Tales from The Void: Entry 1
Runners and their Ships
Retrieved from GALTRAUTH Archive E8G9–18052
When the Galactic Trade Authority (GALTRAUTH) first announced that it would revolutionize interstellar trade in The Void by bringing Outposts and Matter Transfer online, there was a great scramble to acquire vessels that could take advantage of this opportunity. Galactic residents with the requisite skill and fortitude rushed to assemble a ragtag fleet, salvaging and repurposing whatever bits and pieces of starfaring vessels they could lay their hands on.
The main varieties of vessel that traverse the Void can be grouped into three classes: Vettes, Scoots, and Luggers, and each type bears evidence of its original purpose.
Vettes, which emphasize speed, are generally built up from decommissioned military interceptors, remnants of some ancient and forgotten conflict, their weapons systems disassembled and every available hardpoint adapted to add more speed, efficiency, or extra bit of cargo. Missile launchers and torpedo bays are emptied of their deadly payloads, their valuable capacity rededicated to peaceful commerce.
Scoots were originally, for the most part, short range cargo drones, workaday runabouts designed for use in and around space docks. Given their original purpose, Scoots aren’t well adapted to long range journeys, but are highly efficient, and utilize the full breadth of technologies available for emphasizing this trait: stellar power arrays, heat dissipation, novel coolant and external power generation schemes.
Luggers specialize in cargo capacity, plain and simple. With some ships little more than glorified frames from which to hang salvaged containers, others amount simply to huge cargo containers themselves, pushed along by an overworked thruster. Lugger operators know what they want from The Void, and have put all their eggs in one massive basket.
Intensely pragmatic folk, even Void Runners aren’t immune to aesthetics, and so they often are fiercely proud of how their ships look. No aspect of the typical Runner ship is a better indicator of this tendency than the prevalence of wings and sleek shapes that sprout from and define so many of these vessels. “Why would anyone need wings in space?,” a newcomer to this strange universe might ask.
The first answer has to do with technology. While some Runner ships are technically capable of atmospheric flight, where wings and plenty of thrust would serve a concrete role, most Runners never put this capability to the test. To achieve the incredible speeds needed to crisscross The Void, Runners depend on plasma fusion engines, which depend in turn on finely tuned electromagnetic fields for optimal performance. What appear to be wings are, in most cases, specially designed equipment that shapes and molds these fields, allowing Runner ships to skim gracefully through these invisible forces and, indeed, to scoop additional boost and power from errant particles caught up in the eddies they create.
That these devices so often resemble wings brings us to the second explanation. Ancient ship designers, holding themselves only the faintest memory of a time when “aerodynamics” and sleek shapes guaranteed speed, simply couldn’t resist bringing this aesthetic echo to bear on the new technology, despite its use in the vacuum of deep space. Hobbled together though they are from salvaged parts, ships often elicit praise based on these bygone standards of atmosphere-cheating beauty. Even today, a Runner whiling away time at an Outpost as their vessel fills with cargo might be heard to say, about another Runner’s ship, “Looks fast.”
