Garrisons hold reserve squads which can be deployed defensively.

The following ship classes may be used in garrisons:

• Fighters
• Gunboats

Garrison capabilities:

• Garrison Slot Size: The total amount of ships that can be kept in the garrison reserve, active squads, and counted in slots.
• Active Squads: The amount of squads that can be fielded at any one time from the garrison.
• Loiter Time: The amount of time in hours that a squad can remain active once launched.
• Restock Time: The amount of time in hours once a squad returns before its ships can be launched again.

Ships docked within the garrison can be added to the garrison reserve by the owner or commander of the station, or a character with "Assign Stations" privileges in the faction which owns the station. The character must be owner, commander or pilot of the ship being added. The character must be present in the station command room to add ships to the garrison reserve.

Ships can be removed from the garrison by the owner, commander or operator of the station when present at the station command room.

Each garrison type has a maximum size for the garrison reserve. This size is counted as:

A garrison squad can be launched from ships within the garrison reserve. Squads formed have a maximum slot size of 12 (like regular ship squadrons). Garrison squads are controlled by the character that launched them.

Garrison squads have the following capabilities:

• Travel within sublight
• Attack (following the Space Combat Rules)
• Scan

Notably, garrison squads cannot:

• Dock within any other entity (other than the base launched from)
• Jump to hyperspace
• Perform travel other than sublight (such as hyperspace or descending)

A character may launch a squad from a garrison if they are owner or commander of the garrison, or they have the faction privilege Launch Garrison Squad.

A character does not need to be present at the garrison to launch a squad.

Characters can:

• Control a maximum of 4 garrison squads concurrently
• There is a maximum limit of 2 squads controlled per system per individual character

There are some situations where launching is prohibited. These situations will need to be resolved before new squads can be launched:

• If the garrison is over weight or volume capacity.
• If the garrison is over the garrison reserve slot size.

Each garrison squad has a maximum loiter time, this is the amount of time the squad can remain controllable after being launched. When this time expires, the squad is automatically sent back to base. The squad will travel to base, dock, and re-add themselves to the garrison reserve.

While returning to base, the controller cannot issue orders to the squad. Squad scanners are visible while returning to base.

When the squad returns to base, a restock timer is applied. During this time ships from the squad cannot be relaunched. If the squad returns to base within 20 mins of initial launch, then the restock timer is not applied.

Additionally, any character with launch permissions can order any launched squad to return to base.

The following skills are used for calculations involving garrison squads, based on the squad controllers skill levels:

The following table shows the result of this calculation:

Additionally, each point in space command increases the loiter time by 5%, and decreases the rearm time by 5%.