Star-Eye

The Magic Rudder determined a spellship's upper limits, while its hull determined its lower limits.

For small and medium spellships, the Magic Rudder was everything. The hull mattered far less.

But bringing out the Magic Rudder's full potential required a sufficiently well-built hull, especially for a warship.

A warship needed more than powerful propulsion and a high helm rating. Its defenses, offensive capabilities, and survivability had to match, with no obvious weaknesses.

The Crystal Guardship, for example, had a sturdy hull, along with an independent energy pool and weapons system.

Even if its Rudder Master exhausted his mana, he could still pilot the Crystal Guardship and fight with it.

The eleventh-circle Create Spelljamming Helm constructed a corresponding hull along with the Magic Rudder, with its appearance, size, and interior layout all customizable by the caster.

It was much like the eleventh-circle Fortress of Solidity and Demiplane.

The Magic Rudder produced by the eleventh-circle Create Spelljamming Helm could propel a spellship of up to twenty-seven thousand tons. Even with Anse casting it himself, that only rose to sixty-seven thousand five hundred tons, far smaller than he had imagined.

However, this "tonnage" measured volume, not weight.

Anse had no idea who had established it. It was rather abstract, but most spellship technology continued to use that standard.

A starship of one hundred space tons had a total volume of roughly seven thousand cubic meters, equivalent to an ocean-going vessel with a displacement of over seven thousand tons.

That sounded enormous, but if a Magic Rudder rated for one hundred tons was installed on a vessel that large, it could only "crawl" through space at an outrageously slow pace.

If it had the misfortune to be caught by an asteroid's gravity, it could only crash.

Most spellships therefore avoided overly large, heavy hulls.