Bridge Staff

Your Job

Your primary task aboard the ship is to operate the systems that the engineers and munitions techs maintain and feed. These include the piloting of the ship and operation of most of the weapons, and they can be divided fairly distinctly by which console does what. Your secondary job, being the captain's personal whipping boy, doesn't have an associated console, unless you count the one you'll inevitably beat your head against.

The Consoles

Each console could be said to play a diffrent, distinct role. Ideally, you'll onyl have to operate one at a time, but it isn't uncommon for the bridge to be short-staffed or just plain incompetent. You should be at least passingly familiar with each of these. I don't actually rmeember the proper name for each console, but hopefully someone will come along and correct my placeholders. Hopefully.

The Piloting 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, dodge torpedoes, and avoid boarding vessels while remaining within sight of the enemy for your gunner.

The Space bar 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, and A and D move the ship left and right. If you're not using hotkeys, you may need to use the arrow keys instead; I'm not entirely sure. Remember, the ship retains momentum once it starts moving; you need to compensate or brake to slow down or stop.

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 is 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 boarders.

Q and E activate a rotational drift, which is useful for pulling sick driftsturning very quickly.

Left click to fire a MAC round straight out of the nose of the ship. This can be very useful for finishing off crafts that have become unresponsive. This weapon is quite powerful and can fires more quickly than you'd think. MAC rounds? In atmosphere? It's more likely than you'd think.

The Gunnery 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 Ctrl key to switch between weapons. Being on this console will also give you a readout on the remaining ammo (in percenatages) of the ships weapons, including those you can't fire from this console, as well as the ship's armor and strucutural integrity. Your weapons include:

The PDC, or point defense cannons, are machine guns designed to destroy incoming missiles and sometimes fighter craft. Many gunners use these almost exclusively, ass they're very easy to aim due to their high fire rate and ammo capacity. Neither cargo nor munitions will be happy if you do this.

The torpedo tubes, usuually four in number, fire big, slow, powerful torpedoes. There's a 50/50 chance that a munitions tech panics, runs out of standard torpedoes, and loads a nuke if you use these often. Unless they tell you over comms, you have no way of knowing this, nor choosing which tube you fire.

The rail guns are your medium option. They fire extremely fast tungsten rods at the enemy ship. Leading your shots isn't necessary when firing a rail gun, as they pretty much draw a line instantly in the direction of your aim. If you don't use these enough, the munitions techs will let you know.

You'll also have readouts for the gauss turrets, the MAC gun, and the flak turrets, but you can't fire these from this console. The MAC gun is fired by the pilot, the gauss turrets are fired by the munitions techs, and I honestly have no clue who fires the flak turrets, only that the magazine demands to be fed.

The DRADIS

This is effectively the ship's radar, a medium-range sensor suit that can identify targets at short range and see them coming from a fairly long range. Ideally,you'll have a dedicated member of the brige crew watching this and informing the gunner and pilot of the enemy's wherabouts and numbers. In reality, you'll probabaly have to do this yourself. If you do have two members of the bridge crew, it's generally better for the gunner to be the one who hops off his console to check if there are any remaining enemies, given that the pilot doing so could mean the ship eating a nuke. No, I don't know what the acronym stands for, but I like to think it's Doing Really Awesome Drifts In Space.

The FTL Console

This console controls the ship's longe-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.

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 clsoe to the captain. And remember, memeing with the captain is an important job. No matter how flagrantly he's abandonning his duty to throw stupid parties, your answer should always be "Yes dearsir."