Fleets

A Fleet is a grouping of spaceships. Fleets cannot be composed of multiple ships: a Corvette fleet will only be composed of Corvettes, an Industrial fleet will only be composed of Industrial ships, and so on.

Fleet Operations
A fleet can perform multiple actions. All fleets can deployed to another friendly station, can assault or raid enemy stations, and may be sent on missions or additional operations depending on the fleet type.

Deploy
A fleet can be deployed to any station owned by the player, or stations of other players if their permissions allow it. Fleets are commonly deployed to:
 * Defend the destination station.
 * Use the destination station as a staging point for combat operations.
 * Use the destination station as a staging point for other operations.

When it reaches the destination station:
 * The fleet uses that stations Tactics for combat operations.
 * If both station and fleet are owned by the same player, then any buildings that buff Operating Fleets take effect.
 * If the station's Operating Fleet limited is exceeded, additional labor will be required to support the fleet. If the available labor is insufficient, then the fleet will be out of supply and combat penalties apply.

Raid and Assault
These combat fleet operations can only target enemy stations. More detailed information can be found in the Combat page.

Raid is a combat operation whose primary purpose is to steal resources from a station, and will also attack the enemy garrison and fleets in the process. The (successful) raiding party will return with as many resources as it can, depending on its cargo space and how many resources the raided base had. Hidden resources cannot be raided unless the raiding fleet has a Plunder percentage.

Assault is a combat operation that can include bombing runs on the enemy station. Assault ops can damage or even destroy stations.

Events
Additional information on events and ship type specific operations are in the Events page, and in ship-specific pages[Links required].

Fleet Escorts
When fleets are sent on a mission, all other fleets sent with the main fleet are said to be fleet escorts, or simply escorts. These escorts can contribute to the mission requirements if they have the statistics for it.

Fleet Size
Fleets vary in size, depending on the ship type. The more ships are assigned to a fleet, the more labor it will cost in upkeep.

A Fleet may have 0 ships assigned to it, and essentially be a 'ghost fleet'. An empty fleet does not have a labor upkeep, but also cannot be sent on any fleet op, and cannot contribute to base or outpost defence.

Operating Fleets Limit
Every station has a limit to how many fleets may be docked in it, regardless of whether the station is supplying the fleets or not, before it succumbs to an overcrowding penalty.