Starman's arrival has put an end to the near apocalyptic wars on the Homeworld. We’re moving out into the system and beginning to exploit the resources there. Jump drives are still big and complex, requiring monstrous ships around them. The corporations battle among themselves to establish a dominant presence in space. Large jump-capable corporate transports supply smaller mining and fighter fleets scattered throughout the system. The world of Planetary Raiders is still years in the future.

Out in the Hast asteroid belt, 3 corporations are slugging it out: Osis Consolidated Industries, the commercial giant of the Homeworld space station, Vaught Systems Corporation, one of the most innovative technology consortia, and Hast Mining Group, the pioneer in working the hot asteroids sea.

Vaught Systems and OCI had been enemies since the trade wars. Once OCI discovered VSC had supplied OCI's main competitors with supposedly exclusively-built-for-OCI advanced fighters, OCI cancelled all contracts and began using what it had learned to build its own versions of the VSC fighters. VSC maintains there were never exclusive rights for the fighters and OCI has no right to produce ships using VSC technology.

Meanwhile, Hast Mining Group had been making major purchases of fighters from both Osis Consolidated and Vaught Systems in preparation for its own upcoming struggle with the BeltCo mining concern, which is moving into the Hast belt in force, lured by the recent rich Iridium strikes. When VSC demands HMG stop buying the "knockoff" fighters of its competitor, HMG tells them where they can get off, and the technology giant decides to "acquire" the Hast Mining Group using the traditional "hostile" takeover. OCI reacts to the move by mounting its own takeover bid. OCI and VSC move into the Hast Belt and HMG decides that the BeltCo mining conglomerate with its associated weapons manufacturing contacts would make a better friend after all. A new partnership of both of the mining companies makes HMG almost as huge as either one of the weapons giants and control of the Hast asteroid belt becomes a three-way struggle.

The weapons of the various corporations were widely produced during all this, and became available to all sides, leading to the somewhat ironic circumstance where a Vaught or Osis or Belt design may end up fighting its twin in the hands of a rival corporation. Raider Wars models 8 of the most effective designs from the corporations involved, and any may be flown by any side in the conflict.

You enter this struggle as a pilot for one of the 3 corporations. Your mission: To destroy the escorts and capture the carriers of the enemy fleets in the Hast asteroid belt for your corporation. These carriers control access to the belt and to the wealth in it.