Fleet Carrier Operations Guide

A Fleet Carrier is the largest and most expensive thing a commander can own — a capital-class mobile space station that you don't pilot directly. You issue it orders, and it carries your entire fleet, your cargo, and a suite of station services anywhere in the galaxy.

Manufactured by the Brewer Corporation, the Drake-Class Carrier was added in the 2020 Fleet Carriers Update, with walkable interiors (the Concourse) arriving in Odyssey Update 11. Mechanically, it behaves nothing like a normal ship — there is no cockpit you sit in to fly it. Instead, after purchase a Carrier Management menu appears in your ship's right-hand HUD panel, and from there you run the whole operation: scheduling jumps, installing services, setting market orders, and managing the bank.

The mental model

Think of it as a station you own that can teleport. It has 16 landing pads (8 large, 4 medium, 4 small), so any ship in your fleet can dock at it. It can store your other ships and modules, refuel and repair you, rearm you, buy and sell commodities, and — depending on what you install — cash in bounties, sell exploration data, register exobiology, and more. Then, when you want to be somewhere else, you tell it to jump up to 500 light-years and it brings everything with it.

It is persistent and indestructible

Your carrier exists in the game world whether you are online or offline, and across Open, Solo, and Private Group play. Like a station, it cannot be destroyed and has 20 defence turrets that protect it and nearby friendly ships. It carries a permanent alphanumeric identifier (e.g. "L07-P4H") that stays with it even if you rename it — so other players can always identify a specific carrier.

Carriers also carry a notional cargo hold whose used space — including the footprint of installed services — is what determines how much tritium each jump burns. More on that in Section 07.

For a multi-role commander, the carrier isn't a single-purpose tool — it's the keystone that makes a multi-role fleet actually coherent. Here is what it changes:

A carrier rewards players who are active and have a destination problem — people who repeatedly want their fleet and a station somewhere specific. Combat at specific RES/CZ sites, Robigo passenger loops, trade runs, and mining all benefit from a relocatable base.

It is a poor fit for someone who plays rarely, because the upkeep is billed every week whether you log in or not. The honest gate is financial, not skill-based:

For an active commander running combat, passengers, trade, and mining, a carrier is a strong investment once the bank is ready. Treat it as an accelerant for a long-term goal, not a shortcut — it relocates your fleet and services, but grants no rank and unlocks no rank-locked ships on its own.

Up-front cost

The hull is a flat 5,000,000,000 CR. Services are bought separately and on top (see the table in Services). Kickstarter backers get their historic discount applied automatically.

Weekly upkeep

This is the part that scares people, and it's worth understanding precisely. Upkeep is deducted from the Fleet Carrier Bank (FCB) every Thursday at 07:00 UTC during server downtime. It is made of three parts:

• Core costs — a base 5 M CR/week that covers the three always-on core services and the bridge crew.
• Optional costs — the crew salaries for each optional service you install. You can suspend a service to roughly halve its cost (the crew stays on a retainer), or uninstall it to remove the cost entirely.
• Maintenance — a flat 100,000 CR per jump for wear and tear, billed alongside the rest.

A bare carrier costs 5 M/week. A fully kitted-out carrier with every service active can climb to roughly 25–30 M/week. A sensible combat-focused build (more below) typically lands in the 9–13 M/week range.

Debt & the decommission cliff

The good news: decommissioning is not a total loss. Voluntary decommissioning (which you can do any time, in any system) refunds the full hull cost and the value of installed services, minus a fixed fee of around 125 M CR (some guides cite 150 M). Your stored ships and modules are transferred out for free. Caveat: sell off service stock and uninstall services manually first, and remove all commodities and tritium — those are not reliably refunded.

The three core services (free, always on)

Every new carrier ships with these, paid for inside the 5 M base upkeep:

• Bridge Crew — the personnel who run the carrier, led by the Deck Officer.
• Commodity Trading — lets you and visitors buy/sell commodities and set market orders. This is a genuinely powerful free tool for trade and stockpiling.
• Tritium Depot — manages your fuel stockpile and shows jump range.

Optional services

Installed only while the carrier is in a system with the Carrier Administration service. Every service occupies cargo capacity — which means more services = more tritium burned per jump, even when suspended. Choose deliberately.

Refuel / Repair / Armoury are grouped in-game under "Advanced Maintenance." Redemption Office, Secure Warehouse and Universal Cartographics take a 25% service fee on transactions (split between the service officer and your bank). Shipyard and Outfitting let visitors store their own ships/modules — but note you can always store your own ships and modules even without those services installed.

Carriers run on Tritium, stored in the 1,000 t Tritium Depot. You feed it two ways:

• Buy it from Commodity Markets at starports with a Refinery economy (or from other players' carriers / the STAR initiative).
• Mine it from surface and sub-surface deposits in icy asteroid rings — what a dedicated mining ship like the Type-11 Prospector is for. This makes you fuel-independent.

How much fuel per jump?

Consumption scales with jump distance and the carrier's current loaded mass (cargo + the footprint of installed services). As a reference point:

A loaded carrier with heavy services burns considerably more — another reason to keep your service list lean if you plan to relocate often.

The jump sequence

Plotting a jump starts a preparation timer of at least 15 minutes (longer when server traffic is high — during the Trailblazers colonisation rush, hour-plus waits and "no time slots" errors were common). You can cancel until the 10-minute mark. The final phases:

1. Lockdown

   Begins at 3:20 — all services suspend, ships are forced into hangars, on-foot crew must be seated.

2. Hyperspace jump

   The drive spins up, the carrier enters the hyperspace portal, and arrives in the target system.

3. Cooldown

   A ~5 minute cooldown follows before you can plot the next jump.

Anyone docked when lockdown hits jumps with the carrier. Walk to the Command Deck on foot and you can watch hyperspace through the windows.

Four common carrier roles. The recurring theme: services don't change what you do, they remove the round-trip to a station so you can do it where the action is.

A lean, combat-first build that serves all four roles without the two cargo-hungry storage services. Install these at launch:

This keeps the cargo footprint modest (so jumps stay cheap on fuel) and gives you a combat fast-loop, a trade/mining silo, and a serviced base for the liner. Defer Shipyard and Outfitting — you can store your own fleet and modules without them, and they're the two heaviest services. Add them later only if you want field module-swaps or to sell to visitors.

1. Bank ~7 billion credits

   5 B hull + ~335 M starter services + tritium stock + a buffer for rebuys and several weeks of upkeep. Don't buy yourself broke.

2. Travel to a Fleet Carrier Vendor

   Vendors sit at starports flagged by a nearby Carrier Construction Dock. Bubble examples include Diso – Shifnalport, Kruger 60 – Kepler Gateway, CD-47 990 – Jackson Ring, Lan Tzak – Jacobi Platform, and Namnetes – Jolliet Enterprise. Confirm the nearest to you on Inara.

3. Buy via the Contacts tab

   Dock, open Station Services → Contacts → Fleet Carrier Vendor → purchase. The carrier spawns orbiting a body in that system (or the nearest system with Carrier Administration if it's full).

4. Open Carrier Management

   A new option appears in your ship's right HUD panel. This is your entire control surface — you can manage it remotely from anywhere from now on.

5. Install your starter services

   While in a Carrier Administration system, install Refuel, Repair, Armoury, and Redemption Office. (Commodity Trading is already there, free.)

6. Fuel the Depot

   Buy or mine tritium, dock, and transfer it from your ship into the Depot. Aim for a healthy reserve before your first relocation jump.

7. Pre-load the Fleet Carrier Bank

   Deposit enough credits to cover several weeks of upkeep so a missed session never starts a debt spiral.

8. Set tariffs (optional) & jump to work

   If parking somewhere with traffic, set service tariffs to earn income, then plot your first jump to a combat hotspot and start operating.

Upkeep is very beatable. A few hours of focused activity typically funds weeks. Options, roughly best-to-worst:

• Combat cashflow — massacre mission stacks and bounty/bond farming in a capable combat ship routinely clear a week's upkeep in 2–3 hours, especially with the Redemption Office removing station trips.
• Tariff income — park in a high-traffic system (popular mining rings, community-goal hubs, colonisation staging systems) and let visitors' fees fund the bank while you're offline.
• Commodity arbitrage — buy/sell orders on the free market; let other haulers fill your hold for a finder's fee, then move and sell in bulk.
• Colonisation hauling — a current high-demand activity; carriers are prized for ferrying construction commodities, and there are player networks that pay for carrier hauling.
• Mining — bulk platinum/opals via a dedicated mining ship, stockpiled in the hold and sold to the best market you can jump to.

• Don't strand it dry. The carrier can't refuel itself; an empty Depot in a fuel-less system means relying on another player to bring tritium. Always jump with reserve fuel.
• Suspended services still cost cargo. Suspending cuts the credit cost but the service's footprint still counts toward jump-fuel mass. To truly lighten the carrier, uninstall.
• Decommission cleanly. If you ever sell the carrier, manually uninstall services, sell stock, and empty commodities + tritium first — those aren't reliably refunded.
• Plot jumps early in busy periods. During colonisation surges the prep timer balloons; schedule ahead rather than waiting at the pad.
• The 25% fee on Redemption is the price of convenience. For high-value single bounties it can be worth a station trip; for grinding bonds at a distant CZ, the on-site desk usually wins on time.
• Body limit per orbit. Up to 16 carriers can orbit a given body; a red carrier icon on the system map means that body is full — pick another.
• Set your "Current Activity." A cosmetic touch that reskins the management UI to your role (mining, bounty hunting, etc.) — nice for a themed fleet log.