Basic Flight is the standardized “training wheels” flight feat—brief, once‑per‑minute bursts using your ancestry’s listed flight speed, with a hard requirement to land by the end of the move or you fall.
Mechanics
Basic Flight doesn’t make you an ace flyer—it makes you the person who can cross gaps other people measure in broken bones. In Starfall’s shattered decks and Rift‑torn skylines, that one action of controlled air time is often the difference between “we made it” and “we’re stories now.”
In Starfall, Basic Flight is what you get when evolution, cybernetics, or half‑finished gene‑mods gave you almost enough lift to cheat gravity—but not enough to live up there full‑time. Eyprid with half‑formed photon wings, or Androids with emergency grav‑vanes can all perform that signature “burst and drop” motion: hop a chasm, vault a barricade, or skim over a Rift‑scar, then slam back to plating before their muscles, mana coils, or micro‑thrusters burn out.
On crowded stations and in Inner Sphere arcologies, that burst flight is as much etiquette as physics. Signs warn “NO BASIC FLIGHT IN PRIMARY CONCOURSE,” because one overeager Skittermander with fresh wings can turn a commute into a zero‑G pileup. Out on the Frontier, though, crews don’t complain—any edge that lets you cross a broken gantry or dodge a Rift‑spawn pounce is worth its weight in Yoms.
Vertical Access: Basic Flight lets you hit second‑story maintenance hatches, high catwalks, or broken ladder segments without needing full Climbing Gear—especially useful in derelicts and Rift‑damaged facilities.
Low‑G Maneuvers: In partial gravity or drifting habitats, a single controlled burst stabilizes you against spin, letting you dock with airlocks or grab handholds others overshoot.
Showmanship & Culture: Eyprid youth competitions, Crimson Concord aerial dance battles, or Gargo “leap drills” all revolve around how precisely you can spend that one action of flight and still stick the landing.
Basic Flight subtly reshapes infrastructure. Stations frequented by flight‑capable ancestries add higher railings, mesh ceilings over dangerous drops, and “wing lanes” in wide transit shafts. Employers in Outer Sphere salvage and hull‑repair crews pay extra for workers with Flight Specialist entries, because even burst‑only flight slashes harness time and rescue risk.
On the flip side, security planners hate it. Checkpoints, prison blocks, and riot‑control formations must assume that some bodies in the crowd can go over the line once a minute, turning shields and barricades from walls into speed bumps. This has fueled a black market in cheap, hacked‑together wing rigs and micro‑grav packs sold to protests and gangs who want “just enough” air time to matter.