This page is part of the Unofficial Player’s Guide to Tau Station.
Table of Contents
Private Ships
You can buy private ships, and use those for travel. Since this requires several expensive and long University courses and at least 210,000 credits for the cheapest type of ship, this should be considered an advanced feature.
Prerequisites
In order to buy a Private Shuttle, you need to complete the following University courses, in this order:
- Introduction to Spaceship Operations (all Universities, 100 Segments)
- Basic Space Navigation (all Universities, 700 Segments)
- Basic Ship Technology (all Universities, 1400 Segments)
- Basic Ship Handling (Spirit of Botswana, 2100 Segments)
(Total cost for courses: 28,200 credits).
If you want to buy a Razorback (faster and much more expensive), you will need these additional courses:
- Advanced Ship Technology (Moissan, 2100 Segments)
- Advanced Ship Handling (Nouveau Limoges, 2800 Segments)
(totalling another 44,800 credits).
Ship Types
Once you have the prerequisite University courses and enough credits, you can go to a shipyard and buy a ship. (There is a shipyard on The Maid of Orléans, but it doesn’t sell any ships.)
The following table shows the available and the planned ship types:
| Name | Mass / T | Acceleration / G | Fuel Capacity / g | Max Range / km | Cargo Capacity / T | Price / credits | Prerequisites | Availability |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Private Shuttle | 8.8 | 2.427 | 5 | 2,145,548 | 0 | 210,000 | Basic Ship Handling | Daedalus, København, Yards of Gadani |
| Razorback | 9.5 | 14.5 | 90 | 5,987,859 | 0 | 995,000 | Advanced Ship Handling | Yards of Gadani |
| Bulk Carrier | 890 | 0.906 | 250 | 2,841,466 | 140 | |||
| Freighter | 475 | 1.305 | 175 | 2,587,346 | 70 | |||
| Private Cargo Shuttle | 30.5 | 2.321 | 17.5 | 2,265,602 | 10 | |||
| Public Shuttle | 1280 | 3.626 | 5000 | 9,873,087 | 0 |
Operating a Ship
Once you buy a ship, you have to give it a name (length between 3 and 100 characters, Unicode allowed), and then it becomes available at the Docks. A newly bought ship is fully fueled.
At the Docks, you can enter the ship, and choose a destination. On a Jump Gate, the destination can be a connected jump gate or a local station. On other stations, you can just select local destinations.
If you have completed enough Multi-Jump Ship Navigation courses from the Space Navigation module, you can select jump gates that are only indirectly connected to the jump gate you are on, and travel the whole distance in one go, though slower than if you stopped at each jump gate and immediately started the next jump.
Using a ship consumes fuel proportionally to the travel distance. You can refuel at any dock, though the price per fuel depends on the station, and time. It varies quite a bit (up to a factor of about 8 between lowest and highest price observed on a station), but tends to be lower on lower-level stations.
The Tau Tracker shows upper and lower fuel prices per gram that have been observed per station.
Refueling takes about 315 units per gram, which can add up to several segments for a large and empty tank. You can halve the refueling time by spending 10 bonds.
Partial refueling is not possible, each time you refuel you fill up to full tank capacity.
There are University courses available to reduce fuel consumption and to reduce the damage that ships take during normal operation. The Basic Fuel Efficiency course reduces fuel usage by 5%, and the Advanced and Mastery course each add another 5% fuel savings.
Maintenance
Ships require regular repairs, and occasional refurbishments.
Once a health bar of a ship below a certain threshold, or when the navigation computers are “not operational”, the ship requires repair before you can fly it again.
If you are lucky, and the current station has a shipyard, the repairs can be done for you by payed workers, which means you can do not have to be present during the repairs – but it costs about twice as much as repairing it yourself.
On stations without a shipyard, you have to repair your ship at the docks, which is cheaper, but confines you to the docks during the repair. Repairing a ship consumes 50% Focus, Intelligence and Stamina. During a ship repair, stats and focus regeneration is very slow.
In either case, you can spend 10 bonds to halve the repair time.
A repair only brings the health up to 75%. Refurbishment at a shipyard costs an additional 2000 credits, and completely restores the health of the ship.