SCIENCE

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

• CONTROL

  SENSOR SWEEP — a north-up radar dial centred on your ship. Tap any return (hostile, derelict, anomaly, visible mine) to start a deep scan; tap it again to stop. Zoom steps 400 / 800 / 1600 / 3200 / 4800 world units via the −/+ buttons, mouse wheel or two-finger pinch (default 1600). A dashed ring labelled 'SNS' draws your real scanning reach.

• CONTROL

  MODE toggle (bottom-left of the sweep): ○ SCAN ↔ ◉ PLOT. In PLOT, taps no longer scan — you drag to aim a bearing ruler, and whatever you aim at is pushed live to Tactical as a firing solution (bearing, range, suggested torpedo arm delay). Turning PLOT off retracts it.

• CONTROL

  ACTIVE SCAN panel — the live target's name, scan percentage, a STOP button, and the ⚑ TARGET POINTS list: each located enemy subsystem with its own callable designator (e.g. 'Shield Gen — 22 Tango'). It also flags 'jump spool detected' when a hostile is charging an escape jump.

• CONTROL

  SENSOR SCAN scope — the big rotating picture of whatever you last scanned, resolving out of static as the scan climbs. Survey points of interest ride on it as tappable glyphs; selecting one opens an ACTION card with exactly one button: EXTRACT, RETRIEVE, SEND PROBE, DECODE, SAMPLE or TAP.

• CONTROL

  ANOMALY SURVEY board — one card per anomaly with a progress bar, tick marks at the 35% / 70% / 100% milestones, and the lore each milestone unlocks. A SURVEY button starts the deep scan from the card.

• CONTROL

  Triage boards — DERELICT cards (deep scan for salvage), HOSTILES rows (scan each one), MINEFIELD rows with a 'SCAN TO MARK' button, FRIENDLY rows with a hull bar, and the teletype SYSTEM LOG (with a newest-first toggle).

• CONTROL

  '⧉ SCAN ON SCREEN' button in your header — promotes your scope to the shared TV. While a probe mission is live the same button reads '⧉ PROBE ON SCREEN' and pushes the probe feed instead.

• CONTROL

  PROBE PILOT — when a probe mission launches, it replaces the scope in your hero slot: drag anywhere on the glass to fly (release stops), W/S throttle and A/D turn on desktop, one INTERACT button (recover / read / extract), and a press-and-hold ABORT that scuttles the probe after one second.

The numbers here come straight out of the shipping build.

• MECHANIC

  The scan gate: range and power

  Base scan range is 900 units, but your EFFECTIVE range is 900 × your SENSORS power ratio (power allocated ÷ power demanded, times the dish's health). There is no floor — a SENSORS system that is offline or unfunded scans NOTHING, and the console goes to pure snow with 'NO POWER TO SENSORS'. Worse, starting a scan raises SENSORS demand from 5 to 15 power units, so the act of scanning can itself starve your ratio and shrink your reach. Full-power scan rate is 0.4 scan-level per second (about 2.5 seconds for a warship); the Deep Scanner unlock multiplies every scan by 1.3.

• MECHANIC

  The reveal ladder

  On a hostile, 35% confirms the ship class and 55% / 78% / 100% each locate one target point (subsystem) in order. On a derelict the scan runs at half speed and completes at 100% for salvage plus 2 torpedoes. On a mine the read takes about 1 second — and reading any ONE mine marks the entire field for everybody. Anomalies scan slower still and by type: megastructures ×0.3, planets ×0.35, wrecks ×0.5, organisms ×0.6, phenomena ×0.7, comets ×0.8.

• MECHANIC

  Target points are Tactical's only precision option

  Enemy subsystems — Engines, Shield Gen, Weapons, Jump Drive — cannot be targeted until your scan reveals them. Tactical's console literally shows nothing to aim at until you've done the work, and torpedo overflow only routes into a revealed subsystem. Each point carries its own NATO designator ('14 Bravo'), which is what you say on the couch. Killing Shield Gen stops their shield regen; killing Jump Drive stops them escaping; killing Engines strands them.

• MECHANIC

  Survey points of interest (POIs)

  Deep-scanning a planet, wreck, megastructure or derelict resolves survey points on the scope. They appear as unresolved glyphs at 35% scan, the first half resolve at 70%, and the rest at 100%. Each kind offers exactly one action: mineral → EXTRACT, signal → DECODE, core → TAP (these three are free), and relic → RETRIEVE, hatch → SEND PROBE, organism → SAMPLE (these three cost a probe). Actions only land within 1350 units of the body; outside that the button greys out. Every point is one-shot.

• MECHANIC

  Probes are finite — and refundable

  You start a run with 2 survey probes. Guild merchants sell them 2 at a time for 30 salvage, and you occasionally find one in a cargo pod or a nebula lane. Launching a probe-costing action spends one immediately. But if the probe EXTRACTS successfully it is re-racked and you get it back — a clean mission costs nothing but nerve. If it is caught, wrecked, aborted, or if the ship jumps while it is out, the probe is gone AND the survey point is burned with it. Only one probe can be out at a time.

• MECHANIC

  The probe mission (the interior crawl)

  A probe-costing action drops you into a top-down interior on a 24×16 grid. You see a 75° forward cone out to 6.5 tiles plus a 1.6-tile ambient ring — the darkness is the game. Probe hull is 50; arc conduits do 18 damage every 1.6 seconds, vents shove you sideways, and collapse plates fall in 0.7 seconds after you leave them. Noise = 0.08 idle + throttle² × 0.55, and something can hear you from (noise × 14) tiles away — so half throttle is heard ~3 tiles, full throttle ~9. There is a 35% chance something is in there with you on an ordinary roll, and a 100% chance on a trap-family prize. Extraction is a 2.5-second hold on the entry pad; leaving the pad cancels it.

• MECHANIC

  PLOT mode — the firing solution

  Flipping the sweep to PLOT turns it into a bearing ruler. Drag and it snaps to any contact within 26 pixels, reporting bearing, range, and a suggested torpedo activation delay. Every drag streams live to Tactical, who sees a '◈ FIRING SOLUTION' bar they can tap to load bearing and delay into their tubes. It retracts automatically the instant you leave PLOT, switch phone tabs away, or your console unmounts — a stale bearing is worse than none.

• MISTAKE

  Scanning from the arrival point and wondering why nothing happens. Sensors only bite inside your effective range, which is often well under 900 units. The anomaly spawn band is 900–1800 units out — you almost always have to ask Helm to close before a survey will start at all.

• MISTAKE

  Leaving PLOT mode on with a stale aim, or leaving it on while you should be scanning. In PLOT, taps no longer start scans — several crews lose a whole fight because Science was 'scanning' on a console that was actually in ruler mode.

• MISTAKE

  Burning a probe on a hatch when you're one jump from leaving. Engaging the jump drive while a probe is out forfeits it instantly with no end card, and the survey point is marked spent anyway. Finish the mission or don't start it.

• MISTAKE

  Going full throttle in the probe interior. Throttle noise is squared: full stick is heard nearly three times further than half stick, and an arc discharge rings the entire site. The probe crosses the map in about 10 seconds flat out — and that speed is exactly what gets it eaten.

• MISTAKE

  Sitting silent. Target-point designators, the scan percentage, the enemy jump-spool warning, and the range Helm needs to close to all live only on your screen. A Science officer who scans perfectly and says nothing is worth less than one who scans sloppily and narrates.

Science is merged into a combined seat on every hull below the 5-crew cruiser. On the 4-crew VANGUARD and the 3-crew TALON it pairs with Comms as the "Science & Comms" seat, which keeps the full scan loop — sweep, PLOT mode, the SENSOR SCAN scope with POI actions, the anomaly board and the triage lists — but drops the system log (the Comms side carries it). On the 2-crew SPARROW, the "Operations" seat folds Science into Engineering and Comms; it keeps sweep, scope, active scan and the anomaly board but loses the triage lists entirely — you scan by tapping returns on the sweep instead of by tapping rows on a board. On the 1-crew WREN, the Shipmaster seat holds all five duties: the sensor glass becomes one slot you flip between SWEEP, SCAN and PROBE, the anomaly board opens as a slide-over behind a "◈ SURVEYS" button, and an auto-jammer plus slim engineering handle the housekeeping. In every merged form the underlying intents are identical — same scan, same POI actions, same probe. What you lose is elbow room, and on solo you also lose your radar partner: the probe mission's rotating sweep becomes a corner inset on your own glass.