About this archive
This is a fan site about a shareware game from 1996. It is put together by hand, it has no JavaScript, no trackers and no advertising, and it will not ask you to accept anything.
What it does have is a rule: every number on this site is traceable, and nothing is guessed. That turned out to be harder than it sounds, and this page explains why.
Where the game came from
Escape Velocity was written by Matt Burch and released by Ambrosia Software of Rochester, New York on 5 May 1996. It was Macintosh-only shareware, 68k and PowerPC, and it arrived with something almost nothing else had at the time: an editor, so players could build their own galaxies. The plug-in scene that grew out of that kept the game alive for years.
Two sequels followed — EV Override in 1998 and EV Nova in 2002 — and the series ended there. Ambrosia itself wound down over the following decade.
This sits here rather than under the setting, because it is about the real world: who wrote the game and when. The universe it describes is on the missions page, where the factions are, told through what each one asks of you.
The three sources
| Source | What it gives us |
|---|---|
| The game's resource fork | A dump of Escape Velocity's own data files: 27 ships, 108 systems with their real map coordinates, 107 stellar objects, 53 outfits, 25 weapons, 116 missions, 220 named captains, and the descriptive text for all of it. This is the primary source for everything. |
| The official Ambrosia site | escape-velocity.com, recovered from the Internet Archive. Its strategy guides give the stats in the scale the game actually displays, the prose descriptions, the factory loadouts and the original artwork. Restored here in full. |
| Amar Kishan's FAQ | The Ultimate Unofficial Escape Velocity Guide, v2.6, 2001. Written by someone playing the real game. Used as the tiebreaker when the other two disagree. |
The scale problem
The resource dump is in the scale of the Nova engine, not the scale the 1996 game puts on screen. Shields and armour are ten times too large; speed is double. Publishing it raw would have given every ship on this site the wrong numbers — which is exactly what has happened to several EV pages elsewhere on the web.
The conversion was worked out by comparing the dump against Ambrosia's own ship pages: shields and armour divided by ten, speed by two, acceleration by four, turn rate multiplied by three. The Kestrel's 1,300 becomes 130u; the Alien Cruiser's 15,000 becomes 1,500u.
The build refuses to publish numbers it cannot justify
Every time the site is generated, the published values are checked field by field against the 75 entries recovered from Ambrosia's own guides — 25 ships, 24 outfits and 26 weapons, across 16 fields. If any value disagrees and the disagreement is not already documented below, the build fails and nothing is published. That is the whole quality mechanism, and it is why the list of conflicts on this page is exhaustive rather than illustrative.
Every place the sources disagreed
16 conflicts, all of them resolved in the open. None of these are cases where we preferred a rounder number; each one has a reason.
Ambrosia's guide was wrong (5)
The 1998 strategy guides contain typing errors. Where the game's own data and Kishan's FAQ agree against the guide, the guide loses. The mistakes are preserved untouched in the archive.
- Shuttlecraft
- The 1998 guide says 435 AU/h and 30u of shielding. The dump says 275 and 18, and AKishan's FAQ confirms 275 and 18. The guide has an error here: we publish the dump with no footnote.
- Confederate Cruiser
- The guide gives 0.63 u/sec of recharge; the formula over ShieldRegen=222 gives 0.666, so 0.67. The same formula validates twenty other ships, so 0.63 is a typing slip (0.66 -> 0.63). We publish the dump.
- Density Scanner
- The guide says 10,000 cr; the dump says 8,000 and AKishan's FAQ also says 8,000. Two against one: the guide is wrong.
- Mass Expansion
- The guide says 15,000 cr; the dump says 50,000 and AKishan also says 50,000. A guide error.
- Javelin Rocket
- Three different figures: dump 175, AKishan 160, guide 50. AKishan's 160 is 175 with the discount visible across all of his prices — he records the 10,000 cr Shuttlecraft at 9,400 and the 80,000 cr Scoutship at 75,200 — so those are prices observed on screen, not base prices. Nobody backs the guide's 50. We publish the dump's base price.
The game data was wrong (2)
The dump is not infallible either. These values are published from another source.
- Rebel Cruiser — cargo = 60
- The dump says 600, but Ambrosia's guide and AKishan's FAQ both say 60. Two against one — and 600 tons in a warship makes no sense next to its 120 tons of weapon space. (source: guide+akishan)
- Alien Cruiser — charge = 1.88
- The dump's ShieldRegen field is corrupt (-125, impossible). The guide gives 1.88 u/sec, which is exactly what the formula produces with ShieldRegen=625. Every other ship validates the formula, so the broken figure is the dump's. (source: guide)
Still unresolved (9)
No third source settles these. We publish the game's own figure and record the alternative, which also appears as a footnote on the entry itself.
- _readme — 0: we publish —, the says —
- _readme — 1: we publish —, the says —
- Bulk Freighter — cost: we publish 120,000, the guide says 1,200,000
- The Bulk Freighter cannot be bought at all (tech 9999), so its price is decorative. AKishan does not list it and there is no tie-breaker.
- Luxury Liner — space: we publish 30, the guide says 60
- Not a purchasable ship; AKishan does not list it.
- Luxury Liner — cargo: we publish 20, the guide says 30
- Not a purchasable ship; AKishan does not list it.
- Executive Transport — accel: we publish 155, the guide says 150
- 620/4 = 155 exactly. The guide either rounds or is off by 5; the difference is negligible.
- Cargo Pod — max: we publish 2, the guide says 1
- The dump allows two to be installed; the guide says one. AKishan does not mention a limit.
- Fusion Beam — reload: we publish 3, the guide says 2
- A continuous beam does not 'reload' the way a cannon does, so the field does not mean the same thing in each source. A difference with no practical consequence.
- Heavy Fusion Beam — reload: we publish 3, the guide says 2
- Same as the Fusion Beam: the reload field of a continuous beam is not comparable across sources.
Documented by Ambrosia, absent from the game data (2)
- Forklift
- An Ambrosia joke ('This is no ordinary forklift!'), with 1250/1250 damage. It does not exist as a wëap resource in the dump.
- Seeker Drone
- The ammunition for the alien Seeker Drone Launcher. The dump has the launcher (wëap «Seeker Drones») but no separate ammunition outfit, because you cannot buy it.
What we would not claim
- Where some missions are offered. The data encodes "any world belonging to government X" as a number, and the dump and Ambrosia's guide disagree about which government that number means. Rather than pick one, mission entries show the location only when the data names an actual planet.
- Two flags on every world. Five of the seven service flags on a stellar object were confirmed against worlds whose services are independently known. Two were not, so they are not displayed anywhere.
- Exact commodity prices. The data records only whether a world prices a good low, medium or high — so that is all the trade section claims.
- Damage per second. Ours, not Ambrosia's, and labelled as such on the arsenal page.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, it is wrong for a documented reason, which means it can be fixed. The reasoning behind every judgement call is written down in the project's source rather than kept in someone's head.