Beginner's Guide

Movement controls

The movement controls menu

The movement controls are accessed by opening the Action Menu and pressing the MOVE button. If a formation action menu is opened movement controls will be applied to the guide ship.

Display	Setting	Effects
ORB	Orbit Position	Move to a designated area and orbit around it
POS	Move To Position	Move to a designated area and hold position
CHD	Clear Hold Heading	Cancels a Hold Heading command
HDG	Hold Heading	Face the selected direction regardless of heading
CRS	Drive Course	Travel in a direction indefinitely
CRL	Clear Roll Ship	Cancels a Roll Ship command
ROL	Roll Ship	Selects a new direction as the "up" direction of the ship
FRM	Form With Ship	Choose a ship to become a guide ship and then designate a position around it
CLR	Clear HDG/ROL	Cancels Hold Heading and Roll Ship commands
ALD	Assume Lead	Become the new guide ship of the formation
ALL STOP	Hold Position	Cancels all movement commands

Tactics

• ORB / Orbit Position allows dodging of most ballistic weapons at range.
• HDG / Hold Heading can be used to avoid exposing the critical/delicate parts of a ship to enemy fire.
• ROL / Roll Ship can be used to keep certain weapons or radar panels angled at an enemy ship. Ships can roll faster than enemy ships of the same size can position around them.
• ALD / Assume Lead is useful if the guide ship becomes disabled but the rest of the fleet need to carry on with their objective.

Weapon controls

The weapon controls menu

The weapon controls are accessed by opening the Action Menu and pressing the WEP button. The top bar displays the current targeting mode. TRK means the ship is using radar targeting, while VIZ means the ship is using optical targeting. POS is highlighted when targeting empty space and allows direct firing of weapons in any direction. Not all weapons support VIZ and POS mode.

Pressing the ammo button next to a kinetic weapon will show the available ammo types.

• AP (Armor Piercing) ammo is more effective against armor but will only deal internal damage directly in the shell's path.
• HE (High Explosive) ammo is less effective against armor but will only deal internal damage to everything nearby the impact area.

Tactical view

Tactical view

The tactical view displays a lot of information that is normally hidden.

If a ship is selected the tactical view will show a distance range plane around it. The dotted lines represent the maximum ranges for the selected ship's systems. The red line indicates offensive weapons range, the blue line indicates sensor range and the green line indicates defensive systems range.

Detecting enemies

Enemy ships can be detected by active radar, by visual observation at short range, and passively by picking up their radar emissions (ELINT bearing lines and crossfixes). Both can be obstructed by asteroids.

• Radar detection is shared across the entire fleet as long as a ship's communications are online and allows all of a ship's weapons to fire on a detected target. Each ship has a number of radar panels that give full coverage around the ship. Radar panels or the radar controller can be destroyed, impairing radar functionality. Radar can also be jammed.
• Visual detection is not shared across the fleet. It uses a 500 m grid and a 5-cell sight stat (2500 m nominal): depending on direction and where the ships sit in their cells, contact starts reliably near 2.7 km and can extend to about 4.4 km. Enemies detected by visual will only be visible if the ship detecting them is selected and cannot be attacked by other ships unless those also detected the enemy. Guns, beams, and unguided rockets can fire on visually detected enemies if radar detection is not functional. Guided missiles cannot, including command-guided missiles: they need a non-visual track.

Damage control

Damage control teams fixing damage

Battle damage may case a fire inside a ship, indicated with an icon in the ships list. Fires cause constant damage to a ship and slow the working speed of damage control teams.

Damage control teams will attempt to repair damaged components. They will prioritize them in the order of how important a component is. Drives and reactors come first. CIC, the main search radars, and the large missile launchers are next. A component with a catastrophic event, such as a magazine cookoff, jumps ahead of the CIC, and anything you prioritize manually comes before all of these. Priority can be changed manually but repair teams will have to travel to the newly designated component to repair it, possibly taking up valuable time.

There is a limit to how much a component can be repaired. Maximum repair is the lowest health the component has reached, plus 10% of its maximum health, and never less than its functioning threshold plus that same 10%. A Damage Control Complex raises the allowance from 10% to 15%.

If a component has been destroyed completely, repairing it will require spending a Restoration Point, which can only be done manually. Each ship carries only a limited number of Restoration Points, depending on damage control components installed.

Scramming

Hold for 3 seconds to initiate Scram

Initiating a reactor scram can be done at any time and requires that you hold down the button until the progress bar completes, which takes about 3 seconds. This confirmation process can be skipped by pressing space while holding down the button, jumping the camera into the tactical map and immediately initiating the scram.
The reactor scramming process takes 30 seconds and completes even without a DC team present. Power and mobility for the entire ship will be disabled for the duration of the process and 30 seconds after until these systems are brought back online. Scramming will only grey components that were over-loading before the process completed, other systems will be left intact. A general rule of thumb is that you should scram the reactor if you have 4 or more crits on it, as these crits are likely to slow down the progress of your DC teams. Special attention should be payed on larger ships to how long the DC teams are taking to actually reach the reactor in question as well as the status of any DC buffing components like Redundant Reactor Failsafes, Damage Control Central, Small Workshop, and Damage Control Complex, which do not provide their bonuses when they are at 0 HP; you may have less time than you expect to repair the reactor.
Also be sure to check the current status of the powerplant components(s) in question about 40 seconds before detonation to determine if additional crits have been applied by enemy fire, ongoing fires, or other events in the minute or so since you last checked. If so, what was once a save-able overload may no longer be be saveable; Scramming will be necessary.

Community Lingo

The community playing this game has been marinating in weird lingo for years, and not all of it is intuitive. Kate has created and maintains a handy Glossaryon it. Much of it will be referenced within the wiki itself, though we do our best to define it when the terminology comes up.