Ships

Hulls, the module system that augments them, and the four simulated systems — power, heat, damage and sensors — that make a ship something you operate rather than something you drive.

A ship in this game is not a stat block with a model attached. It is a set of coupled systems with one shared budget, and flying it well means managing that budget under pressure.

What a ship is

flowchart TB
    R["<b>Reactor</b><br/>the one source"]
    R --> D["<b>Drive</b><br/>thrusters · reference drive"]
    R --> S["<b>Systems</b><br/>shields · sensors · life support"]
    R --> P["<b>Payload</b><br/>weapons · scanners · scoop"]

    D --> H["<b>Heat</b>"]
    S --> H
    P --> H
    H --> RAD["<b>Radiators</b>"]
    H -.->|"signature"| SIG["<b>Detectability</b>"]
    H -.->|"over limit"| DMG["<b>Module damage</b>"]

    style R fill:#0369a1,stroke:#0c4a6e,color:#fff
    style H fill:#b45309,stroke:#78350f,color:#fff
    style DMG fill:#7f1d1d,stroke:#450a0a,color:#fff

One reactor, three consumers, one waste product. Every interesting decision in a ship — combat, refuelling, stealth, a long descent through an atmosphere — is a decision about where that budget goes and how fast the heat leaves.

Hulls

Six hulls at launch. They are procedurally assembled from parts — a spine, hull sections, nacelles, a cockpit module and greebling — rather than modeled, because one person and coding agents cannot author a ship pipeline. The parts are hand-designed; the assemblies and their variants are generated, seeded from the hull id so a given ship always looks the same everywhere.

The Cannon is the design's center of gravity — the ship the MVP is balanced around, and every number in flight is quoted for it. That the survey vessel is named for the astronomer whose spectral classification the fuel scooping system actually runs on is not a coincidence and should not be smoothed away.

The naming convention

A class is named for an astronomer; a ship is named by its captain. The class/name split is Star Trek's, the class names are the people whose work the game's data actually rests on, and individual ship names follow maritime tradition — one word, plain, aspirational. You fly a Cannon-class survey vessel called the Meridian.

The convention is therefore information. A hull's class name tells you where it came from — which is worth more than any amount of invented backstory, and costs one table.

Naming your own ship is the game's only cosmetic personalization, it is free, and it appears in the Almanac, on discovery records, and on any distress beacon you ever transmit.

Interiors

Walkable interior volume is a hull property, not a feature bolted on later — see onfoot. A Bessel has a cockpit you can stand up in and nothing else. A Herschel has a deck, a hangar, and a reason to walk to the other end of it. Interiors are assembled from the same parts system: a bay is a generated room from a small set of module types, laid out along the spine.

Modules

Everything except the hull is a module. Modules are the whole of capability progression, and there is no other stat on a ship.

The Reference Drive is one module

Worth stating explicitly because it does four jobs that other games split across three or four systems: maneuver thrust, transit acceleration, inertial compensation, and the interstellar jump. Its rating therefore sets how fast you turn, how quickly you cross a system, how much g you feel doing it, and how far you can jump — which makes it the single most consequential fitting decision on the ship. Full numbers in flight.

Slots

Size and grade

Two independent axes, which is what makes fitting a real decision rather than a ladder.

Size 1–8 is physical. A bigger module does more and weighs more, and cannot be fitted to a smaller slot.

Grade A–E is the engineering tradeoff, and deliberately A is not simply best:

Rationale. Elite Dangerous's A/B/C/D/E system is the best-designed fitting economy in the genre precisely because D-rated modules — the worst performing — are the correct choice for the game's most popular activity, since jump range depends on mass. A player who understands that their exploration ship should be built almost entirely from low-grade parts has understood something real, and understanding it feels good. Taken directly.

🎮 Designer's Note: The temptation will be to flatten this into a linear upgrade path because it is easier to explain. Don't. The moment grade A is strictly best, fitting stops being a decision and becomes a shopping list, and an entire layer of the game evaporates.

Acquisition

Modules are not bought — there is no money, see charter. They are unlocked with survey data and fitted at any station. Data is the only currency, which means every module in the game is paid for with exploration, which means the reward loop and the progression loop are the same loop. See exploration.

Power

⬜ Designed, not built.

Six pips, three subsystems, redistributable at any moment.

    DRIVE  ████░░       SYS  ██░░░░       PAY  ░░░░░░
           2 pips             1 pip             0 pips     ← 3 unassigned

Total reactor output is a module property, and a fitted ship can easily demand more than it produces — which is the constraint that makes the pips matter. A ship that draws 108% of reactor output at full allocation is a legitimate and common build; it just cannot run everything at once.

Rationale. Elite's pip system is the deepest cheap mechanic in the genre: four key presses, no UI, and it changes the outcome of every engagement and every fuel scoop. It costs almost nothing to build and it is the difference between a ship that is driven and a ship that is operated.

Heat

⬜ Designed, not built.

The system that ties everything together, and the one most likely to be under-built.

dH/dt  =  Q_reactor + Q_drive(throttle) + Q_weapons + Q_scoop
        + Q_stellar(r, L) + Q_atmospheric(ρ, v)
        − Q_radiators(A, ε, T_env)

Sources. A baseline from the reactor. A sustained burn, which is the largest routine thermal load in the game — a full-power transit is the drive running flat out for minutes, and radiators do not care that you are in a hurry. Weapons, heavily. Fuel scooping, dangerously. Stellar irradiance, which is why scooping is a skill. Atmospheric friction on entry, which is where the roadmap's missing reentry heating lands.

This is what stops maximum burns from being the automatic choice. The fuel cost is one constraint and the thermal budget is the other, and the second bites first on a long haul: a full-power run to the outer system will cook you before it empties your tank. The correct play is often a slower burn you can actually sit through.

Sink. Radiators, whose effectiveness falls as environment temperature rises — so a radiator is nearly useless near a star, exactly when it is most needed.

Consequences.

And detectability. A ship's sensor signature is dominated by heat:

signature = k_H · H_current + k_M · mass + k_E · activeEmissions

Which gives silent running for free: shut the radiators, take the heat, and become nearly invisible for as long as you can stand it. That is a genuinely good mechanic and it emerges from the thermal model rather than being bolted on.

Heat sinks are a utility module with a 20-second cooldown, not a consumable. No ammunition economy — see flight.

Damage

⬜ Designed, not built.

Hull integrity is a single 0–100% value. At 0 the ship is destroyed. Nothing else keys off it.

Module condition is per-module and carries two independent numbers — impact and thermal wear, specified below. A module at 0% impact is offline, not destroyed, and can be repaired. Losing individual modules produces the situations worth having:

Shields are an optional module: a rechargeable buffer that absorbs damage before the hull and recharges from SYS. They are not mandatory, and an explorer who fits none in exchange for range is making a defensible choice.

Resolved: two scales. Impact damage and thermal wear are tracked separately.

The reason to accept the extra readout: they are genuinely different problems. A shot-up drive is an emergency; a drive that has been run hot for three hundred hours is a maintenance history, and a ship that carries one is a ship with a past. It also gives the thermal budget a consequence that outlives the burn, which is what makes managing it matter beyond the next ten minutes.

Module integrity therefore displays as impact% / wear%, and effective performance is the product of the two.

Sensors and targeting

⬜ Designed, not built.

The hardware. What it does for exploration is in exploration; what it does in a fight is in combat.

Subsystem targeting. With a lock inside 8 km, individual modules on a target ship can be selected and damaged specifically — drives to strand, sensors to blind, fuel tank to force a decision. This is what makes ship combat a disabling problem rather than a health-bar problem, and it is why combat can be interesting with very few weapon types.

Autopilot

⬜ Designed, not built.

Requested in the brief, and worth being careful about, because a badly-scoped autopilot deletes the game.

The rule: autopilot executes a plan you made. It never makes the plan.

Each is a module, each occupies a slot, and each disengages the moment something unexpected happens — a contact, a heat warning, an interruption — handing control back with an audible cue rather than trying to cope.

Rationale. Elite's supercruise assist is well-liked because it removes tedium without removing the decision of where to go. Its docking computer is more contentious because it removes an entire skill. The distinction between them is exactly the rule above, so it is stated as a rule rather than discovered per-feature.

Under the burn model this lands more cleanly than it did under cruise, because the interesting decision — how hard, and therefore how much fuel — happens before the burn starts and assist never touches it. Assist automates the holding, not the choosing.

Resolved: assist never performs the flip. It holds the burn vector for minutes at a time — which is the actual tedium — and hands the flip back with a five-second cue on every single trip.

The flip is the game's signature moment and it is performed thousands of times. A pilot should get better at it, and that is only possible if they always do it.

Related

• flight — every coefficient on this page feeds a formula there
• combat — power, heat and subsystem targeting under fire
• exploration — what the sensor suite is actually for
• progression — how modules are earned
• onfoot — the inside of all of this