Well, we have a few other inconveniences on this page. Contaminated fuel, lack of maintenance, drive failure, and misjumps. Yes, those would all be bad. Some of them would appear to be linked, too.
Contaminated fuel means unrefined fuel, ‘often forced by circumstance,’ which suggests that sometimes you have to use whatever’s available, and it might suck. ‘and about as often the result of false economy by a captain,’ which means cheaping out on the costs and hoping you get away with it. Either way, using unrefined fuel means you’ve got a 1-in-12 chance of your drive failing while you’re using it, which would definitely be bad. Oh, and every time you jump without cleaning the drive, your odds of failure go up by a DM of +1. So, eventually it’s going to blow your engine.
Oh, that’s interesting: Unrefined fuel can be picked up by simply skimming a gas giant. The good stuff can only be gotten from a starport, though. So, systems with gas giants become more useful than others, even if it means you’ve got a chance of your ship’s engines dying in the middle of nowhere.
Lack of maintenance is next. It’s simplified to an annual thing, but if you don’t do it, your drive might fail. And then we get a description of what happens when the drive actually fails: All three sections are affected, those being maneuver, jump, and power plant. They can be jury-rigged in an emergency, needing a high roll to succeed, but once you get to the starport, the dockworkers can handle the rest. So, you could be stranded for a while if you don’t have a trained engineer on board. Actually, considering the penalties for not having a skill, having no engineer on board when your engine blows means you’re effectively dead, because you can’t fix it, and no one’s likely to ever find you again. Moral of the story: Have an engineer on board.
Misjumping is next, and it’s described as ‘the most interesting event which can occur’. There are three reasons for a misjump; two are described above. The third is when you jump too close to a planet or star (100 diameters, remember?), and a misjump means you’re going in a random direction and for a random distance.
Those are some nasty modifiers, too; in fact, you can misjump even without those earlier factors, but it’s reasonably rare: 12+ on the throw. If you’re too close to a star, it’s a +5 DM, bad fuel is a +3, and lack of maintenance is a +2. So, if you’ve got all three factors going, you’re automatically getting a misjump no matter what you roll. If you’re using refined fuel, though, there’s a -1 DM, so assuming you’re far enough away from the nearest heavenly body and your ship is full of shiny new parts, you’ll never misjump.
If you do misump, you’re going in a random direction; roll a d6 to figure out what direction. You also roll a die to find out how many dice to roll to calculate your jump distance. So it’s possible that your misjump could actually take you as many as 36 hexes away. Good luck getting home after that.
And of course, all of these things can happen to starships owned by PCs as well the ones they are just hitching a ride on.
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