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
Select a contact and its scan starts, then 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 internalizing: 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.
For a ship, your scanner panel shows its shields and hull integrity, an
energy reading, the lifeforms aboard (and how many of them are on
your side), its faction and any cargo it carries, with the library's description and
a link to its article where there is one. For a planet it gives gravity, radius, mass
and day length, with the atmosphere and the surface broken down element by
element.
A scan of a shielded ship also reads its shield frequency, and your
science graph shows how far your own ship's weapon frequency sits from it. That is how
Tactical learns about an enemy's shield tuning — and it is how an enemy learns
about yours, which is why Engineer randomizes the shield frequency.
Your displays
- Contact list — everything sensors hold, and your scan queue.
- Science graph — your ship's weapon frequency against the shield
frequency of the last shielded ship you scanned. The two traces draw together as the
frequencies converge, and lock when they are within about 25 Hz.
- Planetary surface — surveying a body rather than a ship.
Missions built around exploration live here.
- Radar, with forward and rear relative displays. In the local view
it also draws weapon blasts as expanding fronts, so you can see what a detonation is
about to reach, and it has the same Labels and Search tools as Flight's.
- Viewport, heading and target intel.
- Drones, probes and arrays — if your vessel carries them.
- The reference library — where a library reading sends you.
Switching the radar to its System view also runs 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 shields are at
thirty percent, 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.
