Skip Drive
While you are at the Mission Point your engineer starts looking through old archives on various technical specs to see how the Zhian handled a myriad of technology challenges when your engineer stumbles across something that he doesn’t believe is supposed to be there. It’s written in an ancient dialect of Zhian. He ends up being curious enough about it that he starts feeding the universal translator other examples of this dialect till it is capable of translating it into something your engineer understands. This archive includes all kinds of interesting history that he has never heard about before including the insinuation that the Zhian used to have colonies on other planets, the idea that they had a super weapon whose name simply translates into ‘Death Ray’ and most interesting to your engineer, are some old designs for a ship engine that worked on completely different principles than modern FTL drives. It folds space and relies a lot on unproven quantum mechanic theories to simply help you jump from one point in space to another. Your engineer also realizes that for about 1,000 credits he can probably get the parts here on Zhian Prime to build one for your ship.
- Do you choose to ignore building a skip drive because either you don’t have the spare coin, or don’t like the idea of relying on schematics translated by your ship’s software to move your ship to potentially random points in space?
- Do you go with the idea that this is something that might just give you the competitive edge that you’ve been looking for to quickly traverse to the far flung edges of the universe nearly instantly. Sure it’s a risk, but that’s why your ship comes with the safety feature of temporal displacement. Give the engineer 1,000 credits and see what happens when he builds and installs the Skip Drive.
If you build the Skip Drive, grab the appropriate piece to install it on your ship. It does require an armed marker to activate it and then roll a d20 to see what spawn point you end up at. If the specific spawn point is not out, appear at the spawn point with the closest number always going to the higher number if two numbers have equal difference from the number rolled. Example, you roll a 17 but that spawn point has not come out yet. The closest numbers in play are 15 and 19 which both are only two away from the number rolled. You are required to go to the higher number, 19. If a 20 is rolled you may choose any space already revealed on the board even if it doesn’t contain a spawn point.
After any player has had the option of building a Skip Drive, the archive that this information was found in mysteriously disappears and no one else will have the opportunity to try and build a Skip Drive.