TACTICAL

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

• CONTROL

  TARGETING SCOPE — a north-up radar disc centred on your own ship. Tap a contact to lock it. A button at bottom-right cycles the scope's reach between 800, 1600 and 3200 world units ("u"); rings mark beam reach (720u) and torpedo seeker reach (900u); a dashed amber ray shows the torpedo bearing you have dialled, with an ARM dot on it. Everything in flight — yours and theirs — is drawn live, and a torpedo that has locked YOU draws a dashed line straight at the centre.

• CONTROL

  THREAT BOARD — tappable rows (tap = lock, same as the scope) for every hostile ship, for mines that are visible (up to 6, with any mine that has woken and is hunting you sorted to the top), and for small storm debris inside beam range (up to 5). Each row shows range and bearing.

• CONTROL

  TARGET DATA + TARGET SCHEMATIC — under a lock: the enemy's shield and hull bars, how far Science has scanned it (%), and a wireframe of the enemy hull with a tappable node for each target point Science has located. Tap a node to aim there; tap bare hull to go back to hull shots. Nodes are labelled with a call-sign only (e.g. "22 Tango"), never "Engines".

• CONTROL

  BEAM BANKS (phasers) — one row per bank with a charge bar, a heat bar and a big FIRE button. A bank that has been handed to a Cannoneer shows a "⇢ cannoneer" tag instead of a button: that child fires it, at your lock.

• CONTROL

  MISSILE RACK — one FIRE MISSILE button that flies a homing dart at your current lock. Tapping repeatedly launches a volley (the server paces it).

• CONTROL

  ROCKET POD — an ARM ROCKETS button. While armed the whole scope frame turns amber and reads "ROCKETS ARMED — tap to fire": taps on the scope now FIRE at that bearing instead of locking. Running dry disarms it automatically.

• CONTROL

  TORPEDO ROOM — magazine counts, bearing steppers (−45 / −10 / +10 / +45), arm-delay steppers (±0.5s), and a row per tube: LOAD TORP / LOAD NOISE when empty, FIRE when loaded, a countdown bar while reloading. Plus an IN FLIGHT list naming every round in the air and its state, and a cyan FIRING SOLUTION button whenever Science pushes you a bearing and range (tap it to dial both in at once).

• CONTROL

  PD/HOLD: each gun turret has a real button that flips it between PD (armed, automatic point defense) and HOLD (powered down, shedding 12 units off the WEAPONS bus). STATUS-ONLY READOUTS you monitor but do not set: the four deflector arcs (allocation belongs to Engineering), the ordnance board (torpedoes / noisemakers / missiles / rockets), the railgun's stock and cycle timer (Helm's trigger), hull %, and the "◱ SCREEN" button that puts the tactical map on the TV.

The numbers here come straight out of the shipping build.

• MECHANIC

  The lock is the whole console

  One contact at a time is "the target" (tap on the scope, or a threat-board row). Beams need it, missiles need it, Cannoneers fire at it, and sub-targeting hangs off it. Switching the lock silently resets your sub-target back to plain hull shots, so you must re-pick the component after every target change. Locking a fresh contact takes no time and costs nothing — but nobody else on the bridge can do it for you.

• MECHANIC

  Beams: short, certain, and hot

  A phaser bank does 24 damage per shot at up to 720u and CANNOT miss inside that range — no dice roll for the player. Full recharge is 2.4 seconds at full weapons power, and each shot adds 30 heat to the bank (which bleeds off at 14/s and slows the next recharge by up to 60% while hot). Each shot also dumps 6 heat into the reactor core, which only cools at 2/s on its own — sustained beam fire is a problem Engineering has to vent. If Engineering is overclocking, beam damage doubles to 48.

• MECHANIC

  Sub-targeting: shield first, then the component

  Damage always eats the enemy's shield before anything else; only the overflow reaches your chosen target point, and only if that point has been revealed by Science and is still online. Destroying a component knocks it out and tears 12 extra hull off the ship. The schematic shows call-signs only — Science's console is the one that says which call-sign is Engines, Shield Gen, Weapons or Jump Drive, so you have to ask.

• MECHANIC

  Torpedoes: slow, huge, and blind to friend or foe

  A torpedo runs at 95 u/s — faster than anything afloat, since the quickest hostile is a 73 u/s swarm drone, though it is still the slowest round in the game, carries a 72-damage warhead, has 32 seconds of fuel (about 3040u of reach) and turns at 95°/s. Once armed it homes on the LOUDEST signature within 900u — and it has no IFF, so your own ship is a valid target. You dial a compass bearing and an arming delay of 0 to 20 seconds; arming distance is delay × 95u, and the console warns below 3 seconds ("may arm near own ship"). Tubes take 8 seconds to reload. Nothing can shoot a torpedo down.

• MECHANIC

  Noisemakers are the answer to torpedoes

  Load a tube with NOISE instead of a torpedo and fire it down a bearing. Once it arms it screams at signature 400 — far louder than your ship (40 when parked, up to 165 at full burn with overclock and evasive) — and torpedoes re-pick the loudest source every single tick, so it steals fish off you. It stays loud for 24 seconds. It is symmetrical: it will steal YOUR torpedo too if it is anywhere near the run. Noisemakers cannot be restocked anywhere in the run.

• MECHANIC

  Missiles vs rockets

  A missile costs one from the rack, flies at 260 u/s for 9 seconds (~2340u) and does 14 damage. It leaves the rail wild for 0.4s in a ±40° corkscrew, then chases the lock it was fired at, at 240°/s — it never re-targets, and if that ship dies the rest of the volley just flies straight and burns out. A rocket costs one from the pod, flies at 300 u/s for 4 seconds (1200u) for 10 damage, and only has a weak 45°/s nudge onto the first enemy inside 500u and within 30° of its nose. Missiles and rockets can both be shot down by point defense and lured onto decoys. A torpedo cannot be shot down by anything — but it can still be stolen by a decoy, which is exactly what noisemakers are for.

• MECHANIC

  Gun turrets are automatic — you only manage their power

  You have no manual gun trigger. Turrets auto-engage inbound MISSILES and ROCKETS only, out to 340u, with a 45% chance per shot to delete the round, one shot roughly every 0.9 seconds (faster with more weapons power). They never engage torpedoes or railgun slugs. Your only control is PD (armed) vs HOLD (powered down), and any turret off HOLD adds 12 power units to the ship's WEAPONS demand — so HOLD is a real gift to Engineering when there is no ordnance in the air. Frigate has 1 turret, cruiser 2, dreadnought 3; the wren, cutter and corvette have none at all.

• MISTAKE

  Expecting point defense to save you from a torpedo. It never will — the guns are hard-coded to engage missiles and rockets only, and the railgun slug is uninterceptable too. Torpedoes are answered by a noisemaker (or by Helm's flare, weakly, for about 5 seconds); a rail slug is answered only by Helm dodging. Also note the scope's dashed "GUN" ring is drawn at 420u, which is NOT the point-defense envelope: auto-PD only reaches 340u.

• MISTAKE

  Popping a noisemaker while your own torpedo is still running. Your fish re-evaluates the loudest source in a 900u bubble every tick, and your noisemaker screams at 400 — so it will happily turn around and chase your own decoy. Fire fish first, decoys second, or place the decoy well off the run line.

• MISTAKE

  Launching a torpedo at a close target with a short arm delay. Torpedoes have no IFF and your own ship is a legitimate signature. The console warns below 3 seconds of delay for a reason: at 95 u/s, 3 seconds is only ~285u of dead run before the seeker wakes up looking for the loudest thing nearby, which at that distance can easily be you.

• MISTAKE

  Not noticing a WEAPONS outage. If a hack or a surge knocks the WEAPONS system offline, your beams, the missile rack, the rocket pod and PD all go dead — and the dedicated Tactical console does not grey out its buttons, so presses just do nothing. Torpedo tubes and Helm's railgun are mechanical and keep working. If FIRE stops producing beams, call Engineering and switch to tubes.

• MISTAKE

  Shooting a ship after it has surrendered. You have already been paid the 25-salvage bounty; finishing it off earns no kill salvage and costs 15 reputation with BOTH pirate factions, which makes future captains meaningfully less willing to offer surrender to your ship for the rest of the run.

Tactical is a full dedicated seat only on the 4-crew frigate, 5-crew cruiser and 6-crew dreadnought. On the 3-crew corvette and 2-crew cutter it merges with Helm into the "Pilot-Gunner" console, and on the 1-crew wren it merges with everything into the "Shipmaster" console. On those merged seats the targeting scope disappears into the flight map: you tap contacts on the same map you fly with (and, with rockets armed, tap it to fire on a bearing). You keep beams, torpedo tubes with bearing and arm-delay steppers, the missile rack, the rocket pod, ordnance stocks, target data and the sub-target schematic. What you lose is the point-defense section entirely — the wren, cutter and corvette carry zero gun turrets, so there is nothing to switch between PD and HOLD, and Helm's flares (of which those hulls carry extra: 10, 8 and 9 respectively) are the ship's only point defense. Their weapon fit is also thinner: one beam bank on all three, one tube on the wren and two on the cutter and corvette, versus two banks and four tubes on a cruiser. Claiming Cannoneer seats materialises extra phaser banks beyond the hull's stock count — but each cannoneer takes a bank from the back of the list, so on a one-beam WREN, SPARROW or TALON the first cannoneer takes your only phaser.