Starship

The main role of a starship was to carry people across the emptiness of space. Because of this, starships were built with an atmospherically sealed hull and protected against space debris and radiation by deflector shields. To get in and out, occupants used pressurized gates called airlocks, which were hatches or doors in the hull. To make the inside comfortable, most ships had life support systems that adjusted the air, temperature, and pressure to levels that most species could survive in.

To move through space, starships used engines, specifically sublight engines, which burned and expelled fuel from a fuel tank or mixed special materials from a reactor. More advanced drives, like the twin ion engine, used accelerated ions and other tiny particles. Some starships also had a hyperdrive, allowing them to enter hyperspace and travel farther in less time, but this needed a navigation computer to safely guide the ship through known hyperspace routes. Also important, though often not thought about, was the gyrocomputer, which used control momentum gyroscopes to provide a location reference when there was no planetary terrain to use.

There were as many kinds of starships as there were jobs in the galaxy. These types were divided into classes, mainly based on the ship's purpose (like starfighter, transport, freighter) and the Anaxes War College System, which classified ships by size (like corvette, frigate, battlecruiser). A starship's class affected how it was built. For example, combat ships like starfighters had weapons like laser cannons built in and often didn't have a hyperdrive, while freighters had bigger reactors and engines to carry more cargo.

Starship parts included repulsorlifts, artificial gravity, deflector shields, hulls, sublight engines, hyperdrives, life support, acceleration compensators, reactors, blaster cannons, laser cannons, turbolasers, missiles, sensors, flight computers and tractor beams. Carbon-freezing was once a critical part of a starship, before the invention of the hyperdrive.