Building Transport Entries

A transport is a modular stat sheet, not a heavier piece of equipment. It is its own file type — Transport — built so the same chassis can be rebuilt voyage to voyage. Where a single Equipment entry is one blade, a Transport entry is a hull plus five docking bays, and the craft of building one is knowing how those bays, the numbers, and the moduleType tags fit together.

The type's shape

A Transport file carries one chassis and a small set of numbers that the GM engine (GM Instruction 10 — Transport & Vehicles) runs on:

• transportType — Beast | Fuel | Energy. This is not a label; it decides what powers the engine and what counts as fuel. Beast runs on living muscle (feed, provisions), Fuel on combustion (gasoline, diesel), Energy on cells and dream-flux. Choose it to match the fiction, because the roadside behavior follows from it — a Beast must be fed per day of travel, a Fuel rig burns per distance, an Energy ship drains per trip or per hit (its shields eat a cell per absorbed blow).
• hitPoints ({current, max}) and armor ({current, max}) — tracked separately, and deliberately. The engine's armour-first rule means a hit drains Armor until it hits 0, and only then does HP fall. Every 20% of max HP crossed knocks out one component via a 1d6 roll.
• speedKmh — cruising speed for map travel. Keep it a single believable lode number (charging/full-burst is flavor in the notes); the GM turns speed × distance into travel time.
• fuel ({current, capacity}) — a resource, not a decoration. At 0 the machine stops until crew refuels from a matching Fuel module. Put real supply in the mounted Fuel modules, not a vague "enough fuel."
• baseCargo — the chassis's own weight allowance before modules. A number, not prose.

The five slot arrays: build modules, not stat-dumps

The heart of the type is five array fields — engineSlots, energySlots, weaponSlots, armorSlots, gearSlots — plus a cabinLocation. Each slot array is a list of references to Equipment files, and each can hold several modules. That is the whole modular trick: the same hull can be a smuggler one voyage and a warship the next by swapping what sits in the bays.

For a module to be offered in a slot, it must be an Equipment file whose schema carries a moduleType tag matching the slot (Engine | Fuel | Weapon | Armor | Gear). The transport's slots are pickers that only offer equipment of the matching kind — so the delimiter between "this is cargo" and "this is a mounted weapon" is the moduleType tag on the Equipment file, not a sentence in the transport's notes.

Build each slot honestly against the canon:

• Engine — what moves it: Driver's Saddle & Rein, Internal Combustion Engine, Sail Rig & Oar Bank.
• Fuel / Energy — what feeds it: Vegetable Feed, Gasoline, Dream-Flux Reaction Cells, Crew Provisions.
• Weapon — how it fights: Tusks & Trunk & Trample on the elephant, Culverin & Bombard Battery on the warship, Combat Drone Rack & Rocket Pods on the RV.
• Armor — what shields it: War-Elephant Hide, Armored Hull, Composite Hull & Energy Shields.
• Gear — special equipment with mechanical weight: Side Cargo Crates, Mobile Command Center, Planetary Scanner & Contraband Hold.
• Cabin — not a slot but the interior Location the party rides inside: cabinLocation points at a Location file (the RV's cabin, the elephant's pavilion, the warship's deck).

Cargo Capacity is computed, never hand-typed

The transport's Cargo Capacity is a computed field — the live sum of baseCargo plus every cargoBonus on mounted Gear, solved by formula on the sheet, never written into the file. This follows the system's iron rule (see The Computing Layer): derived values belong to the machine. If you want a module to add cargo, you give that Equipment file a cargoBonus value — the transport's capacity then re-solves itself. Do not type a static cargo capacity into the transport; change the inputs (base or module bonuses) and let the sheet do the addition.

Wiring the cabin both ways

The interior is a place, so it is a real Location file, and the link is two-way:

• The transport → cabin: cabinLocation points at the Location (the cabin is the transport's interior).
• The cabin → transport: give the Location a hostVehicle reference back to the Transport.

Build both, in each direction. It turns "a ship with a deck" into a place you can actually enter from the map and a machine that knows where its crew sleeps — and it keeps map ↔ transport ↔ location wired so the party can run a fight from the saddle.

Checklist

• transportType is set to the truthful Beast | Fuel | Energy, and the fuel story matches it (per-day, per-distance, per-hit).
• Five slot arrays hold real Equipment references whose moduleType matches each slot — never prose.
• hitPoints + armor are tracked separately, honouring the armour-first rule.
• baseCargo is written; Cargo Capacity is left to the computed field (and any cargo-adding Gear carries a real cargoBonus).
• cabinLocation points at a real Location, and that Location carries a hostVehicle back to the transport.
• Fuel attaches to real mounted Fuel modules, so a dry tank is refuelable, not a dead end.

Build the machine the way the engine expects to run it — a hull, five bays, and honest numbers — and it will carry whatever road you give it.