The Meek

The Meek are the people who fly your rockets. You hire them once, seat them in a pod, fly them, and bring them home tougher than they left. A pod with nobody in it does not fly at all.

Every Meek has a name, a face, a trade and five stats from 1 to 10. They are yours for good once hired: the hire is the only credits a Meek ever costs you, and nothing is charged again for flying them. What they cost you is the risk. A Meek lost with a ship is lost for good.

You start with one already on the roster, before you have flown anything: an Astronaut with piloting 5 and nerve 6, who blacks out past 6.4 G. Everyone after them is hired at the Astronaut Center, which is also where you look at them, let them go, and read the list of the ones you lost.

The Meek sheet on the Roster tab: three cards, each with a face, a name, a trade, five stat bars and a line saying what G they black out past. — The roster. Each card's green bars are the stats that trade is judged on; the foot line says the load that Meek stays awake through.

A pod flies only with an astronaut in it

A pod is a part with a seat and the controls in it, and it needs an astronaut strapped into one of those seats before the rocket may leave the pad. Tap Fly with an empty pod and the hangar selects the pod instead of launching, and the line under the ship's mass reads "Seat an astronaut in the Command Pod". Seating them is Seat crew on a pod.

A probe core needs nobody. That is the whole of the choice: fly a rocket with people in it and it can be flown by hand, or fly it unmanned and risk no one.

Everyone aboard is cargo the ship has to lift. A seated Meek adds 80 kg to the part they sit in, suit and all, and the hangar's mass figure counts them.

Passengers and astronauts

Only the astronaut trade flies a ship. Everyone else rides. That gives three rules, and they are all the game checks:

A pod needs an astronaut of its own. A scientist alone in a Command Pod keeps it on the pad.
A Passenger Cabin may hold anyone, of any trade, so long as an astronaut is aboard the ship somewhere in a pod.
An empty cabin is freight. It keeps nothing on the pad and does nothing in flight.

Nobody may be in two places at once: a Meek already aboard a ship in orbit cannot be seated in a second one until that ship comes home. The cabins and pods themselves are in Parts: Pods.

Food and power aboard

A filled seat eats. An empty one does not. Food is drawn from the whole ship rather than from the part the seat is in, so a cabin eats out of the pod's larder, or a tank's, as readily as out of its own. The crew chip in flight tells you how many days are left.

Under one day of food the chip turns amber and reads HUNGRY. Run the larder dry and everyone who was eating out of it is lost. Electricity is different: each passenger in a cabin draws a little of it for air, warmth and light, and a cabin that goes dark still keeps its people. Power is comfort. Food is life.

G, greying out and blacking out

Acceleration presses on a body as much as on a hull, and the Meek have a limit of their own that has nothing to do with the parts'. It is their G-tolerance stat: they stay awake through 4 G plus 0.6 G for every point of it, so the frailest hold out to 4.6 G and the hardiest to 10 G. Every card and every crew chip says the figure outright.

Everyone aboard is judged on their own limit, and what you see is the pilot's. From two G under their limit the world darkens in from the sides of the screen, most of the way shut at the limit itself. Three seconds past it and they are out. They come to five seconds after the load has dropped a G back under.

The flight screen under heavy load: the crew chip outlined in amber, the sky visibly darker at both edges of the screen. — Nearing the limit. The sky is darker at both edges than it is in the middle, and the chip has gone amber.

The pilot's blackout is the one the ship feels. While they are under, the controls read zero, the throttle freezes, nothing stages, and the world goes black but for a trace. Every instrument stays readable, so you can watch what the ship does without you. A passenger's blackout is theirs alone and costs the ship nothing.

The flight screen almost entirely black, the navball and readouts still bright, the crew chip outlined in red reading PASSED OUT, the throttle and turn buttons greyed out. — The pilot is out. The instruments stay lit; the throttle, the turn buttons and STAGE are dead until they come to.

Spinning

A body does not need weight to give out. A tumbling ship swills the inner ear whatever the accelerometer reads, so rate of turn is a second way to the same blackout, and a ship coasting at one G can put its whole crew under.

The same G-tolerance stat sets it. The frailest keep their bearings to about 19 rpm and the hardiest to about 34 rpm — roughly a third of a turn a second at the top end. Past that the screen closes in exactly as it does under load, and the chip goes amber and reads DIZZY beside the rpm that Meek gives out at. Six seconds past their limit and they are out: twice as long as a hard burn takes, because vertigo builds where a grey-out arrives. They come to five seconds after the ship has settled well under the figure, and settling means both the load and the spin.

Spinning never kills. A tumble fast enough to hurt a body tears the ship apart first, and that is the hull's limit, not theirs. What it does is take the controls away at the worst possible moment, so a ship that starts turning after a separation is worth catching early — on the reaction wheels, on fins in air, or on the thrusters.

Careful

Five G past a Meek's limit, held for three seconds, kills them. The pod around them survives to its own limit, so a ship can come home with a dead crew aboard. It is sustained load that does this, not one jolt: a long hard burn is far more dangerous to a body than a hard bump.

The scientist's bonus

A Scientist aboard makes every science reading pay more. Each reading's credits and discovery go up by 10 % for each point of that scientist's science stat, so a scientist with science 6 pays +60 % and one with science 10 doubles the reward. Only the scientist trade pays it: an astronaut's science stat earns nothing.

The figure follows them everywhere so you can price a hire against what they will earn: on their card at the Astronaut Center, on the seat you put them in, on the toast when a reading is taken, and on the toast that pays it. What a reading is, and which instruments take them, is Science and readings.

Growing, and coming home

Stats grow by use, and only when the Meek comes home. Recovering a landed ship is what brings them back and what moves their counters; a flight that crashed, was terminated, or was left in the air grows nobody, because nobody came back. See Landing and recovery.

What grows depends on what they did. Piloting grows for whoever was at the controls, by the hardest thing the flight reached. Nerve grows for everyone aboard, and grows more the first time they reach something new. G-tolerance grows from a flight that pressed near their limit, from every blackout they survive, and from every full hour they spend aboard: the body hardens to the load the longer it flies. Science grows for a scientist each time a reading is filed with them aboard.

Ten is the ceiling and nothing ever falls. The exact figures are in Crew.

The memorial

A crash, an empty larder, too much G, or a ship abandoned in the air loses everyone aboard. They leave the roster for the Lost tab, which records how they went and over which world. Nothing brings them back, and the seat they were in is part of what a surviving pilot carries home.

The Lost tab of the Meek sheet: one dimmed card reading Doss Nix, ASTRONAUT, crashed over Earth, 1 flight. — The Lost tab. The line under the bars says how and where, and how many flights they had flown.

The recruit board always carries at least one raw astronaut, so losing your only pilot never leaves you unable to fly.

Passengers a contract lends you

Some contracts hand you passengers the moment you accept them: Tourists, who cost nothing at all. They sit on your roster like anyone else, and you seat them, fly them and bring them home the same way, but they are not yours. They ride outside the Astronaut Center's limit, so they never take a place from a Meek you hired; they cannot be let go; and they leave on their own when the contract ends, however it ends.

A tourist still needs a seat beside an astronaut. A tourist run is over when you recover the ship, not when you land it, because a recovery is what gets them off the ship. See Contracts.