Alignment describes your character, and helps others determine how you act towards fellow merchants in the universe. In this universe, good (alignment of 0 and above) and evil (sub-zero alignment) traders exist.

Alignment rises by killing evil merchants, you get about 1/4 of the bad guy's alignment. You can do this at any time. To become evil however, you have to kill newbie merchants or good aligned people you are not at war with. Note that killing a good aligned merchant who is at war with you, does not affect alignment.

Alignment affects two things:

• Imperial Protection - with the correct alignment and firepower of your vessel, you can be protected by the beacon's invulnerability field. The attack ratings are as follows:
  

  Alignment	Attack rating allowed for protection
  300 or above 150 to 299 -150 to 150 -299 to -150 -300 or below	6 5 4 1 no protection

• Ship prices - good aligned merchants get ship discounts, around 0,1% for every point of positive alignment; evil merchants however need to pay more for their ships, also about 0,1% for every point of negative alignment.