The Comm Guild Maelstrom's Edge

When travelling at speed away from the ultimate destruction of the Maelstrom, the need for constant resources is always there. We've covered this with interstellar hydrogen harvesting and automated crop ships, but there is another key piece of the puzzle.

Stopping off to manually harvest asteroids and other space detritus is a slow, energy intensive and hazardous affair. One of the most important post-maelstrom ships is the mining ship - a huge vessel which flies at the head of a fleet, ingesting physical matter from space and performing some basic processing of it.

Larger material that would not fit in the intake is usually blasted by flanking assault craft so that as much as possible can be consumed for the long journey towards the galactic rim.