The player carries one finite rig. Its spaces hold active equipment parts; ordinary salvage and inactive parts occupy the same overall carrying capacity. A part installed in the rig occupies capacity once, not once as cargo and again as equipment. Moving it to inactive cargo frees active rig area but not carrying capacity. The exact grid, shapes and capacity are open. A suit tank supplies limited portable oxygen; carrying additional canisters in general capacity is a proposal, not an owner requirement.

Parts use a public grammar rather than hidden recipes: a **trigger** notices an event; a **payload** carries charge, heat, force or fragments; a **modifier** transforms, stores or branches; an **actuator** produces a projectile, arc, barrier or shove. A packet contains a trigger and may carry a payload. Impact Dynamo, for example, emits a trigger carrying charge; Capacitor stores it and later emits a charged trigger, while Thermal Lens changes charge into heat without inventing another trigger.

The player arranges parts and draws compatible directed links between visible ports. Multi-role parts reopen old arrangements. Rig-installed and inactive carried parts each consume capacity once; installation also consumes active area and enables use. Field swaps consume world time.

Manual activation, a new enemy attack or an ambient hazard is an **external event** and starts a causal wave. Rig-created projectiles, fragments, arcs, barriers and contacts keep that wave identity rather than becoming new external events.

At an exposed isolator contact, the player may bypass it and seat a carried relay-family part—such as Fork Relay—in readable service ports. Knowing relays transfer packets tells the player what to pack; local preview only confirms the proposed link on arrival. The part stays seated to keep the section and hoist powered. It is lost to the rig but, once left behind, no longer occupies carrying capacity. This adopts Exploration Structure's persistence choice.

**Cascade lance.** A manual Pulse Projector shot starts a wave; its impact lets Dynamo send a charged trigger through Fork. One branch activates Arc Emitter, the other stores charge. Capacitor release sends charge through Thermal Lens, whose heat payload Projector launches. Sparse targets reduce Arc branching and later impact opportunities, not the basic sequence. Packed hordes may be overwhelmed.

**Counterwall reactor.** A manual trigger raises Barrier Plate. Each later enemy strike starts a wave through Dynamo into Capacitor. Stored charge can trigger Barrier or Arc Emitter. The wall becomes protection and engine while a horde attacks; it stops when strikes stop, bypass its facing or break the barrier.

**Salvage storm.** Cycler emits a trigger carrying a material response: conductive scrap activates Arc, pressure passes through Projector as force, brittle material fragments. Their impacts let Dynamo make one batched charge packet, split by Fork between Arc and Capacitor. Those fragments cannot start fresh waves. The path spends colony-bound salvage; hoarding starves it and firing destroys return value. Equipment/material composition, not enemy control, is the experiment.

All three reuse parts while asking whether to sustain a chain, power defence or consume cargo. A found Fork, Lens or Capacitor changes several paths because ports describe possibilities, not archetype membership.

Found equipment is readable individually. The player may install it, carry it inactive, leave it or discard something else. Installation grants immediate use but commits active area, carrying capacity and field-edit time. Returned salvage has no currency or automatic upgrade value defined here.

Hordes test space creation, sustained output and the oxygen-limited return while feeding dense-target chains and barrier impacts. A deliberately assembled build may erase ordinary hordes as payoff. Its real limits are causal shape, carried cost, acquisition and situations it does not address.

On return, keep the rig and forgo salvage, dismantle a part for a discovery, spend salvage through Cycler, or turn back. Separate spare-canister capacity would preserve equipment-versus-salvage while weakening its oxygen link.

These baseline functions do not expose build ports and cannot join a cascade. The ship services one suit baseline after revival; it never becomes detachable, saleable cargo or another cached copy. It lets the player scout, record, follow the traversed-route breadcrumb, evade, take another objective or search for parts, but does not guarantee cache recovery. Additional canisters, build parts and tools still occupy whatever capacities later systems assign. This is an equipment-system dependency, not settled starting gear, a replacement economy or an explanation of revival.

Instead of directed links, each part could carry semantic tags such as heat, impact, branching and barrier. Compatible pairs or sets would activate authored effects automatically; arrangement would mostly manage carrying space. This is easier to explain and bounds the authored interaction list. Multi-tag parts can support cross-combinations, and their authored rules would still need to exclude or contain any feedback loops.

- **Infinite feedback:** descended effects retain their source wave; a returning path stops. Multiple qualifying impacts become one batched accumulator contribution. New enemy attacks may sustain new waves, but rig output alone cannot mint them.