In Star Citizen, cargo can be widely divided into Items and Commodities. To combat this, smugglers can add additional technology to their SCU crates such as ‘scramblers’ that will make it harder to detect illegal cargo, or ‘spoofers’, which make a container appear as something else altogether. Of course, the police wouldn’t be doing their job properly if they just believed what every trucker told them, so they will be scanning ships on occasion to confirm what the transporter is ferrying, whether it is on the grid or not. A player who wants to slip a crate full of contraband through customs will be able to do so simply by leaving it off the grid and avoiding transmitting its details to a passing police officer. As highlighted beforehand, a box left in a passageway risks unbalancing a ship, over-weighing it and rattling around in the back, but once the smuggling system comes online, players have a plus side in that it’s not broadcast to others as part of the manifest. This will allow a player to be able to make a conscious effort not to declare an item as well, by deliberately leaving it off the grid. What this means is that when players go through customs checkpoints in the future, or are encountered by law enforcement out in the space lanes, their manifest will be broadcast like a trucker handing over a clipboard, declaring what’s inside their hold that everything is above board.
Goods that will be secured in place on the cargo grid will also be considered ‘declared’ on the ship’s cargo manifest. It should be noted that, although cargo can be stored outside the cargo plates area, it will not be secured and could shift causing damage all around and to the contained cargo. Using the manifest, you can activate and deactivate locking plates (to jettison cargo), set orders for arranging cargo and see the effect that all of your items are having on your center of mass. Īs included in the final use case players must be able to interact with their cargo from the ship's onboard manifest. Active locking plates are lit gold, although the light will change to red if there is something wrong: the cargo bay is too damaged to maintain lock, any of the items atop the plate cannot be secured and so on. This means that only cargo containers can stack while disallowing infinite bridges, and that turning off the power plant won’t shred the ship with instant cargo shrapnel. The technology that drives these locking plates only requires power to change state, and will secure even unboxed cargo as long as it is fully within the locking area. Containers are placed in a locking grid of sorts, which marks out (floor to ceiling) where cargo can be stored onboard a ship. The SCU value introduced earlier defines the exterior dimensions of containers, which is important to note because it allows the number of SCU a ship is rated for to actually correlate with the SCU value of all containers which can be placed inside that particular cargo bay. Containers fix themselves to the cargo plates. Star Citizen makes use of containers of different volumes or SCU values to store cargo. Cargo bay Screenshot of the new trade console interface to a minimum size of 32-SCU containers for the RAFT, Hull C, Hull D and Hull E Meanwhile, others like the Hull A and Hull B can carry a mix of container sizes. Some vehicles are limited in the size of the containers they can carry, from a max size of 1/8-SCU containers for the STV. įurthermore, the cargo transported inside a container can have different properties like hazardous, perishable, fragile, priority, etc. Ports are 0.25m spaces.īesides this two key statistics, containers are defined by size and weight, health and shielding. SCU defines the exterior dimensions of the container in cubic meter increments, while the number of ports defines how many discrete slots into which items can be placed are available. These define everything the game needs to know about loading a container onto a pallet or attaching it to a ship. The term is most frequently applied to devices made from materials that are durable and are often partly or completely rigid.Įvery container has two key statistics: Standard Cargo Units (SCU) and Number of Ports. Things kept inside of a container are protected on several sides by being inside of its structure. For a list of all types of containers in Star Citizen, see Containers.Ī container is any receptacle or enclosure for holding a product used in storage, packaging, and transportation, including shipping.