Sciences answers one question, over and over: what is that? Everyone else
on the bridge is acting on contacts. You are the only officer who can turn a contact
into knowledge.
It is the most under‑used console on a new crew's bridge, and the one that most
changes how a fight goes.
Scanning
Pick a contact, start a scan, and it runs to completion in the background. Scans
are queued, so you can have several in progress and work down a contact list rather
than babysitting one target.
Three things govern whether a scan works:
- Your sensors must be online. If they are not, nothing scans. That
is Engineer's console, not yours — ask.
- The target must be inside sensor range. Outside it, the scan does
not run slowly; it fails and drops out of the queue, and you are told it was out of
range.
- Range sets the speed. This is the part worth internalising: a scan
at close range completes around three times faster than the same scan
at the edge of sensor range. Distance is not a minor modifier, it is the dominant
one.
Which makes "Flight, can you close the range" the most valuable sentence in
your role. If the bridge is waiting on your scan, closing the distance is the fastest
thing anyone can do about it — and a target that is running away is a scan you may
simply lose.
What a scan tells you
Readings come back in categories: library (what the ship's records
already know about this class of thing), energy,
elements, gases and biologics. Which
you get depends on what you are scanning — a warship's interesting readings are
energy, a planet's are elements and gases, and a derelict's may be biological.
The energy readings are the tactically valuable ones. They break a
target down component by component, showing how hard each system is running. From
that you can tell a ship with weapons hot from one that is genuinely just passing
through, and you can see which of its systems are damaged before anyone shoots.
Energy readings also carry a frequency offset for each component:
how far that system's frequency sits from the frequency of the fire that has been
hitting it. That is how Tactical learns about an enemy's shield tuning — and
it is how an enemy learns about yours, which is why Tactical randomises.
Your displays
- Contact list — everything sensors hold, and your scan queue.
- Science graph — readings as a trace rather than a table, which
is how you see something changing.
- Planetary surface — surveying a body rather than a ship.
Missions built around exploration live here.
- Radar, with forward and rear relative displays.
- Viewport, heading and target intel.
- The reference library — where a library reading sends you.
There is also a system‑wide scan for surveying everything around you rather
than one contact at a time.
Being good at it
- Scan before you are asked. Every new contact, immediately. The
scan you started two minutes ago is the one that is ready when the Captain asks.
- Queue, do not wait. Several scans progress at once. Start them all
and read the results as they land.
- Report the number and what it means. "Its shield generator is at
thirty per cent, so it has already been in a fight" is worth ten times "reading
0.3".
- Ask for range. Constantly. It is your single biggest lever.
- Watch the library. If a contact is a known class, the records
already have most of what you need and you can spend your scan time on something
unfamiliar.
- Tell Tactical where it is weak. You are the reason they can shoot
the right facing of the right ship.
