Vehicles

In Eclipse Phase, most vehicles are piloted by ALI. You simply get in the vehicle and tell it where to go. Manual piloting is for emergencies, control freaks, and people who don’t like machines. Like robots, vehicles can be remotely operated. They are not equipped for sleeving into, however, unless you add a cyberbrain system.

Vehicle Ware

All vehicles include the same sensory systems used in morphs and bots: standard vision, hearing, touch, proprioception, balance, etc. They are also all equipped with a standard set of necessary ware, listed below, in addition to that listed with their specific description. You may also modify a vehicle with extra ware, just like a synthmorph.

Vehicle Hardware

A few enhancements are designed specifically for vehicles, though some robots also use them:

Improved Handling: This vehicle is more maneuverable and responsive to controls. Apply a +10 modifier to Pilot Tests.

Life Support: The vehicle has a pressurized and heated/cooled compartment with air capable of supporting one or more biomorphs comfortably for a listed period. Such vehicles have airtight environmental seals, but usually do not have full double airlocks. The listed life support timeframe is according to the vehicle’s medium-sized passenger capacity; adjust as appropriate for more/less or small/large passengers. Most life support systems are designed to last 48 hours, extended periods require extra tanks.

Ram Plate: A heavy metal plate affixed to the front, for ramming other vehicles. Increase the DV inflicted on the other vehicle by +2d10 (Collisions).

Aircraft

On Mars, Venus, Titan, many exoplanets, and within large openspace cylinder habitats, aircraft of various kinds see regular use. This includes modern versions of rotorcraft (helicopters, autogyros, tilt-rotors), fixed-wing planes, zeppelins, and other lighter-than-air craft. These are typically propelled by turbofan or jet engines, rotors, or vectored thrust. Aircraft are flown with Pilot: Air and repaired with Hardware: Aerospace.

Flying Car: This methane-powered car is equipped with turbo fans that fold out from the body for vectored-thrust flight on Mars and worlds with similar gravities.

Microlight: This ultra-light personal aircraft is not much more than a strut-based wing, an airframe, and an electric propeller engine. They are ideal for getting around inside large habitats with enclosed airspace.

Portable Plane: Made of smart materials, this light but durable propeller plane packs into and self-erects from a large-sized but portable package in 10 minutes. Different models are designed for flight on Mars, Titan, Venus, or elsewhere, with an average wingspan of 10 meters.

Small Jet: Methane-powered jet planes are a common form of transport on Mars, Venus, and Titan. Their smart-material wings and frames can adapt to a wide range of speeds, altitudes, and atmospheric conditions.

Utility Helicopter: Common on Venus, Titan, and exoplanets with substantial atmospheres, this standard helo design is used for cargo and personnel transport, medevac, ground/air assault, and command/control.

Exoskeletons

Exoskeletons are worn powered mechatronic frames that enhance your physical capabilities. The exoskeleton’s servo-hydraulic joints mimic your movements, like an extension of your own body. They can also be remotely operated. The exoskeletons listed here are open frameworks, meaning you are exposed; hardsuits are enclosed. Most exoskeletons are designed for use by medium-sized characters, but some alternate-sized designs exist. Use your normal physical skills while wearing or remotely operating an exoskeleton, and Hardware: Groundcraft to repair.

Atlas Loader: This common example of a heavy-use industrial exoskeleton is large (just over 3 meters tall) and designed for handling heavy/large objects. Though open frame, the wearer is partially protected by a meshed cage. Atlas’s provide a +2 bonus to Vigor pool and increase melee damage by +2d10. Melee damage also becomes armor-piercing.

Exowalker: Exowalkers are minimal framework exoskeletons, primarily designed to bolster the wearer’s strength and movement. They provide a +1 bonus to Vigor pool, increase melee damage by 1d6, increase your walker speed to 8/32 (fast), and double your jumping distance.

Transporter: This exoskeleton framework features a pair of vector-thrust turbofan engines, giving you flight capabilities. Use Pilot: Air and a Movement Rate of 8/40 (very fast).

Trike: The trike exoskeleton is a three-wheeled personal motorcycle design, rather than a walker. Use Pilot: Ground and a Movement Rate of 8/40 (very fast).

Groundcraft

While trains and bicycles remain the most common form of ground transportation in most habitats, cars and cycles are common on larger habitats, moons, and planets. Drive them with Pilot: Ground and repair them with Hardware: Groundcraft.

Buggy: Ubiquitous on Luna, Mars, Mercury, and Titan, this four-wheeler’s large balloon tires are designed for both roads and off-road terrain. Smart materials in both the suspension and the tires reshape themselves to adapt to uneven conditions.

Cargo Hauler: These freight trucks are used to carry supplies to isolated habitats and terraforming operations on Mars, Mercury, Titan, and some exoplanets.

Cycle: Motorcycles are favored in habitats where space is premium. Open two-seaters remain the most common, but gyro-stabilized one-wheel designs are growing in popularity. Two-wheelers and trikes with enclosed capsules are frequent sights on Mars, Mercury, and Titan.

Ground Car: Standard automobiles come in a range of models and sizes.

Microcar: Single-person cars are popular in large habitats with limited space. These are little more than passenger pods riding on two large side-placed omni wheels for better handling and lateral movement.

Rover: Rovers are mobile living units, used by terraformers on Mars, miners on Mercury, and gatecrashers on exoplanets. They feature 8 large smart wheels, a 2-person airlock, cramped living quarters, a smart hitch for trailers, and a drone launching rack.

Hardsuits

Hardsuits are solid, enclosed-shell, powered exoskeletons. Like standard vacsuits, they are environmentally sealed, protecting you from vacuum, radiation, and temperatures from −175 to 140 °C. They also self-seal any punctures that inflict less than 30 points of damage. Hardsuits are used for extreme environments and dangerous conditions, from the upper atmosphere of a gas giant to the acid-scorched hellscape of Venus’s surface. Hardsuits are equipped to be worn for days at a time, if necessary. Occupants can only wear armor with an Armor Value (either energy or kinetic) of 4 or less inside the hardsuit; this worn armor is cumulative without layering penalties.

Battlesuit: This power armor features a military-grade fullerene armor shell with flexible aerogel for thermal insulation and a diamond-hardened exterior designed to resist even potent ballistic and energy-based weapons. It increases Vigor pool by 2, inflicts an extra 1d10 damage in melee, increases your Walker movement rate to 8/32, and doubles your jumping distance.

Envirosuit: These shells feature both increased radiation shielding and thermal regulation systems to withstand extreme environments such as deep undersea and the surfaces of Mercury and Venus. They can withstand temperatures from −270 to 1,000 °C.

High-Dive Suit: High-dive suits are personal spacesuits designed to withstand atmospheric re-entry. Wearing one of these, you can step out a spacecraft in orbit around a planet, enter the atmosphere without burning up, and safely land using both drogue and conventional parachutes. High-dive suits are meant for unpowered descent only; they do not possess the capability for flight.

Standard Hardsuit: This heavy-duty suit can almost be considered a miniature spaceship. It appears as a large metallic ovoid with jointed, servo-assisted arms and legs. It increases Vigor pool by 1 and inflicts an extra 1d10 damage in melee. Its miniature plasma thrusters are capable of delivering 0.01 g for 10 hours.

Hybrid Vehicles

These vehicles defy classification as they are designed to handle multiple environments. Use with Pilot: Ground, Pilot: Nautical, or Pilot: Space as apppropriate to the environment and repair with Hardware: Groundcraft, Hardware: Nautical, or Hardware: Aerospace.

General Exploration Vehicle (GEV): A GEV is a boxy exploration vehicle designed to handle almost any environment. Favored for gatecrashing, they feature a smart-matter chassis that can shift between wheels and legs for rough terrain in 1d6 minutes. It can handle vacuum, surface water, and underwater, and carries a small metallic-hydrogen drive and attitude jets for maneuvering in space. It is shielded against radiation, features an extendable airlock, and carries extended life support functions.

Rocket Buggy: This smart-wheeled buggie is equipped with a metallic-hydrogen rocket. It is ideal for moons and large asteroids, where it can reach orbit and return or take a parabolic path to any destination on that moon in less than an hour. Buggies are also popular on Mars (though unable to reach orbit).

Nautical Craft

Within the Solar System, nautical craft are used for the methane seas of Titan and the subcrustal oceans of Ceres and Europa. They are driven with Pilot: Nautical and repaired with Hardware: Nautical.

Mini-Sub: This submersible is for small groups and cargo.

Personal Transport Devices

These one-person movement aids are primarily used in space or undersea. Use with Pilot: Nautical or Pilot: Space as appropriate and repair with Hardware: Nautical or Hardware: Aerospace.

Rocket Pack: This is a miniature metallic hydrogen rocket that you strap to your back, with two rocket exhausts extending out to either side, away from your body or legs. To prevent burns, a biomorph must be wearing a heat resistant garment such as a vacsuit. Also, to prevent harm, the thrust must be kept sufficiently low that it can only take off on Mars or moons with even lower gravity. A rocket pack can keep you airborne for up to 15 minutes in Mars gravity, or 30 minutes on Luna, Titan, and smaller moons and asteroids. It can be used to reach orbit and land again on Luna, Titan, and other similarly small bodies like the Jovian moons.

Sled: This small sled uses air impellers or nitrogen thrusters to maneuver in microgravity or vacuum, or propellers to move undersea. It is used to carry gear attached with numerous straps and clips. It can also pull along 2 medium-sized morphs.

Thruster Pack: Worn for micrograv operations or EVA in vacuum, this thruster pack uses vectored thrust nozzles to maneuver.

Spacecraft

Though egocasting and nanofabrication have reduced the need, spacecraft continue to play an important role in transporting goods and people around the Solar System. Both in terms of materials and propulsion, spacecraft in the post-Fall era are far superior to the primitive vessels used in the 20th and early 21st centuries, but they are still based on the same principles.

Spacecraft are flown with Pilot: Space skill and repaired with Hardware: Aerospace.

Spacecraft have few stats in Eclipse Phase, as they are primarily handled as setting rather than vehicles. Note also that no stats are given for spacecraft weaponry. It is highly recommended that space combat be handled as a plot device rather than a combat scene, given the extreme lethality and danger involved. If you must know the DV of a spacecraft weapon, treat it as a standard weapon with a DV multiplier of x3 for small craft (fighters and shuttles), x5 for medium craft, and x10 for larger craft.

Bulk Carrier: This vessel is long and thin, with fusion rockets at one end and the cockpit and crew quarters at the other. Freight modules carrying cargo are grappled all along the spine. A pair of airlocked freight elevators move inside the spine. Carriers haul refined ores, ice, and similar large, useful, but low priority cargo at relatively low velocities. They also offer an inexpensive, reliable, and slow method for passengers to travel from one habitat to another and are not infrequently used by individuals who wish to disappear for a while. Bulk carriers lack rotating habitation rings, and are primary crewed by hibernoids, bouncers, and synthmorphs.

Courier: With their anti-matter drives, these fast couriers can cross the Solar System in a matter of days or weeks. They are reserved for high value and critical cargo.

Corvette: Corvettes are light warships and fast-attack craft. They primarily rely on fusion drives but also carry anti-matter for highspeed propulsion and devastating warheads. They are armed with railguns, lasers, drones, and missile systems.

Destroyer: The largest military spacecraft in common use, destroyers alternate between fusion and antimatter drives like corvettes. They are armed with railguns, nuclear and high explosive missiles, point-defense lasers, and a contingent of 20 fighters.

Fighter: Most of these short-range military vessels are designed to be crewed by an infomorph/ALI, though some can hold a single pilot (typically a synthmorph or vacuum-adapted biomorph). A typical loadout includes 4–6 laser and railgun turrets that can fire in any direction and a missile launcher carrying high-explosive or even nuclear or anti-matter missiles. Some are also designed (or can change their shape) to handle atmospheric flight.

Scum Barge: Barges are a catch-all category for a type of mobile habitat common in scum swarms. The original barges were temporary micrograv refugee habitats built in Earth orbit during the Fall. These were designed to support up to 20,000 people in cramped conditions for months or even years. Largely abandoned by authorities, the scum lashed rockets on or began towing them. Other barges have been claimed and made mobile over the years, including everything from remnants of partially destroyed torus habitats to small asteroids. The best use fusion rockets and carry 5–10,000 in relative comfort, sometimes spun for low gravity; the worst use aging plasma rockets or rely on towboat craft and stretch their life support systems and living spaces to the limit with up to 25,000 residents.

Shuttle: Also known as landers and orbit transfer vehicles (LOTVs), these common vehicles transport passengers and cargo between a planet or moon and orbit and for short distance transfers between habitats less than 100,000 km apart. Those designed for atmospheric entry have conical designs; airless models are blockier. Both use metallic hydrogen drives. Smart-material landing legs and grapples allow it to rest securely on any stable terrain and link up with all forms of docking clamps. Smart-material interiors can be easily and rapidly reconfigured to accommodate different amounts of fuel, passenger seats, and cargo space. Shuttles come in small and large models.

Transport: This common freighter and passenger vessel can be found on regular routes between every large habitat and inhabited planet and moon in the Solar System. These are modern fusiondrive ships that offer fast and comfortable travel for passengers and some cargo. Similar in design to bulk carriers, transports trade off cargo module room for multiple passenger compartments mounted on 90-meter-long booms that can extend and rotate at 2 rpm to simulate Mars gravity.