Ship Systems

Every purchasable hull launches with the same core set of machines: something to fly it, something to earn with, something to spend with, and something to build with. This page is a map of what you will find aboard and which page explains it properly. Anything not mentioned here works the way it does on /tg/station.

Bridge

The helm control console is the ship. It flies, scans, charts, docks and undocks. All of it is covered in Piloting Your Ship. Larger hulls also carry wall-mounted ship viewscreens, which mirror the helm display for anyone who isn't at the bridge but give no controls.

The cryogenic oversight console manages your crew roster: which job slots are open, and who is asleep in the freezers. The cryopods themselves are where players joining your ship mid-round appear, and where crew who log out end up instead of lying on the deck. A ship with no cryopod cannot be joined at all.

Earning and spending

The cargo console pays out of the bank machine aboard your own ship and links itself to it automatically. If you build a second bank machine and want the console pointed at that one instead, save it to a multitool buffer and use the multitool on the console.

Both the bank and the cargo console are explained properly in Money & Trade. Note that your cargo shuttle has to be sent away before the helm will let you undock.

Fabrication and research

Almost every ship has an autolathe somewhere aboard (on modular hulls it arrives with one of the modules) and that single machine is what makes research reachable on any ship. Print the Research & Development Kit from it (20 sheets of iron and 40 of glass) and the box contains the boards for the whole suite:

• R&D console
• Protolathe
• Destructive analyzer
• Circuit imprinter
• Ship R&D server, plus the source code disk that goes in it

The imprinter is the important one: machine boards can only be printed there, never on a protolathe. A ship without one is stuck with whatever machines it launched with, and a ship with one can eventually build anything.

The server holds your ship's techweb, and the source disk is where it actually lives. Slot the disk into the server and link consoles and machines to it with a multitool. What your crew can build is gated by how far up the tech tree you have climbed, not by which hull you bought.

Your ship starts with no research points and no income. Everything is earned. How to earn it, and what the tree is worth spending on, is all on one page: see Research.

Several ship systems read the techweb directly rather than unlocking a printable object: the radar tiers behind your sensor range, and the research gating on transporters, both work this way.

Power

Ship power is ordinary /tg/station power with a ship-sized budget. Each area has its own APC, and hulls launch with charged SMES units feeding them.

Generation is usually a portable generator burning plasma sheets. A few hulls carry solar panels instead or as well. Ion thrusters draw straight off the same grid, so a ship flying on ion drives is spending its battery to move, watch the SMES charge, not a fuel tank.

Engines and their heaters are covered in Piloting Your Ship, and the renewable fuel machines (the nebula ram scoop and the plasma sublimator) in Gas & Fuel.

Air and gravity

Atmospherics aboard a ship are standard: distro and scrubber loops, vents, air alarms, fire alarms, canisters and a pipe dispenser. Two things differ from a station.

First, hull breaches are routine. Ship combat, meteors and hard landings all open your deck to space, so knowing how to patch a wall and re-pressurise a room is a core skill rather than an emergency one.

Second, gravity comes from the deck plating itself. There is no gravity generator aboard to find or repair. If gravity fails it is because something switched it off ship-wide, and it comes back on its own.

Comms and cameras

Ships carry one or more holopads, which do double duty: they place calls to other ships and outposts, and they are where incoming pirate hails ring. See Radio & Comms.

Security cameras and their consoles are bound to your own ship's network. A console aboard your ship sees your ship's cameras and nothing else, and cameras you build mid-round join the same network automatically.

Defence

Weapons are not standard equipment. Most hulls launch unarmed and you buy or build up from there. What you will eventually bolt on:

• Shield generators, which soak damage before the hull does and draw power to regenerate.
• Laser turrets and missile launchers, aimed from a ship combat console.
• An interdictor, which pins another ship in place so it cannot undock or run.
• An electronic warfare suite, which hacks a locked ship's systems instead of firing on it. See Ship Hacking.

All of it is covered in Ship Combat.

Changing the ship itself

Hull layout is not fixed. Modular hulls are bought with slots you fill with modules, and a ship construction console drives a drone that can rebuild, extend and shrink the hull itself. See Ship Upgrades.