Every kill leaves ore behind: salvage fields
Published
In short: a battle over a planet leaves its wrecks on the ground, and wrecks are ore. They pile up into salvage fields that your Prospectors can gather, so a fight pays back part of what it cost. Leave a field alone too long and it’s gone. Numbers are placeholders.
At a glance
| A wreck | a third of the craft’s build cost, in ore |
| Mk0 / Mk1 fighter | 5 t / 8 t |
| Joins a field | within 500 m of it |
| Fields | merge when they come within reach |
| Gone | after 30 minutes with nobody adding or gathering |
| Mark | none: salvage is plain ore |
Where wrecks come from
- Every craft destroyed leaves a wreck where it fell, on a planet’s surface. A squadron leaves one for each jet it loses, round the squadron’s place.
- Any side’s. Your losses and the enemy’s both end up on the ground.
- Not in space. Wrecks stay only on a planet’s surface; nothing is left in orbit, in space or in the simulation.
- One to start with. At the start of a game there is a salvage field of 100 wrecks 1.5 to 2.5 km from the carrier.
How fields grow
- Wrecks join up. A wreck near a field joins it and adds its tonnes. A field is a chain of blobs: a wreck close to a blob joins that blob, otherwise it starts a new blob of the same field.
- Fields merge. Where two fields reach each other they become one. A long fight between two places slowly lays one long salvage field between them.
- What you see: jagged scrap, dark slabs and spars half sunk in the ground, inside the field’s outline. The pieces thin out as the field is gathered.
Gathering it
Salvage fields are resource nodes, like ore patches: allow one and gatherers with work on will go to it. A gatherer works the part of a field nearest to it, not the middle. More: work and gathering.
Ore pays for the machine shop, repairs and rebuilt jets.