Travel

Status: draft v0.1, 2026-11-09. Hangs off GAME-DESIGN.md §4.3 and is the system everything else resolves against. Numbers are shapes, not balance.

---

1. Why this document is first

Distance is the core mechanic (GAME-DESIGN.md §2, pillar 2). Every other system in this game is a consequence of it: tax is a rate on revenue that climbs with road distance, security is a switch thrown by whoever controls the system, markets are regional because goods must physically cross it, intel perishes because the map changes faster than you can traverse it, and the galaxy is too big to seize because crossing it takes weeks.

So travel is not a convenience layer between the interesting parts. It is the interesting part, and everything else is downstream.

2. The two roads

	Lane transit	Free burn
Needs	A gate at both ends	Nothing
Speed	Minutes per jump	Hours to days per hop
Visibility	Logged. The system's owner sees you pass	Effectively invisible
Range per hop	Gate to gate, however far that is	Limited by your drive
Permission	Public road: none. Private road: the owner's policy (§4.2)	None. Nobody can forbid open space
Can it be taken away	Destroyed, but only in unsecured systems (§4.4)	No

Lanes are the civilised road: fast, surveilled, and somebody else's property. Free burn is the smuggler's road: slow, unwatched, and nobody's to close.

The only cost of distance is time. There is no fuel, no refuelling, no running dry. A journey costs you the hours it takes and the exposure it buys, and nothing else. This is deliberate: a consumable every player must top up before every trip is a chore, not a decision, and it would tax the check-in loop forever to buy us a logistics minigame nobody asked for.

What makes free burn expensive, then, is time and risk — days instead of minutes, and days spent somewhere nobody is obliged to care about you.

There is no such thing as a sealed region — only an expensive one. That is a rule, not a side effect. Any political structure that could completely lock players out of a volume of space would break the game.

2.1 Free burn has a hard range per hop

A single free-burn hop is limited by the ship's drive range — a hull and module property, not a consumable. You cannot cross an arbitrary void in one go; you cross it in legs, through whatever is in between, and a better drive means longer legs.

This settles an open question from SECURITY-AND-SOVEREIGNTY.md: yes, genuinely isolated regions exist, unreachable until somebody stages their way out there or builds a road. Which is good — it means the deep frontier has to be opened by someone, and that act of opening is an achievement with a name attached to it.

2.2 In-system movement

Abstracted. Arriving in a system and moving to a body within it takes minutes and costs nothing meaningful. Nobody wants a second travel system nested inside the first, and there is no gameplay in it.

3. Time, and the shape of a journey

A journey is a route: an ordered list of legs, each a lane transit or a free-burn hop. You commit it and it executes whether or not you are online. This is the backbone of asynchronous play — most of what a player does is dispatch something and come back later.

You may re-route at any leg boundary. You are committed inside a leg.

The same commitment rule as the scan sweep (SECURITY-AND-SOVEREIGNTY.md §7.3), and for the same reason: decisions should be made before the risky part, not continuously during it. It also means no mid-flight micromanagement, which is what keeps this playable on a phone.

Crossing the galaxy takes weeks. Not because of an artificial cap, but because the core lane network is dense, everything beyond it is sparse, and the gaps are free burn. You live in your region. Politics is local. This must not be softened — every shortcut we add here deflates the entire design.

4. Gates

A gate is a project. Building one costs materials — Antimatter among them (ECONOMY.md §2) — and real work, which is exactly why a road into the deep frontier is an achievement and not a commute.

Once a gate is open, it is open for good. No maintenance timer on the structure itself, no decay, no way for the builder to take it back. A gate ends only by being destroyed, or — for private roads — by its upkeep going unpaid (§4.4).

There are two kinds, and the difference between them is the whole politics of roads.

4.1 The public road

• Cheap to build, and no upkeep, ever.
• Open to everyone, free, permanently. The builder has no further say.
• It carries its maker's name, forever.
• There can be only one public road between any two systems. Whoever builds it has taken that link.

That scarcity is the point. Linking two systems publicly is a thing that can be done exactly once in the history of the galaxy, and the name on it is the only permanent monument this game offers. It is earned by generosity — by building the cheap thing that helps everyone, including your enemies — and it cannot be bought, inherited or taken while it stands.

It also means the obvious land-grab: being first to connect two important systems is a race, and losing it is permanent. Good. Races over scarce prestige are free content.

4.2 Private roads

• Unlimited. Any number of private gates can link the same pair of systems.
• They cost upkeep, continuously, for as long as they stand.
• The owner sets who may pass: Private (owner and corp), Allied (standings-gated), or Toll (open to anyone, for a fee).
• A toll road costs the most upkeep of all. Running a road as a business is the most expensive way to own one.

So control is not bought once; it is rented forever. A corporation can wire its territory with private corridors nobody else may use, and it will pay for that privacy every single cycle until it stops.

4.3 The Empire only counts roads that are actually roads

roadDistance is measured over public and toll gates only. A private or allied gate is a corridor, not a road, and the Empire does not recognise it as civilisation reaching further out.

Lay the three options side by side and every one of them costs you something real:

	Build cost	Upkeep	Who passes	Lowers tax	Prestige
Public	Cheap	None	Everyone, free	Yes	Your name on it, forever
Private / Allied	Normal	Yes	You and yours	No	None
Toll	Normal	Highest	Anyone, for a fee	Yes	None

The shape of the trade:

• Public is the cheapest road in the game and the only one that buys you something money cannot: a permanent name. The price is that you have built your enemies a highway to your door, and you can never close it.
• Private buys control, and charges you rent for it forever and leaves you paying frontier tax prices, because the Empire does not count your corridor as a road.
• Toll is the businessman's road: it counts, it earns, and it is the most expensive thing to keep lit. Charge too much and someone funds a competing chain — or simply builds the public road and puts their name on it.

You cannot have a private highway and a cheap tax bill, and now you cannot have one cheaply either.

4.4 Losing a gate

Two ways a road ends.

Destruction. Possible only in unsecured systems — in secure space the Empire guarantees the roads, and nobody is cutting the arteries of civilisation. A destroyed gate is gone, not disabled; reopening that road means building it again from nothing. That makes it the heaviest strategic act in the game: permanent until someone pays the whole cost again, and it raises the tax bill of everything behind it (SECURITY-AND-SOVEREIGNTY.md §2.2), so cutting roads is how you strangle a region economically, asynchronously, without a single fight.

It is only possible out where the Empire does not reach — so the frontier is exactly where roads are both most valuable and most fragile.

Unpaid upkeep, for private and toll roads only. A gate whose upkeep lapses goes dark and stops carrying traffic; sustained non-payment collapses it into ruins and the link is gone. Same shape as a lapsed system claim (SECURITY-AND-SOVEREIGNTY.md §3), and the same drama: an overextended corporation's private road network going dark one gate at a time is a visible, public death spiral.

A destroyed public road frees its slot. The one-per-pair rule binds the gate that exists, not the pair forever. Blow up a rival's monument in unsecured space and the link is open to be claimed — by them again, or by you, with your name on it this time. Few things will be fought over harder, and it costs us nothing to allow.

5. Speed and convoys

• Speed is a ship property. Scouts are fast and fragile; haulers are slow, fat and delicious.
• Ships can travel as a convoy, moving together at the speed of the slowest member. This is how escorting works mechanically — the escort is simply in the convoy.
• Speed matters twice: how long a journey takes, and whether you can disengage (COMBAT.md §5).

6. Mass is loud

Detectability scales with the size of what you are moving. A single scout free-burning is effectively invisible. A hundred-ship fleet is not, in either mode.

A blob can exist. It cannot arrive unannounced. The counter to overwhelming numbers is therefore intel and roads rather than a damage nerf, which means we never have to balance numbers against themselves.

This is the third system built on the same rule — the public lapse flag, the scan signature, and now fleet mass. In this game, commitment announces itself. It should be applied deliberately from here on rather than rediscovered each time.

7. The road can disappear while you are flying at it

Two ways, and both can happen mid-journey:

• The policy changes. The gate you were counting on goes private, or standings shift and you are no longer allied. You arrive and you are not welcome.
• The gate is destroyed, which is possible only in unsecured space (§4.4). You arrive and the road is simply gone.

Either way: you are in somebody else's system, your route no longer exists, and the only way onward is free burn — days of it, in open space, however far your drive reaches per hop.

This stays, because it is the one genuinely asynchronous strategic act in the game:

• Closing or cutting a road behind an enemy fleet strands it on the wrong side of the map, with no combat and nobody needing to be online.
• Closing is reversible and cheap, which makes it a diplomatic weapon — the threat of it does most of the work. Destruction is permanent until someone pays the whole construction cost again, which makes it an act of war.
• It gives free burn its finest hour: the slow, invisible road is the one nobody can take away. Anyone who plans around lanes alone has a single point of failure and will eventually find it.

Which is also why a route's exposure (§8) has to show not just how dangerous the systems are, but whose gates you are depending on. Relying on a stranger's goodwill for your way home is a decision, and the UI must let the player make it knowingly.

8. What the player actually sees

The travel UI is the second most important screen in the game after the report feed, and it is a route planner: pick a destination, see the routes, compare time against risk, commit.

Two numbers, because there are only two:

Time	When does it arrive
Exposure	How much of this route is watched, how unsafe is it, and who owns the space

Neither is invented. Time comes from the route; exposure comes from the state of each system on it (SECURITY-AND-SOVEREIGNTY.md §2.3) and who holds the territory. The fast road through a rival's space and the long way round on free burn should be visibly different propositions at a glance, and the player should never need a spreadsheet to see which is which.

9. Implementation notes

• A transit is a row: from, to, departed_at, arrives_at, mode. Position is derived, never stored, never ticked (ARCHITECTURE.md §1.2).
• Arrival is a job in the one jobs table, due at arrives_at.
• Route planning is a shortest-path over the gate graph with a cost function the player chooses — fastest, or safest. The gate graph is small and already cached for roadDistance; this is the same structure answering a different question.
• Free-burn legs are not in the gate graph. They are edges the player proposes and the server validates against the ship's drive range.
• Gates are permanent rows. The graph only changes when one is built or destroyed — rare, and always a deliberate player act — so cache invalidation is trivial.

10. Open questions

• [ ] Can a journey be recalled mid-leg, or only re-routed at boundaries? Boundaries only is cleaner and consistent with the scan sweep. Recall is friendlier and much more forgiving of a misclick on a phone.
• [ ] Is there an emergency jump — expensive, risky, gets you out of trouble once? It is a classic for good reasons and it is also a get-out-of-consequences card. Leaning no.
• [ ] How fast is a lane jump, in real minutes? This number sets the tempo of the entire game. Too fast and the galaxy shrinks; too slow and the check-in loop starves.
• [ ] Do gates have throughput limits, making a chokepoint physically congested rather than merely strategic? Interesting, and possibly one system too many.
• [ ] How much work is a gate, exactly? It has to be heavy enough that opening the frontier is a feat, light enough that a motivated corporation attempts it. This is the number that sets how fast the settled galaxy can grow.
• [ ] Can gate construction be contributed to by several players or corps, Kickstarter-style? It would make roads genuinely communal, and it is the obvious thing players will ask for.
• [ ] Does free burn leave any trace at all — a cooling trail, a departure vector at the origin? A tiny amount of traceability would make hunting smugglers possible without removing the invisibility that makes the solo path work.
• [ ] With fuel gone, is there any consumable pressure on long expeditions, or is the only cost the days spent? Days may genuinely be enough — but it means a patient player can go anywhere, eventually, with no preparation at all.

---

Changelog

• 2026-11-09 — v0.1. Two roads with free burn hard-limited per hop (so isolated regions genuinely exist), routes committed per leg, fuel as the universal sink with stranding as the failure state, convoys as the escort mechanic, mass-is-loud applied to fleets, and gates closing on fleets in flight as an asynchronous strategic act.
• 2026-11-09 — v0.2. Fuel cut entirely — the only cost of distance is time, and free-burn hop range is now a drive stat rather than a tank. §4 gates: a gate is a project and permanent once open, with no upkeep and no decay; access policies and tolls are retained, and roadDistance counts public and toll gates only, so a private highway and a cheap tax bill are mutually exclusive. Destruction is possible only in unsecured systems and requires a full rebuild.
• 2026-11-09 — v0.3. Two kinds of road. Public: cheap, no upkeep, free to all, carries its maker's name forever, and only one may exist between any two systems — the game's one permanent monument, earned by generosity. Private/Allied/Toll: unlimited per pair but carrying continuous upkeep, highest of all for a toll road. Control is rented, generosity is free. A destroyed public road frees its slot to be claimed and renamed.
• 2026-11-09 — v0.4. §1 no longer claims tax is priced on distance and security decays with it: road distance sets the tax rate on revenue, and security is the controller's pay-or-refuse switch.