Your specialist discipline; the thing you trained for, the thing you're good at, the reason the squad keeps you around. There are four Cores: Combat, Engineering, Overwatch, and SysOps. Each has three Specialists. Your Core determines your ability tree, your combat role, and whether people call you "the gun," "the wrench," "the brain," or "the one who touches the computers."
Luna hoons are some of the bravest or craziest, yet the most daring, pilots in the cybercore universe. Luna hoons get their name from both the markers they race around and the lunatic personality traits required to even risk such a sport. But what a sport it is; the stakes are high in every category. Watched by trillions across the multiverse, the money that changes hands over these races would purchase several small galaxy clusters. It's a sport in which one races for money around the moons and asteroid fields of the outer rims, these space pilots and hyper warp junkies race some of the fastest and most dangerous custom-built one or two-man scout ships in the known universe.
Often built from scraps of frigates, tug-haulers, or anything that has a large, powerful space drive, these speeders are known for both their speed, agility, and their ability to spontaneously scramble their drivers like eggs if the inertial dampeners fail, making the sport of luna hooning one of the fastest growing and deadly thrill rides in the galaxy today.
Covers any astronaut that makes their living out in the depths of space. Generally refers to a pilot from Asteroid hoppers to Long haulers. Still, it can also refer to any deep spacer crew member.
Someone who has spent their entire life planet side. They have never had the inclination or wealth to afford the G's Fee.
The cost in Creds to get void side. It's called G's fee as it's the cost in weight/fuel to escape the gravity well of the planet. The larger the planet, the higher G's Fee.
Being on the planet, messing with the Grounders.
A one-way trip in a Ground Pounder, a small iron grav-busting re-entry vehicle well known for the crater, it leaves as much as for the two inches its occupants lose due to spinal compression upon "landing." Once embedded, it makes a short-term habitation pod until it eventually rusts out.
Being off planet. Either in a ship, space station, orbiter, or in deep space.
A water-rich asteroid. See Water & Ice for the full taxonomy; Weepers, BlueStones, Snowballs, and the rest.
The standard cost in Credits for living Upside, covers your Oxygen, waste disposal, access to a shared sleeping pod, and one processed protein food slab a day. Rates vary wildly by station. A well-supplied hub near a regular Weeper route might charge 30 Creds a week. A frontier station three months from the nearest ice delivery will charge whatever it wants, because what are you going to do, hold your breath?
A Pleb who was dumb enough to run out of Credits Upside yet was lucky enough to become an indentured servant to a corporation.
The Corp will pay your O-Bills, but you are nothing more than a corp-hack at this point, doing whatever dirty and often dangerous work they require. Even if you managed a side hustle to get ahead enough to buy your way out, your spacing days are over. Unicore Law requires all Corps to release Indents onto a survivable planet inhabited by their species.
Thus, once you become an Indent of the Core, your release fee and freedom must therefore include one last trip planetside, as moving anything off-planet is exorbitantly expensive; moving the living on-planet in a survivable way isn't cheap either, with a Ground Pounder Trip being the least costly, most Indents never buy their way out of servitude.
As "Habitable" is subjective, mining syndicates are often "generous" enough to cover the Ground Pounder Trip contract. Of course, it's a planet of their choosing, and it just so happens there is no way to earn a crust down there other than picking up a shovel. So Indents with a good side hustle often choose to stay with the Corp until they could pay their own "planetside" fee or bribe their way onto a cargo vessel and escape to the Outer Rim.
The round trip cost of landing Planetside and getting back into space.
Describes leaving a planet from a designated spaceport or space station, but often referred to in the darker dealings as assisting someone out of an airlock.
Someone who is not local and doesn't understand the customs or unspoken rules and laws.
A station that's missed two or more Weeper deliveries. Not the nautical term. When someone says "Kepler-9 went dry dock last month," they mean rationing, price gouging, and fights over the water recycler.
Cargo that exists on the manifest but not in the hold. Insurance fraud, smuggling cover, or the reason your ship handles lighter than it should. "Running ghost weight" is how FOFT operatives describe a clean customs pass.
The unofficial surcharge stations add per head during population surges. Refugee ship docks? O-Bills go up 40% overnight. Nobody calls it a meat tax officially. Everyone calls it a meat tax.
A cryo-freight passage. Cheapest way between systems. You get frozen, stacked in a rack with fifty strangers, and thawed at the destination. The "coffin" part is aspirational; coffins have more legroom.
The tiny fractions of a Credit that accumulate from rounding errors in automated transactions. Individually worthless. Collectively, someone at every major bank is skimming them. It's the galaxy's quietest crime.
A piece of equipment so expensive it keeps you tethered to a contract you'd otherwise walk away from. "Can't quit CONFED; got an anchor baby in that combat rig." The financing terms are the real weapon.
A deal that evaporates if you look at it too hard. DarkNet listings that vanish after first contact, vendors who only exist for one port rotation, prices that were "definitely available yesterday." Half the Outer Rim economy runs on smoke sales.
A salvage claim on your own wrecked ship. When your vessel is destroyed but you survive, the insurance payout on the hull is your iron pension. Most spacers' only retirement plan. "He's flying that rust bucket hoping for the iron pension."
A recurring debt that compounds. Station docking fees, equipment rental, med-debt from a patched-up gunshot wound nobody asked about. Ticks are small, quiet, and eventually drain you dry. "How many ticks you carrying?" is a question friends ask and strangers don't.
How fast an operative goes through Creds on a mission. High burn rate means expensive habits; top-shelf ammo, premium stims, replacement gear every firefight. Low burn rate means duct tape and field repairs. Your burn rate says more about you than your rank does.
Weepers are the most common source, but spacers have names for every type of ice rock depending on size, quality, and how likely it is to kill you during extraction.
A water-rich asteroid that vents vapour when you crack the crust. The standard supply asteroid; large enough to be worth the trip, stable enough to mine without losing crew. Station economies swing on Weeper delivery schedules.
A small, low-density Weeper; mostly loose ice and gravel. Easy to crack, fast to process, but low yield. Snowballs are the fast food of ice harvesting. UNI-NAV patrol ships often crack a Snowball for resupply rather than diverting to a station.
A 100% pure water asteroid; no rock, no mineral contamination, just a solid mass of frozen H2O tumbling through the void. BlueStones are extraordinarily rare and worth a fortune. Every ice miner claims to have found one. Almost none of them have. "He swears it's a BlueStone" is spacer for "he's lying."
A Weeper with a partially molten core; warmed by residual radioactives or tidal forces from a nearby gas giant. Slushies are easier to pump but harder to mine safely. The liquid interior is under pressure. Crack one wrong and it becomes a very expensive water cannon.
A contaminated ice asteroid; heavy metals, chemical compounds, ammonia, or biological residue from pre-human debris. Nobody asks why it's yellow. Yellow Snow requires extensive processing before the water is safe, and even then it tastes like regret. Mining syndicates sell it at a discount. Stations buy it when they can't afford to wait for a BlueStone. "Beware of the Yellow Snow" is not just advice for children anymore.
A Weeper fragment; broken off from a larger body by collision or mining activity. Hailstones tumble through shipping lanes and are a navigation hazard, but opportunistic haulers will net them for free water. Netting a Hailstone mid-transit is technically illegal in most jurisdictions. It happens constantly.
A perfectly cubic ice asteroid; not natural. IceCubes are pre-cut blocks of ice, quarried from larger Weepers and shaped for efficient transport and stacking in cargo holds. They are an industrial product, not a geological formation. When someone orders "two hundred IceCubes," they are placing a wholesale water order, not making cocktails.
An ice comet on approach to a star; already sublimating, visibly shrinking, a long vapour trail marking its countdown to nothing. Melt Money is a race against physics: the ice is free for the taking, but every hour it's worth less. Desperate haulers chase Melt Money when they can't afford a proper Weeper claim. The margins are razor-thin and the window is closing. "Chasing melt money" means pursuing a deal that's evaporating faster than you can close it.
An ice asteroid deliberately parked in a stable orbit as a hidden supply cache. Smugglers, pirates, and forward-operating military units stash Dead Drops along supply routes. The ice provides water and a reason to stop. The cargo bolted inside provides everything else. CORSEC finds and confiscates about one in ten.
A dense cluster of ice asteroids occupying a stable orbital band; the galactic equivalent of a freshwater lake. Glacier Belts supply entire systems. Getting water off a planet is rarely worth the G's Fee, so civilisation clusters around Glacier Belts the way old Earth civilisation clustered around rivers. Mining rights on a Glacier Belt are worth more than most stations. Corporate wars have been fought over them. Small wars, admittedly. But the invoices were enormous.
Hidden Markets deep in the galactic DarkNets deal in anything from software piracy to illegal weapons and outlawed AI mods. Most illegal digital trades occur somewhere in the DarkNet or are organized there for trade in the physical world (MeatSpace). Trades of Hazardous and illicit goods that require physical trade are generally arranged on the DarkNet.
A Nebula Trade is a physical exchange of "highly sensitive" equipment or illicit goods. The term gets its name from the common meeting place of the exchangers, deep inside Nebula, as well as a reference to the grey and Nebulous trading as it might be seen by law enforcement. The locations of hidden nebulae and another space phenomenon where tracking and tracing are almost impossible are well-guarded and valuable secrets.
Earth Translation “All Are One”.
What your crew calls each other when rank isn’t listening.