Locations

To buy ships, right click on a shipyard or wharf and select Buy Ships. (This is a remote shortcut for docking at the station and going to the Ship Dealer and talking to the counter staff.)

Shipyards sell L and XL ships.

Wharfs sell S and M size ships.

Equipment Docks sell equipment for ships, but can only swap equipment (vs building the entire ship).

Note that different factions sell different models of ships (or alternate variations of the same ship), and each faction has at least one unique piece of equipment (weapons, engines, etc) available only from that faction.

When you choose “Buy Ships” the ship purchase/configuration window will open. For information on choosing equipment and configuring ships, see the Equipping Ships section.

Using the ship purchase window, you can build up a “shopping list” of several ships and confirm them all at once, or simply put in orders one at a time. Each ship is then handled as a separate build, however you enter them.

Once you complete your order, you’ll see the ship(s) at the bottom of you “owned property” list in the map. You can cancel your order by right-clicking on a ship there.

Ship prices

Ship prices are based on the cost of the materials to build/replace them at that station. Ship costs are therefore somewhat variable based on component availability at that station at that moment.

Similarly, if you offer to sell a ship to a station the price you’ll be offered will be based on how valuable the materials in that ship are, to that station, at that moment.

Component shortages

“I bought a ship, why isn’t it being built?”

Wharfs, Shipyards and Equipment docks are factories, just like all the other stations. They just happen to build ships as their product.

This means that, like other factories, they need to have the wares in storage to feed into the factory to produce their output. If you want ships from them, they need the components to do that build for you.

Problem is, they may not have those components in storage. And they don’t want you to cancel your order with the ship half-built, so they wait until they have everything they need before starting construction.

If you have a ship on order, but the time-to-completion countdown isn’t moving, it’s almost certainly because the builder is missing components required to build the equipment for your ship.

You can see this in the order window when putting in your order, but it’s easy to miss if you’re in a hurry. You can check for this by right-clicking on the station and asking to buy another ship. The order window will show (lower corner) a description of any wares the station is short on, and exactly how many.

When this happens, you can do one of three things:

• Cancel your existing ship orders
• Wait for someone else to deliver the needed parts
• Give one of your own trade ships orders to buy the parts and deliver them (you’ll almost certainly make a profit on this, too)

Once the necessary parts arrive, the build counter will start ticking down.

Selling ships

To sell a ship, select it then right-click on a shipyard/wharf and choose “Sell ship”. You will be shown an offered price you can accept or decline.

Note that if the ship has a pilot and/or crew assigned, they will go with the ship when you sell it. You can use the “Transfer crew with…” command to send the crew to another ship before selling (select the source ship in the map, right click on another ship, choose Transfer Crew).

The buyer will fly the ship to their wharf/shipyard and disassemble it for parts, adding to the station’s inventory.

The buyer will not use the ship directly (i.e. it will not be added to the faction’s fleet and used in battle). The buyer uses it to strip down to components to build the faction’s preferred ships.

Note that after you sell it, the ship may encounter hostile ships along the way to the destination and may be destroyed. You still retain the money for the ship regardless, and you can actually use this to your advantage in some cases (fly a ship somewhere, sell it to a faction hostile to the local sector government, enjoy the resulting chaos).

Equipment Docks

Equipment docks are refitting stations for ships that have already been built. They can swap equipment for you, but can’t build you a new ship from scratch.

Not all equipment docks are the same. The capabilities of a Dock depend on which station modules it has.

The repair/upgrade modules come in three variations, and some Docks may not have all the modules:

• S/M-ship upgrade bay
• L-ship upgrade bay
• XL-ship upgrade bay

If you’re trying to send a ship to a Dock for repairs or upgrades and the station isn’t giving you the option to do it, it probably means that Dock doesn’t have the type of bay it needs to work on that ship. [Note: it’s also possible it had the necessary bay, but it suffered damage in an attack and isn’t currently functional.]