I’d like to pretend this will be a guide to help you play Jumpgate better, but in reality it’s more of a tourist guide. Hence rest & relax, we aren’t trying to power-level today.
In early 2001, NetDevil designed the production buildings and started adding them as the game was edging towards 1.0. Along with the ore depots, naval yards and custom producers came three buildings designed for ship services: the Repair Station, the Refueling Stop and the Rearm Arsenal (a.k.a. Armory). We’ll look at those in this article.
Location, location, location
There are currently three “RRR” buildings in the game, but two of them are armories, and one is a repair station. Each of them fulfills only one of the “R’s” and so you can’t use any of these to refuel in deep space. Here’s where you find them.
In each of these cases, the buildings are a little bit out of the way, and so they may not be immediately obvious as you pass through those sectors in a ship with short radar range. If you equip a 35K-range Knocker, they should just about show up as you ply the main routes between gates.
How To Train Repair Your Dragon
The RRR buildings are tied to their sector’s beacon, which means they’ll only service pilots from the faction controlling the beacon in the same sector. If the beacon is not tuned (grey), they will not work.
With the Repair building being in an unregulated sector, you just need to tune the beacon yourself before using it, or check it’s tuned to your faction.
Like other pinhole-tube buildings, there is no docking guidance, so you’ll need to perform a manual approach. Bring your ship in the tube and slow down to less than 1V towards the middle to activate the building.
All RRR buildings charge a nominal sum of 250 credits to service your ship, regardless of how much damage/fuel/ammo is needed to replenish. They will not charge you if your ship needs no service, or if it cannot be serviced due to factional control.
Arsenals or Armories
I am not sure why the docs refer to the Armories as Arsenals. It could be a mistake, or the building name was changed at some point and the docs weren’t updated. Anyhow, both Armories are found in Quantar space, within two jumps from one another at Ekoo and Hyperion Gate. Clearly this isn’t great news if you’re not Quantar and looking for more ammo, or, huh, maybe it is if you were itching for a fight… As with the Repair station, if the beacon isn’t tuned to your faction, your ship will be refused service, but you can always visit for a souvenir picture.
The Armory has the longest pinhole tube of any building, so lining up with it needs a little bit more precision.
On the screens, you can see I entered without tuning the beacon first, and the building refused to service my ship. It’s OK, I was doing this for science. I also had a Rotacol equipped, so you can see the building coordinates for Hyperion Gate are [38.3, 7.9, -40.7]
. Just in case you struggle finding it while a c7 manta is chasing you around the sector…
I’m including these screenies from March 2001, showing a Solrain and an unregulated armory in offline mode. You can see the building has different color accents from the ones you find in the game.
The Missing Piece: Refuelling Depots
It’s my belief that Refuelling depots are possible and working in the game. Simply, there isn’t one built in the current universe, but it should be possible to create one. Anyhow, you can’t fly to one at the moment, but we do have one screenshot from the same batch of promo pictures showing all the prod buildings as they looked in March 2001.
You can just about make out the pinhole tube on the Refuelling Depot, and although I wasn’t able to test any of this, there is no reason not to assume this building works exactly like the other two.
The Pragmatic RRR
While it’s cool to know about those buildings, it’s rather impractical to rely on them for much, usually. If you’re actually in need of RRR, your best bet, other than docking at a nearby faction station, is to know about a nearby friendly Player-Owned Station offering Refuel, Rearm and Repair services. Typically, such stations advertise services by featuring the well-known ‘RRR’ acryonym in their name. In a pinch, you can use jg-tri’s POS list tool and check out public POS in the sectors near you. Here’s an example.
Jimbo’s Retreat is located in the Stith, and you can see that if you dock there, you will be charged no credit for RRR. You can tell the services are available because of the green squares, and the public setting of the POS. Since players can change those settings at any time, I won’t provide a list of RRR spots, but with this you’ll hopefully be able to help yourself!
POS maintained by players are a more viable way to RRR (sometimes at cost, though) as there are many across the galaxy, and a single building equipped with the right modules can perform all three R’s for you.