Salvage and distress

In brief

• Travel between two stellar bodies takes real in-game days.
• Each travel day rolls for a contact. The odds start at 10% and rise with the route's danger and the value of your cargo.
• A contact is hostile 35% of the time or more. Near a body, a quiet day has a 15% chance of one of six other events.
• At cruise speed nothing can come alongside, so only a distress call or a malfunction happens, at 5% a day.
• Time moves while you are docked as well, so factions, markets and station news all change while you sit still.

Salvage

• HULK: A hulk is a hull too wrecked to fly, sold for scrap at a Belt yard. She flies again once she is spaceworthy.
• SPACEWORTHY: A hulk is spaceworthy once half her structure is renewed. From then she can fly, and her work crew can finish the job under way.
• SALVAGE TITLE: A salvage title marks a hull that was once a wreck, and the salvage yard sells every hull under one. She resells for 30% of her new price instead of 45%.

Condition

• A hull has health, and combat and travel hazards take it down.
• SHIPYARD > REPAIR puts it back, for a fee and the days the yard's gang takes. A bigger station has a bigger gang.
• A job longer than a day offers a day's work instead, because a holed hull still flies but lets more rounds reach what matters.
• Under way, REPAIR HULL has your hands mend hull and drive with hold steel, far slower than a yard.
• STANDING ORDERS > REPAIR PARTIES sets which job the hands work first, the drive or the hull, and shows the steel and days.
• A hulk from a Belt salvage lot is restored by the yard, or by your own hands under RESTORE A HULK.
• Damage is not the same as wear. See RUNNING COSTS for wear.

Each value is read from the game code. Sort by any column heading, or filter by grade or by a word.

• Salvage law pays for a useful result: an operation that saves nothing earns no reward, which Lloyd's Open Form words as no cure, no pay.
• The reward comes from the owners of the property saved, and it may never exceed the value saved.
• A salvor loses the reward if the salvor's own fault made the danger, or if the owner or master forbade the help.
• A person saved owes nothing, and the convention does not apply to warships with sovereign immunity.
• The master of a ship must go to people in distress with all speed, so far as it does not seriously endanger the ship.
• A master who cannot help, or thinks it unreasonable, writes the reason in the log, and that is the whole penalty.
• A ship that hears an alert tells the rescue service it is coming, or tells the service when it cannot help.
• A false alert is canceled as soon as it is known, and one sent on purpose is a hoax.

• Capture is not salvage: the game used to call the 25% on a boarded wreck a salvage bonus, but the boarding side made the danger and the enemy master resists. It now says capture bonus, and the word salvage stays for a derelict found abandoned and for the hulk work.
• The relay price: relaying adds 6 percentage points of contact chance a day for the rest of the leg. The source gives relaying no cost at all, and the game's reason is that a plain voice call tells raiders where a hull is.
• A bait beacon: the game has a real hazard aimed at the captain alone, and the berth checks the register before it launches a cutter, so relaying bait costs nobody anything.
• Holding your course costs nothing: the source agrees, since V/33.1 asks only for a log entry.
• A distress reward: the game draws a base reward of 200 to 600 Cr, scales it by the body's danger, and pays 50 percent of it, and the game says a stranded crew pays what it has, which is less than a salvage fee. No source sets a figure.
• A beacon's clock and a cutter's reach are authored game numbers, kept so that rescue usually works near a berth and fails far from one.

1. The Salvage Convention and Lloyd's Open Form do not provide values for the following:
   1. Amount of a salvage reward. Article 13 lists criteria. Lloyd's Open Form leaves the sum to an arbitrator in London.
   2. Payer for a wreck with no owner. Article 13(2) has the owners of the salved property pay.
   3. Seizure or prize. Capture belongs to the law of naval warfare.
2. IAMSAR does not cover the following:
   1. Search patterns and the on-scene coordinator. They are in IAMSAR Volume II, which is not read.
   2. Reward for a relay. Salvage law pays for a rescue, not search and rescue.
3. SOLAS does not cover the following:
   1. Penalty for holding course past a distress call. Regulation V/33.1 asks for a log entry only.
4. No source on the shelf provides values for the following:
   1. A ship that cannot stop. The physics reason fits the SOLAS exception for a master who finds help unreasonable.
5. Atomic Rockets does not provide values for the following:
   1. Legal figures for a rescue.
   2. Rescue burn.
6. Not read for this page:
   1. Articles 20 to 30 of the Salvage Convention.
   2. The SCOPIC clause of Lloyd's Open Form.

• International Convention on Salvage, 1989, Articles 1(a), 4(1), 12, 13, 16, 18 and 19: Salvage is an act to assist property in danger (1). Only a useful result earns a reward (12). The reward may not exceed the salved value (13(3)). Nothing is due from persons whose lives are saved (16). Fault or fraud by the salvor can cut the reward (18), and a forbidden service earns none (19). Warships with sovereign immunity are outside the convention (4). (all uses)
• Lloyd's Standard Form of Salvage Agreement (Lloyd's Open Form, LOF 2020), Heading and clauses A, G and K: The form is headed no cure, no pay. The contractors promise best endeavours (A). Either side may end the services when no reasonable prospect of a useful result remains (G). The master signs for the owners as their agent (K). (all uses)
• IAMSAR Manual, volumes I and III (2016), with SOLAS V/33, Volume III section 1 and appendix A (SOLAS V/33.1, 33.2), section 2 figures 2-3 and 2-4, and p. 4-7: A master who hears of people in distress and can help must go with all speed and tell them or the rescue service (V/33.1). A ship that cannot help logs the reason. A requisitioned ship must comply (V/33.2). A false alert is canceled quickly, and a deliberate one is a hoax. "whenever they can safely do so" (all uses)
• Atomic Rockets, rescue, Introduction: The page treats rescue as something that comes from a base, since matching the course of a drifting hull costs a great deal of delta-v. Its remark that all vessels must answer distress signals is a line from a fiction excerpt about the 1967 treaty, so it is not used as a legal source. (all uses)
• Design notes: travelevents: The game's own reading: relay is the inform-the-rescue-service step, hold your course is the unable-to-assist branch, and the source prices neither. (all uses)