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Description
In the Exile, contrary to the opinions of certain sorts of poorly-informed fantasists, space travel is tightly regulated. To some extent, this is due to natural selection - in the places where it's not regulated, well, they tend to stop being places very quickly. This is for simple-but-obvious reasons - space is, of course, very large. As such, making any journey in reasonable time requires high speeds. As kinetic energy scales with the square of the speed ... well, in kinetic energy terms, any spacecraft that's fast enough to be useful will probably roughly compare to the asteroid that took out the dinosaurs.

If a ship drifts off of its assigned vector, the good ending is the one where you only lose a city or a few mountains. A more typical ending involves an entire continent. Entirely-plausible endings involve stratospheres filled with refractory dust, coastal settlements inundated by mile-high tsunamis, craters big enough to be visible from neighbouring planets and the collapse of entire trophic webs. (The final ecocatastrophe on Old Earth was probably hastened by the sheer number of shuttle-crashes during the evacuation stage of the climate crisis; one factor that drove many people to Okani Spaceways - in spite of the obvious megalomania of its founder - was that, for all their other flaws, their ships usually did make it to orbit in one piece.)

When an incoming ship goes quiet, it's big news.

Generally, most governments aren't keen on events where the "happy" ending is the one with a death toll that runs to six figures. Even the most corrupt of autocracies will be annoyed by the inevitable disruption to trade and the usual grifting, and any even-minimally-responsible asministration will not welcome the public relations disaster associated with entire cities being wiped out.

A ship that goes out of contact can reasonably-expect to be treated as a rogue meteor.

On the other hand, "missiles first, ask questions later" is also an unpopular approach. So, a large portion of the Imperial Fleet Aerospace Arm's peacetime role is centred around policing shipping throughout the Empire. Fast interceptor-craft such as the S-26 Fang are ideal for investigating non-responsive freighters. 95% of the time, it turns out that the problem is a faulty radio. In that case, standard procedure is either to fix the radio, or if that isn't possible, then escort the ship safely in.

There is the other 5% of times, when it turns out that something capital-B Bad has happened.

Here we can see Ash boarding a non-responsive ship. He's space-walked over using a magnetic grapple - using two miniaturised rocket thrusters, it fires on a line-of-sigh trajectory, and the magnetic plate at the front will attach it to any ferrous surface. Once it's firmly attached, you can just pull yourself over. (If you look very closely, you'll also see that the line is cleated to Ash's flight harness, for obvious safety reasons.)

From the looks of things, this ship has experienced some sort of unscheduled depressurisation event. Perhaps that lovely picture-porthole was more "pretty" and less "sensible", in hindsight...

Description
In the Exile, contrary to the opinions of certain sorts of poorly-informed fantasists, space travel is tightly regulated. To some extent, this is due to natural selection - in the places where it's not regulated, well, they tend to stop being places very quickly. This is for simple-but-obvious reasons - space is, of course, very large. As such, making any journey in reasonable time requires high speeds. As kinetic energy scales with the square of the speed ... well, in kinetic energy terms, any spacecraft that's fast enough to be useful will probably roughly compare to the asteroid that took out the dinosaurs.

If a ship drifts off of its assigned vector, the good ending is the one where you only lose a city or a few mountains. A more typical ending involves an entire continent. Entirely-plausible endings involve stratospheres filled with refractory dust, coastal settlements inundated by mile-high tsunamis, craters big enough to be visible from neighbouring planets and the collapse of entire trophic webs. (The final ecocatastrophe on Old Earth was probably hastened by the sheer number of shuttle-crashes during the evacuation stage of the climate crisis; one factor that drove many people to Okani Spaceways - in spite of the obvious megalomania of its founder - was that, for all their other flaws, their ships usually did make it to orbit in one piece.)

When an incoming ship goes quiet, it's big news.

Generally, most governments aren't keen on events where the "happy" ending is the one with a death toll that runs to six figures. Even the most corrupt of autocracies will be annoyed by the inevitable disruption to trade and the usual grifting, and any even-minimally-responsible asministration will not welcome the public relations disaster associated with entire cities being wiped out.

A ship that goes out of contact can reasonably-expect to be treated as a rogue meteor.

On the other hand, "missiles first, ask questions later" is also an unpopular approach. So, a large portion of the Imperial Fleet Aerospace Arm's peacetime role is centred around policing shipping throughout the Empire. Fast interceptor-craft such as the S-26 Fang are ideal for investigating non-responsive freighters. 95% of the time, it turns out that the problem is a faulty radio. In that case, standard procedure is either to fix the radio, or if that isn't possible, then escort the ship safely in.

There is the other 5% of times, when it turns out that something capital-B Bad has happened.

Here we can see Ash boarding a non-responsive ship. He's space-walked over using a magnetic grapple - using two miniaturised rocket thrusters, it fires on a line-of-sigh trajectory, and the magnetic plate at the front will attach it to any ferrous surface. Once it's firmly attached, you can just pull yourself over. (If you look very closely, you'll also see that the line is cleated to Ash's flight harness, for obvious safety reasons.)

From the looks of things, this ship has experienced some sort of unscheduled depressurisation event. Perhaps that lovely picture-porthole was more "pretty" and less "sensible", in hindsight...