Bridge Staff
| Bridge Staff | |
|---|---|
 "CHARGE THE FTL DRIVE GODDAMNIT" | |
| Information | |
| Access | Bridge |
| Additional Access | Maintenance, Engineering |
| Difficulty | Medium |
| Supervisors | Executive Officer |
| Rank | Sub-Lieutenant (SLT) |
| Duties | Pilot the ship, Miss all your shots, Never know when to pull back from a fight, Get the ship boarded by Syndicate. Somehow survive when CIC gets bombed. |
| Guides | Guide to enemy types, Guide to using the FTL console |
Your primary task aboard your assigned vessel is to operate the systems that the engineers and munitions techs maintain and feed. These include piloting the ship and operating most of the weapons through two consoles in CIC - the Flight Control Console and the Tactical Systems Console. Use Ctrl + Scroll Wheel to zoom out when viewing the overmap through these consoles.
The DRADIS
This is the ship's pair of eyes, a medium-range sensor suite that can identify targets at short range and see them coming from a fairly long range. Multiple individuals can use the DRADIS console at any given time and it is a requirement to effectively pilot the ship or aim the guns. Because of this it's possible to have the Dradis console open alongside other consoles, which is the intended way to use it.
Apart from having a single detection radius, it is also possible to switch to a sonar mode. This mode makes the dradis send out a ping every few seconds, which then reveals every ship in the system. Of course such a powerful tool comes with a huge downside, when the sonar is active every ship in the system can detect the pings and thus know where you are. Usually it is best to only reserve the sonar for hunting down stealth ships at the end of the fight to avoid having to fight the entire fleet all at once.
The Flight Control Console
The operator of this console is responsible for flying the ship. It's fairly straightforward, but there are some keys you need to know. In general, avoid getting hit if possible, try to dodge torpedoes, and avoid boarding vessels while remaining within sight of the enemy for your gunner.
The C toggles whether the ship follows the mouse. When you first click the console, the ship will strive to point its nose towards your mouse. Hit space to toggle this behavior, which can be useful for not ruining your orientation just because you needed to click out of the window for a moment.
W and S control the throttle. Remember, the ship retains momentum once it starts moving; it will only stop itself if the inertial assistance system is turned on.
The Alt key is a sort of parking brake. Hitting it toggles the brake, which will make the ship come to a complete stop and stay there. Do not leave the parking break on while jumping into a hot zone. The chances that you remember to turn it off in those first few seconds of dodging torpedoes are very much not 100%. The deaths of so many innocent men weigh upon my soul.
The Shift Key activates a boost, which is primarily useful for dodging particularly nasty torpedoes or evading enemy boarding vessels.
Q and E activate a rotational drift, which is useful for pulling sick drifts turning very quickly, and in a short distance. This can also help to evade torpedos and less maneuverable ships.
The X key toggles inertial assistance. Disabling this allows you to strafe using A and D, and stops the ship from automatically braking when you stop holding W.
Point Defense Cannons, standard issue on NT vessels, fire numerous bullets in a short amount of time. This makes it great for taking out incoming torpedos or fighters. But be warned, you may only fire them in bursts. You can fire it by Left Clicking anywhere around the ship. The Tac console also has access to this weapon.
If your vessel is equipped with Superliminal Bluespace Artillery, you can use Left Click to fire a highpower plasma laser straight out of the nose of the ship. This can be very useful for finishing off large or medium-sized ships at close range. This weapon is hilariously powerful, but takes a lot of power and time to recharge.
Bear in mind that as the pilot, it's your duty to minimize losses by evading incoming fire and assisting the flyboys where needed. If the ATC reports that a pilot has ran out of fuel, you can help out by flying over the stranded fighter's flight path so it can dock.
The Tactical Console
The gunnery console is a little more straightforward, but it pays to have munitions tech experience. Knowing the rough ammo capacity of different weapons can be useful, but the names themselves are fairly informative. Hit the Space key to switch between weapons. Being on this console will also give you a readout on the remaining ammo (in percentages) of the ships weapons, including those you can't fire from this console, as well as the ship's armor and structural integrity.
Your weapons include:
Torpedoes – Click in a direction after locking onto a target to fire a Torpedo. Torpedoes deal a significant amount of damage with a short travel time that may require a small amount of leading. Additionally, nuclear warheads can be loaded to deal a massive amount of damage but are difficult to acquire. Torpedo tubes also do not possess much ammo capacity, being limited to only a few torpedo tubes with a long loading time. Torpedoes do however have a homing effect, making for very good long-ranged weapons.
Naval Artillery Cannon – To shoot the Artillery cannon simply click where you want it to hit. While this seems easy to do at the first glance, the artillery cannon requires more than just a single click to work. Before you can fire it needs to be loaded with gunpowder, as the amount of powder used affects the speed of the bullet. This means that you'll have to communicate with the munitions staff (radio hotkey: .w) to ensure the optimal bullet trajectory. This means that if the gun doesn't have much powder loaded the bullet will move very slowly, and you must aim your shot in where you expect the enemy to be instead of where they currently are.
Automated Missile System (AMS) –
The missiles are an easy to use automatic defense and offense weapon. Their targeting systems are controlled by the Munitions Technicians and can choose between multiple firing modes. If they are set to Countermeasure mode they will automatically aim at incoming torpedoes and missiles, while Anti-Ship mode gives you (and the fighter pilots) direct control over where the missiles are heading.
To set a target for the missile system simply hold CTRL and click with the left mouse button or press "Target" on the Tac console's UI. Fighter pilots can also do this for ships that are outside your view range to make it targets further away.
Point Defense Cannon (PDC) - Point Defense Cannons are as the name implies: defensive utilities. They fire a large volume of bullets in a short amount of time. This makes it great for taking out incoming torpedos or fighters, but ineffective against larger opponents. The Helm console can also fire the PDC, but unlike the helmsman, your PDC is fully automatic. This makes you, the gunner, better suited to laying down defensive fire.
You will also have a readout of the Gauss and the Superliminal BSA, however these are not under your control. Gauss cannons are controlled directly by Munitions Technicians while the BSA is controlled by the helm officer (see above).
In addition, while it might be obvious, it is worth noting that different ships have different weapon loadouts, and as such, different playstyles.
The FTL Console
This console controls the ship's long-range movement. It will provide you a map of various star systems that the ship can navigate to, as well as the ship's current location and how charged the FTL drive is. In order to make a jump, the drive must be 100% spooled up, which takes about a minute. If it isn't spooling at all, yell at engineering. As one might expect, this console doesn't need a dedicated crewmember; the pilot usually takes care of the job. However, in combat scenarios where the ship is fleeing, it might be neccesary for another member of the bridge crew to operate the FTL console while the pilot runs evasive maneuvers.
The EWAR Console
This console controls the ship's ship lockdown feature. You can use it during combat on just about any syndicate ship to initiate a lockdown, letting your crew board it. Operating this console is quite easy as the only requirements for locking down the ship you want are the ship being between 1 - 50% hull left and also being one of the many boardable ships.
Once you are done with your boarding and everyone is back on your ship, you can then release the EWAR scrambling, which will let go of the ship REMOVING IT PERMANENTLY. (You cannot stop scrambling mission critial ships until you finish the mission [EVEN IF IT BLOWS UP])
When Not In Combat
When you're not in combat, your second job comes in: Being the captain's whipping boy. During FTL jumps and while waiting for engineering to get its shit together, feel free to go make a run to the nearby cigarette vendor to sate the crippling nicotine addiction that you've adopted in order to retain your sanity while working this close to the captain. And remember, memeing with the captain is an important job. No matter how flagrantly he's abandoning his duty to throw stupid parties, your answer should always be "Yes, dear sir."
