CANNONEER

Everything below is on your screen and nobody else's. If you do not say it out loud, it did not happen.

• CONTROL

  ONE giant FIRE button that fills the bottom of the screen in portrait (or the right half in landscape/desktop). It is the only control on the console — there is nothing else to press.

• CONTROL

  The FIRE button's sub-label, which always spells out why you can't shoot right now: "no phaser bank — waiting for a slot", "weapons offline — ask Engineering", "overheated — venting", "charging…", "waiting for Tactical to lock a target", "too far — 940u / 720u", or "→ 22 Tango" when you're clear to fire.

• CONTROL

  LOCKED TARGET panel: the contact's designator (a NATO-style callsign like "22 Tango"), its distance in world units, and whether that's inside the 720u beam range (grey "in range" vs amber "too far").

• CONTROL

  PHASER BANK panel: a status lamp (READY / CHARGING / OVERHEATED / OFFLINE / NO BANK), a CHARGE bar (0 to 1) and a HEAT bar (0 to 100).

• CONTROL

  Station header showing which bank you actually hold — "Phaser A", "Phaser B", etc. — plus a running "hits ×N" tally on the right.

• CONTROL

  Hit feedback: pressing FIRE plays a beam sound; when the beam lands you get a big green "✦ HIT!" for 700 ms, a reward chirp, and the streak ticks up.

• CONTROL

  The run strip along the top, shared by every station: sector number, encounter name and objective, banked salvage, jump-drive charge %, and a border that turns amber/red with the alert level. Unlike Tactical, Helm, Science and Comms, you have NO "◱ SCREEN" button — a Cannoneer can't push anything to the TV.

The numbers here come straight out of the shipping build.

• MECHANIC

  You never miss, and you never aim

  There is no aiming, no lead, and no hit roll on your shot. The server applies balance.combat.weaponDamage = 24 damage straight into the target's shield, and the overflow into its hull. Enemy fire against you rolls a hit chance and can be dodged; your phaser cannot. Maximum beam range is 720 world units (balance.combat.maxWeaponRange) — outside it the shot is simply refused.

• MECHANIC

  Your bank is delegated to you live, by the server

  Each phaser carries a gunnerSeatId. The first connected Cannoneer takes the LAST bank in the list, the second takes the one before it, and so on, so Tactical keeps the front banks. This is re-evaluated every tick: if you disconnect, your bank hands itself straight back to Tactical, and if you rejoin you take one back. Tactical's console shows your bank tagged "⇢ CANNONEER" with no FIRE button of their own — they can watch your charge and heat but cannot pull your trigger, and you cannot pull theirs (the server rejects both).

• MECHANIC

  How many banks exist depends on how many Cannoneers boarded

  At launch the ship fits max(class beam count, number of connected Cannoneer seats) phasers. Class beams are: WREN 1, SPARROW 1, TALON 1, VANGUARD 2, SOVEREIGN 2, COLOSSUS 3. So a third Cannoneer on a SOVEREIGN materializes a third bank — extra kids genuinely make the ship stronger. The flip side: on a 1-beam hull the ship's only phaser transfers to you and the pilot keeps none, and if Cannoneers equal or outnumber banks, Tactical has no beam at all.

• MECHANIC

  Charge and heat

  A bank charges from 0 to 1 in 2.4 seconds at full weapons power with a cold emitter (balance.combat.chargeTimeSec), and that rate is multiplied directly by the WEAPONS power ratio Engineering allocates and by the WEAPONS system's health. Every shot adds 30 heat, which bleeds off at 14/second; heat also slows charging by up to 60% at heat 100, so your real cycle is a little longer than 2.4 s while the emitter is still hot. Engineering's vent cycle dumps 20 heat/second out of your bank as a side effect of flushing the reactor.

• MECHANIC

  Tactical's sub-target rides on your shot

  If Tactical has selected a revealed, still-online subsystem on the locked ship (engines, shield generator, weapons, jump drive), your 24 damage goes into THAT subsystem instead of the hull. Killing one takes the enemy function offline and ruptures 12 points of hull as a bonus. This is powerful for disabling a runner, but note that while a sub-target is set your shots are not reducing the hull — you are not shortening the fight, you are changing what the enemy can do.

• MECHANIC

  Every shot costs the reactor

  Firing adds 6 heat to the ship's reactor core, on top of the 30 to your own emitter. The core only sheds 2/second passively, so sustained fire from two or more banks heats the ship faster than it cools; past 85 the reactor starts taking damage, and Engineering has to run a 5-second vent that halves reactor output while it runs. Overclock doubles your damage to 48 per shot but adds another 6/second of core heat on its own.

• MECHANIC

  Lockouts and outages

  If the WEAPONS system is forced offline — an event outage, or Engineering shedding the bus — FIRE is refused even if your bank is fully charged. The charge is held, not lost, and firing resumes the instant the bus is restored; your console shows "○ OFFLINE" and "weapons offline — ask Engineering". Clearing it is Engineering's conduit-reroute minigame (or it decays on its own after 90 seconds).

• MECHANIC

  Targeting and turrets are not yours

  The server rejects a selectTarget intent from a Cannoneer seat — target selection and sub-targeting belong exclusively to Tactical. It also rejects fireTurret from everyone: the ship's gun turrets are now fully automatic point defense that shoot down hostile missiles and rockets by themselves. Your one and only intent is fireWeapon on your own bank.

• MISTAKE

  Saving the shot for a "better moment". There is no charge-up, no critical hit and no ammo — a bank held at READY is pure waste while the enemy shield knits itself back at 3/second.

• MISTAKE

  Keeping the trigger down after the enemy strikes its colors. A surrendered ship is already counted as a kill and already paid its 25 salvage bounty; destroying it adrift pays nothing extra and costs 15 reputation with BOTH pirate factions, which makes future pirates bolder and less willing to surrender to you.

• MISTAKE

  Firing at whatever is locked without reading the designator. Tactical can lock a FRIENDLY — the distress freighter or an evacuation transport — and your beam does not care. Killing one costs you the payout rather than the run: a dead KESTREL forfeits the 55-salvage escort bonus and a dead colony transport costs a colony saved — both logged as "we were too slow".

• MISTAKE

  Going quiet when FIRE turns grey. Your bank's state is invisible to the crew except as a small charge/heat bar on Tactical's panel; the sub-label already names the officer who can fix it, so read it out instead of tapping a dead button.

• MISTAKE

  Treating the torpedo-lock klaxon as your problem. Your seat hears that alarm, but you cannot shoot torpedoes down — torpedoes are countered by Tactical's noisemakers and Helm's evasion, and missiles/rockets are handled automatically by the turrets. Stay on the lock.

The Cannoneer duty is never merged into anyone else's chair. It exists as up to four optional add-on seats (Cannoneer — Phaser I through IV) available on every hull from the 1-crew WREN to the 6-crew COLOSSUS, always with GUNNER as its only duty and always rendering this same one-button console, so a young crew member can join any ship at any crew size. What changes with hull size is who loses a gun: on the 1-beam hulls (WREN, SPARROW, TALON) the ship's single phaser transfers to the first Cannoneer, so the solo Shipmaster or Pilot-Gunner keeps missiles, rockets, torpedoes and the railgun but no beam. On 2- and 3-beam hulls the Cannoneers take banks from the back while Tactical keeps the front ones, and any Cannoneer beyond the class beam count causes a spare bank to be built at launch. A Cannoneer who claims a seat after launch may find no bank free — the console then reads "no phaser bank — waiting for a slot" until someone drops.