COMMS

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

• CONTROL

  CHANNEL BANK + HAIL button — one row per ship, hulk or beacon on the plot (enemies, friendlies and derelicts only; rocks and anomalies aren't hailable). There is no range limit; the little strength bar just reads weaker the farther away they are.

• CONTROL

  RESPONSE BUTTONS on an open hail, plus ✕ END TRANSMISSION. The server writes the options; you press them. Put the COMMS channel on the TV and the whole room sees the other captain full-screen — avatar, name, faction, the transmission typing out at 38 characters a second, the response timer and the option labels — but the buttons stay yours alone.

• CONTROL

  CONDITION lamps — GREEN / YELLOW / RED. This is the ship's posture and only you (and the story) can set it.

• CONTROL

  COUNTER-SIGNAL jammer — a canvas you drag with your finger/mouse to slide your jamming window across the radio band and hold it on the enemy's hopping carrier.

• CONTROL

  TUNE / DROP CHANNEL on "passive signals" — sources that transmit but never answer (anomalies, haunted hulks). You get a live waveform; the audio plays on the TV, not your phone.

• CONTROL

  SCREEN ROUTER — you are the TV operator. You can put the tactical map, the scan card, the comms channel or Helm's parascope on the big screen; every other officer can only push their own channel.

• CONTROL

  PROBE RADAR + ◉ PING (only while Science is running a probe mission) — a rotating sweep and a manual radar burst, plus a ⧉ screen button to put the sweep on the TV.

• CONTROL

  READ-ONLY panels you relay from: the SIGINT intercept feed, the DIPLOMATIC LEDGER, the SHIP STATUS readout (hull / power / core heat / seven systems / shield average / threat count), the ENEMY SIGNALS board, the SIGNAL SPECTRUM strip and the SYSTEM LOG.

The numbers here come straight out of the shipping build.

• MECHANIC

  The hail — one channel at a time, silence is an answer

  Their words type onto your screen at 38 characters per second and the response buttons stay hidden until the text finishes; then a countdown runs ("silence is an answer"). A pirate tribute demand gives you 120 seconds, an incoming mayday 100, a Vel'Shaar envoy 180, and a Guild merchant lingers 300 before she warps out. Letting the clock run fires that node's default: a pirate takes silence as a refusal and attacks. Hanging up on a live tribute demand is also a refusal and starts the fight immediately.

• MECHANIC

  The counter-signal duel (jamming reinforcements)

  Roughly 45 seconds into a sector — then about every 180 seconds ±25% — the farthest eligible hostile opens a wide-band uplink for reinforcements. The window lasts 22 seconds. Their carrier jumps to a new frequency about every 2 seconds; you drag your jammer window onto it, and while you're inside a tolerance of 0.06 of the band your lock charges, outside it decays. The panel's BLOCKED number is your time-averaged lock across the whole window, and when it closes the odds are literally P(reinforcements) = 1 − blocked: hold 80% and only 20% of calls get through. A wave is 1 ship, +1 for every 3 sectors survived, capped at 3. Extra spikes on the spectrum are decoys and are never scored — only the brightest peak counts.

• MECHANIC

  Jammer reach depends on Engineering

  The counter-signal only bites inside 7000 world units multiplied by the SENSORS power ratio (power granted ÷ power demanded, times sensor health; zero if sensors are offline). A fully-fed dish covers the whole playable area; a starved one can't touch a caller hanging back at the edge, and the board prints "⚠ SIGNAL OUT OF RANGE — caller beyond jammer reach — feed the SENSORS to extend it" instead of letting you chase air. Killing the caller, or driving it to flee or surrender, cuts the uplink dead with no roll at all.

• MECHANIC

  SIGINT — ears on the void

  The server leaks real events onto a feed only comms consoles render: at most 4 rows live, each for 24 seconds, and the TV never shows them. Triggers are a coded burst about 15 seconds BEFORE an uplink opens (naming the ship winding up to dial), a runner's engine harmonics the moment she starts spooling an escape jump, a rail-gun capacitor whine when an artillery ship's rail is within 3 seconds of firing and in range, garbled husk chatter when the Unmaking front is high, and colony convoy pleas every 35 seconds during an evacuation.

• MECHANIC

  The diplomatic ledger — four factions, −100 to +100

  Crimson Corsairs, Ashfall Syndicate, Free Haulers Guild and The Vel'Shaar. The ledger bands are hostile (≤ −60), wary (≤ −20), neutral (< 20), respected (< 60) and feared (60+); the positive end isn't friendship, it's fear. Paying tribute costs 8 corsair points AND makes them bolder — both the chance of a future demand and the size of the tribute scale by 1% for every point you sit below zero (base tribute is 30 + 8 × sector). Refusing a demand and then clearing the fight pays +5; a bluff that worked pays +12. Destroying a ship that has already struck its colors costs 15 points with BOTH pirate factions and makes fewer captains offer to surrender to you later. Guild standing rises +2 per honest purchase (capped at 6 per meeting), +3 for selling survey data, +8 for surviving a q-ship trap, +10 for a colony convoy that got away.

• MECHANIC

  Standing unlocks better sentences

  At corsair standing ≥ 40 the tribute demand grows an extra option — "RUN OUR KEEL SIGNATURE. THEN DECIDE." — which scatters them 85% of the time, versus 50% for the "this is a Vanguard warship" bluff, and pays the same reward (half the encounter's normal payout). At Vel'Shaar standing ≥ 20 the kin-speech option appears on first contact without waiting for Science's scan. At Guild standing ≥ 25 the merchant gives you family rates (25% off) unasked.

• MECHANIC

  Surrenders, real and fake

  Corsairs, reavers and the Basilisk artillery lance all yield when hailed while broken; fighters, drones, the envoy, the hunter and bosses never answer. Only corsairs and reavers ever hail YOU unprompted, once, the first time hull drops under 60% of maximum, at a 40% base chance. You can also force the conversation: hailing a pirate below 25% hull — or below 60% with a subsystem destroyed — opens the yield script instead of mockery. Accepting pays 25 salvage, counts as a kill, and leaves them adrift with weapons and engines dead. But 15% of yields from a ship still above 25% hull are fakes that spring an 18-damage point-blank strike when you accept; below 25% hull the fake roll can't happen. Choosing NO QUARTER means that ship never flees, never talks again, and fights to the last.

• MECHANIC

  Alert condition and the big screen

  The three lamps have no direct effect on the simulation — they are the crew's shared posture signal. Setting one recolors every terminal's border, changes the TV's alert badge, plays an alarm on every console when it goes up, and switches the music (green = calm, yellow = alert, red = combat, and red in a hunter sector = the boss track). The story overrides you: the server slams RED when a fight starts and drops to GREEN when the sky clears. On the screen router you and the TV host are the only ones who can put ANY channel up; putting the COMMS channel up shows the whole conversation full-screen, read-only — the buttons stay on your console.

• MISTAKE

  Staring only at the hail panel. SIGINT rows expire after 24 seconds and never appear on the TV or on anyone else's console — a rail-charge warning you didn't read out is a warning that never happened.

• MISTAKE

  Paying tribute because it feels like the safe option. It pays zero reward, costs 8 corsair standing, and directly inflates both how often you get shaken down and how much they ask for next time.

• MISTAKE

  Answering the ring instantly. The buttons don't even render until the transmission finishes typing, and the windows (100–300 seconds) exist so the couch can argue about it — pressing first is throwing away the one mechanic that's genuinely a group decision.

• MISTAKE

  Chasing the pretty spikes in the jamming duel. Decoy peaks are pure decoration; only the single brightest carrier is scored, and every second off it decays your lock faster than holding it builds it.

• MISTAKE

  Letting the gunners keep shooting a ship that struck its colors. That's −15 with both pirate factions at once, and it measurably reduces how many future captains will offer to surrender to you.

• MISTAKE

  Pinging the probe radar because the map looks dark. The ping is the loudest thing the probe can do and the creature hears it — it reveals AND attracts, on an 18-second cooldown.

A dedicated Comms chair only exists on the 5-crew cruiser (SOVEREIGN) and the 6+ dreadnought (COLOSSUS). Everywhere else the duty is merged: the 4-crew frigate and 3-crew corvette fold it into a "Science & Comms" seat, the 2-crew cutter into "Operations" (Engineering + Science + Comms), and the 1-crew WREN into the single Shipmaster chair. On every one of those merged consoles the manual jamming duel is gone — an auto-jammer module holds a flat 25% blocked for the whole window instead, meaning 75% of reinforcement calls get through no matter what you do (a human chasing the carrier by hand can approach 100%, which is exactly why the dedicated seat is worth a body). The signal spectrum strip and the enemy-signals board are also dropped. What survives the merge: the SIGINT feed, the full hail channel and dialogue tree, the condition lamps, the ship-status readout, the diplomatic ledger, the screen router, the system log, and the probe radar with its PING.