HELM

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

• CONTROL

  THROTTLE: a 0–100% slider with four preset buttons (STOP, 1/3, 2/3, FULL) and a naval readout ("ALL STOP" / "AHEAD 1/3" / "AHEAD 2/3" / "AHEAD FULL"), plus an ENGINES bar underneath showing how much of the thrust you ordered is actually being funded with power (it turns red and says "power-starved" when it isn't).

• CONTROL

  HEADING DIAL: drag to order a course. Above it a compass tape shows the actual bow (amber line, fixed at center), your ordered course (cyan diamond sliding along the tape), the shrinking gap between them with your hull's turn rate printed (">> 42° @ 55°/s >>"), and a green circle marking the direction you are really drifting.

• CONTROL

  VIEW toggle — MAP or PARASCOPE. MAP is a top-down follow camera with a dashed projected-course line, range rings every 250 units, a faint 900-unit torpedo-seeker ring, the dashed red radiation boundary and zoom buttons. PARASCOPE is a look-out-the-window view you can fly from: A/D or on-screen ◄ ► steer, W/S or ▲ ▼ ramp the throttle, drag to glance around (up to ±60° up/down), R or a chip to re-center, plus FREE-LOOK and (on phones) GYRO chips.

• CONTROL

  EVASIVE toggle ("harder to hit · louder") and ENGAGE JUMP, which only lights when the jump drive is charged to 100% and is not in a forced lockout from an intrusion or surge — the button then reads “drive locked out — reroute power” and Engineering has to run the conduit puzzle. Ordinary battle damage does not block the jump; it only slows the spool. Otherwise it shows the charge bar Engineering is filling.

• CONTROL

  RAIL slab: your railgun. Shows slug count (×2 to ×6 depending on hull) and a 6-second recharge bar. On the map it is press-to-arm then press-to-fire; in the parascope the slab arms it and you pull the trigger from the view (Space, a clean tap on the picture, or the round FIRE RAIL button).

• CONTROL

  ECM toggle ("scrambles homing") and FLARE button with its remaining charge count.

• CONTROL

  CHART: a slide-over star map of the whole run. Tap a system linked to the one you're in to lock it as your jump destination (tap again to release), see which systems are charted, which are unexplored frontiers with signals, and which are tagged "⚠ DEBRIS". It repeats the destination, jump charge and ENGAGE JUMP at the bottom.

• CONTROL

  Glance readouts over the map: speed, throttle %, bow heading vs ordered heading (amber = still turning, cyan = on course), distance to the nearest hazard (with a ⚠ mine label), hull %, and the mission clock. Two "⧉ on screen" buttons push your parascope view or your chart to the TV. A red pulsing banner + looping alarm warns of a collision course with a countdown; a second banner warns you are in the radiation zone.

The numbers here come straight out of the shipping build.

• MECHANIC

  You order a course; the ship answers slowly

  The dial does not turn the ship — it sets an ordered heading, and the bow swings toward it at your hull's fixed turn rate: 130°/s on the WREN, 110 SPARROW, 90 TALON, 70 VANGUARD, 55 SOVEREIGN, 38 COLOSSUS. That means a SOVEREIGN needs over three seconds to reverse course and a COLOSSUS nearly five. On top of that, velocity only eases toward the new direction (a base rate of 0.55 per second, scaled by hull), so the ship keeps sliding the old way after the bow has come round — that drift is what the green flight-path circle on the compass tape is showing you.

• MECHANIC

  Throttle is a request the reactor has to pay for

  Top speed is 50 units/sec times your hull multiplier: 67.5 on the WREN down to 37.5 on the COLOSSUS. Real thrust = your throttle × how much of the ENGINES power demand Engineering actually funded × engine health, so a starved or damaged drive makes the lever lie (the ENGINES bar under the slider is the truth). If ENGINES goes offline or gets zero power, the drive UNSPOOLS: your throttle physically decays at 0.3 per second — full to dead stop in about 3.3 seconds — and you must push the lever back up once power returns. When Engineering OVERCLOCKS the reactor, engine output doubles: a SOVEREIGN goes from 45 to 90 units/sec.

• MECHANIC

  Speed is noise (signature), and EVASIVE is a trade

  Enemy torpedoes home on the loudest thing nearby, scored as signature ÷ distance², with no friend-or-foe check. Your signature is 40 at rest, plus up to 70 more from throttle (so 110 at full burn), plus 20 while evasive, plus 35 while the reactor is overclocked, plus 15 while ECM transmits. EVASIVE halves an enemy's chance to land direct beam fire (a ×0.5 multiplier on their hit roll) but raises engine power demand by 60% and makes you louder — it does nothing at all against torpedoes, mines, rams or the railgun.

• MECHANIC

  Solid space: rams, mines, and the fence

  Any impact bills 4 + 0.72 × closing speed × mass ratio, where mass is radius² and the ratio is clamped between 0.75 and 1.15 for ordinary bodies but jumps to 2.6 against planets and megastructures (roughly 97 damage from a full-speed 50 u/s hit — planets do not notice, you do); under 15 u/s of closing speed it's a harmless scrape, and both you and the other ship pay. Inside a DEBRIS STORM system rock impacts hit 2.25× harder and a big rock reaching the hull knocks a ship system offline. Mines sit quiet until you come within 160 units, then chase at 58 u/s — faster than a TALON (55), VANGUARD (50), SOVEREIGN (45) or COLOSSUS (37.5), so on those hulls shooting them is the counter rather than running; only the WREN (67.5) and SPARROW (62.5) can outrun one. Past 3,400 units from system center you're in the radiation fence: the crew's radiation shielding drains 4 per second at the line, and another 4 per second for every 1,000 units deeper. It never touches the hull directly — but if shielding reaches zero the run ends.

• MECHANIC

  The railgun: your gun, aimed by steering

  A forward-fixed slug fired along the ACTUAL bow at the instant you pull the trigger (not your ordered course), so a turning ship throws the shot. It does 120 damage at 420 units/sec with 7 seconds of flight (roughly 2,940 units of reach) and a 6-second recharge; hulls carry 2–6 slugs, and a trader will sell two more for 60 salvage. Nothing counters it except dodging — point defense ignores it and decoys don't touch it — which is also why it still works when the weapons bus is knocked out. But rocks, hulks and planets block it, and it damages any ship it touches, including the freighter you were sent to protect.

• MECHANIC

  Flares and ECM

  Flares are finite (6–10 depending on hull, with no way to restock mid-run) — they eject behind you, light 0.15 seconds later and burn for 5 seconds. Enemy missiles and rockets are strongly lured onto them and detonate against them within 80 units; torpedoes can also be pulled by the flare's 200 signature, though a Tactical noisemaker at 400 is still the proper answer to a torpedo. ECM scrambles the seekers of hostile torpedoes and missiles within 700 units (periodic heading kicks of up to ±12°), but only while SENSORS is online and funded to at least 40% — and it adds 15 to your own signature the whole time it transmits.

• MECHANIC

  The jump drive and the chart

  Engineering spools the drive (18 seconds at full power); only you can fire it, and only at 100% charge with the drive not locked out. Once it's full it bleeds +8 reactor heat per second until you use it, so a "banked" jump is actively hurting the ship. You may jump mid-combat, but leaving before the objective completes logs "objective abandoned" and forfeits that sector's salvage reward. On the chart you can lock any system connected to yours by a lane (or through a charted wormhole) as the destination; with no lock, the jump takes a random connected lane.

• MISTAKE

  Steering as if the dial turns the ship. You are ordering a course that the hull answers at 38–130°/s while still coasting on old velocity — new pilots overshoot into a rock, then over-correct into the next one. Watch the slew arc on the tape and start the turn early.

• MISTAKE

  Cruising at FULL all the time. Full throttle is maximum torpedo bait (signature 110 vs 40), one of the heaviest swing loads on the bus (20 units/sec, 32 while evasive — though shields at full allocation want 40, and weapons with the turrets armed 42), and it turns a graze into a 40+ damage ram.

• MISTAKE

  Leaving EVASIVE on outside a gunfight. It only reduces direct beam hits — it does nothing against torpedoes, mines, or rocks — while costing 60% more engine power and adding 20 to your signature.

• MISTAKE

  Believing your own throttle lever after a power failure. With ENGINES offline or starved the drive unspools itself at 0.3/sec and your slider drops with it; when Engineering restores power you must re-order the throttle, or the ship just sits there.

• MISTAKE

  Trying to outrun a fight. Torpedoes (95 u/s) outrun every hull, mines (58 u/s) outrun everything but the WREN and SPARROW, and the quicker raiders outrun most of the fleet. The jump drive is the only real escape, and pressing it early costs you the sector's salvage.

Helm is a full seat only on the 4-, 5- and 6-crew hulls (VANGUARD, SOVEREIGN, COLOSSUS). On the 2-crew SPARROW and 3-crew TALON it merges with Tactical into the "Pilot-Gunner" seat, and on the 1-crew WREN the single "Shipmaster" chair holds all five duties at once. All of these keep the entire flight cluster intact — the same compass tape, evasive/jump buttons, rail/ECM/flare/chart row, throttle with detents, heading dial, and both the map and fully flyable parascope views (the merged consoles literally reuse the helm's own components). What changes is that nobody else is flying while you shoot, and on the WREN the ship runs auto-officer modules (auto-jamming, a cut-down engineering that auto-vents heat and auto-repairs at a quarter rate) to cover what one pair of hands can't. One important hull note for small crews: the WREN, SPARROW and TALON carry zero point-defense turrets, which is exactly why they carry the biggest flare racks (10, 8 and 9 charges) — as pilot you *are* the ship's point defense.