Radio & Comms

There is no telecomms on Voidcrew. No relay to build, no stack to repair, no z-level to be on. Radio just works, everywhere, forever. What changed instead is who hears you: every ordinary channel is scoped to a single ship, so your crew chatter reaches your crew and nobody else. The one channel everyone in the galaxy shares is Wideband.

Your ship's channel

Press ; before a message to talk on your headset's main channel. On a station that would be the common channel; here it is your ship. Messages are tagged with the ship's name so you can tell at a glance which hull you are hearing.

Department channels work the same way and are scoped the same way. Your engineering channel reaches the engineers on your ship, not the engineers on someone else's.

Sticky binding

Your headset binds to a ship, and that binding follows you off it. It is set when you spawn in, or the first time you use a radio while physically aboard a ship. Once bound it stays bound, walking onto a planet, into a ruin, or onto someone else's deck does not change it.

This means:

• An away team on a planet still talks to the crew back on the ship.
• A boarding party keeps its own crew channel while standing inside the enemy hull, and can also overhear the local traffic of the ship it is standing in.
• A stolen headset stays bound to its old ship. Take one off a body and you are listening to their crew, not yours, until it is re-tuned.

To re-tune a radio, use a multitool on it while aboard the ship you want it bound to. It rebinds to whatever hull it is currently sitting in.

Wideband

Wideband is the galaxy-wide hailing channel. Every headset carries it, no research or equipment is needed, and it reaches every radio in the galaxy regardless of distance or z-level.

Speak on it by prefixing your message with :w or .w.

Use it for the things that need to leave your hull: hailing a ship you can see, arranging a trade or a meeting, calling for help, warning other crews about something dangerous, or negotiating instead of shooting. It is also where a number of galaxy-wide events announce themselves, so expect traffic you did not ask for.

Remember that a Wideband transmission tells everyone that you exist and that you are talking. It says nothing about where you are, but the people who want to find you are listening too.

A few other frequencies are also unscoped and reach the whole galaxy rather than one ship, including the syndicate channel. If you are carrying a headset that has one, assume the wrong people can hear it.

Ship-to-ship hails from the helm

The helm console's Comms tab sends a short transmission from the ship itself. It reaches every vessel within your four-tile view ring (the same distance you can see) and lands on their helm as a logged message with a pulsing marker at your position.

The trade-off is deliberate: hailing gives you away. A transmission identifies your ship on the receiver's chart exactly as if they had scanned you, so an anonymous blip that says hello stops being anonymous. Staying quiet is a valid tactic, and a pirate lurking on your tile has a reason not to greet you. See Piloting Your Ship.

Holopad calls

Holopads dial by site, not by area. Open one and the list shows:

• Rooms on your own ship, by area, like a station intercom.
• Every other ship in the galaxy, as one entry per ship: calling it rings every pad on that ship at once.
• Every trader outpost and player-founded outpost, the same way.
• Unregistered pads in ruins and wrecks, but only ones sharing your physical location.

Calls are allowed galaxy-wide, matching Wideband. Answering projects the caller into the room as a hologram that can walk around, look, and talk.

Two rules apply to calls between different ships:

• Nobody can force their way onto your pad. Cross-ship calls always ring and always have to be answered. Keycard authorisation cannot auto-connect a call from another vessel.
• Moving cuts the call. If either ship docks, undocks or jumps mid-call, the link drops and both pads announce that the carrier was lost. Calls within one ship are unaffected: both ends move together.

The ringing pad also announces where the call is coming from, so you know which ship or outpost is on the line before you pick up.

Pirate hails

Hostile ships hail before they shoot. When one does, every holopad on your ship rings and the helm posts a priority alert.

Answer it from the holopad interface: the incoming hail appears in the pad's call list alongside ordinary holocalls, labelled as a hostile vessel. Answering opens a negotiation with the pirate captain's hologram. You can pay them off, talk your way out, or stall.

You have twenty seconds to answer, with a reminder at the halfway mark. Ignore it and they open fire. Lock weapons on them or shoot first, and the hail ends immediately and they engage. See Ship Combat.

When comms go down

Radios can be knocked out. An EMP silences everything it touches, radio jammers work the way they do on a station, and a communications blackout event kills every radio, intercom and holopad aboard one ship for about twenty seconds, including Wideband. Nothing needs repairing afterwards; the radios come back on their own.

The warning you get is the blackout announcing itself over the very radios it is about, degrading into static mid-sentence. If a message cuts out like that, you have a few seconds before the ship goes quiet.