to be farther out, the true difference between the regions lies in the density of so-called “Drift beacons.” These mysterious objects, sometimes spontaneously generated and sometimes placed by priests of Triune, help navigation systems orient ships in the Drift. While placing a single Drift beacon on a world isn’t enough to convert a Vast world to Near Space status, placing many in that general region of space can cause the shift, and thus it’s possible to find pockets of Near Space worlds all the way out to the galactic rim, as well as uncharted zones considered part of the Vast near the galaxy’s core.

When traveling to a world through the Drift, determine whether the destination is in the same system, Near Space, or the Vast. The distance between the start and end of your journey doesn’t matter, nor which category of space you’re starting from: traveling from the Vast to a Near Space world is no more difficult than between two Near Space worlds. Roll using the travel times below, then divide the result by your starship’s Drift engine rating to determine how long it takes you to reach your destination. For example, a starship with a Drift engine rating of 2 traveling to a world in the Vast would roll 5d6 and divide the result by 2. If you rolled 15, then the trip would take 7-1/2 days. Note that you never round down with Drift travel rolls, since these partial days can be extremely important when multiple spacecraft are racing each other to a destination. Additionally, since the Drift is a plane that you’re traveling through, it is possible to pause midjump, and even to land on one of the floating chunks of terrain or engage in starship combat. Time spent stopped in this manner does not bring you closer to your destination, and thus does not count toward your required travel time. Days spent in the Drift are no different for the crew than days spent in normal space, and thus they can craft items, heal, and take other actions as normal.

The one exception to the rules above is Absalom Station: for unknown reasons, the Starstone at its core acts as an extremely powerful Drift beacon, allowing ships from anywhere in the galaxy to jump to Absalom Station in 1d6 days.

While traveling through the Drift, a starship uses its conventional thrusters. For a starship to engage its Drift engines to either enter or exit the Drift, its conventional thrusters must be turned off for 1 minute.
  • Travel In-System (1d6 Days): Jumping between two points in the same solar system is moderately faster than moving between them in real space, and is so short as to carry only a 1% chance of random encounters in the Drift.
  • Travel to Absalom Station (1d6 Days): Jumping to Absalom Station always takes only 1d6 days, thanks to the Starstone.
  • Travel to Near Space (3d6 Days): Near Space contains the Pact Worlds system and most of the worlds colonized and contacted so far by their explorers, but there are still thousands of Near Space worlds yet to be investigated. Jumps to Near Space worlds rarely carry more than a 10% chance of a random encounter while in the Drift.
  • Travel to the Vast (5d6 Days): Largely unexplored, the millions of Vast worlds are significantly more difficult to get to than Near Space, and the risk of a random encounter in the Drift can be anywhere from 25% to as high as 50%.
  • Travel beyond the Rim: While other galaxies are known to exist, the distances between them and the galaxy of the Pact Worlds are so incredibly large that there have yet to be any confirmed instances of intergalactic travel using Drift technology. Whether this is due to the extreme travel times involved, limits to the reach of the Drift itself, or dangers encountered in the Drift during such attempts remains unknown.