The ship that costs three rupees and has no gun

There are four ships you can buy in Astrototo, sold by mining crews who were three years out when their funding stopped and who never stopped mining. They cost one, two, three and four rupees.

The three-rupee one has no weapon at all.

The one that cannot fight

The Ore Hauler has twenty-two hull, the most of any of them, and nothing to shoot with. It flies seven units behind you and it does not move for anything. Whatever gets past you arrives where it is sitting.

That is the whole ship. You are not buying a gun or a shield, you are buying twenty-two hull placed in the one position where things that got through end up. It cannot save you from what is in front. It is for what you missed.

The other three all shoot. The Scrap Skiff, at one rupee, has eight hull and a gun that does one damage — it flies just off your shoulder and chases your position a fraction late, which is enough that something aimed where you were finds it instead. The Tin Lancer, two rupees, takes a side, carries plating that removes one damage from every hit and never wears out, and fires a lance that keeps going after it hits something. The Chaff Barge, four rupees, throws five flak shots twice a second and puts a bubble around itself that absorbs three hits and comes back six seconds later.

What you are actually choosing between

Position, and how much of it you want in front of you.

An escort holds a station relative to your ship and keeps to it. It does not hunt, and it makes no decisions of its own once the run starts. What differs between them is where that station is — a screen sits ahead and takes what is coming at you, a soak sits behind and takes what got past — how much hull they bring, and what, if anything, they fire on the way.

That sounds like a reduction and it is the opposite. It means every ship you buy is legible. You can look at a formation and know where each hull will be for the next two minutes, which is the whole basis for deciding whether you would rather have damage in front of you or hull behind you.

And you can re-task one. At a Harbour, a deployed hull can be given an order that overrides what it was built to do — a lancer told to screen flies where a screen flies. The order stands until you change it.

That it persists is the point. An order that quietly reverted somewhere on the way to Saturn would put your haulers back where they started without telling you, and the fleet screen is the one place this game asks anyone to make a plan. So the choice is not only which ships to buy. It is where you want them, and it stays where you put it.

What they cost when it goes wrong

Nothing.

An escort that dies during an episode you fail comes back. The server settles the fleet only on a run that cleared; anything else returns every ship you took in, so a bad run costs you a restart and not a purchase.

At one rupee it would be tempting to let them burn. A ship priced at the level of not-thinking-about-it is exactly the one a game would quietly consume on a failed run, and the person who paid would be annoyed rather than angry, which is worse. So they come back.

And you cannot buy any of them for a while

Not at Mars. Mars has a Harbour — three fleet slots, a free repair — and no shop, and if you go looking the screen tells you so: nobody sells ships this far in.

The Kin are berthed at Ceres. Getting there is eight episodes, a little under nineteen minutes of flying, and only that if you never lose one.

That gap is on purpose. The first thing a game asks you for should not be money, and a fleet you were sold before you understood what a fleet does is not a choice, it is an upsell. By the time there is a shop, you have flown enough to know whether you would rather shoot or be shielded.

Which of those people pick, I do not know yet. Nobody has had the chance.

Fly out to Ceres and find out. It is eight episodes, and the first one takes two minutes.