Scanners

Space does not report to you. Your scanner does.

Every hull carries one, and it projects a live-intel bubble around the ship: any vessel or station inside that radius shows on your charts: a dot on the corner radar, a mark on the zoomed-out schematic. Outside the bubble, nothing. Not “hidden behind something”, just unreported. Space is big and your antenna is only so long.

Range

Range is a hull stat. The Vindicator mounts a survey-grade unit that covers roughly a whole system from anywhere inside it; the scrap most raiders and haulers fly sees a fraction of that. No swapping or upgrading yet. The range you launched with is the range you have, until module hardware reaches the market.

Astronomy is free

Stars, planets, moons, belts, gates: charted forever, fog or no fog. Orbits do not sneak around. The scanner’s job is everything the almanac cannot tell you: who is flying where, right now.

Charted, not watched

Zoom out and every known system is drawn; existence is never a secret. But a system with none of your ships in it renders as a dark silhouette: dim rings, dim name, no contacts. Charted, not watched. Nothing you own is there to do the watching. Fly in and it lights up; leave and it goes dark again behind you.

The rule is presence: anything of yours keeps its system lit. Today that mostly means the one you are sitting in. The day you own more hulls, a freighter parked in a quiet system is also a watchtower.

A station counts too, and it never leaves. Plant one and its system stays lit behind you — you keep watching that sky from the moment you build there, whether or not you ever come back. It is the difference between an outpost and a rumour: the belt you claimed keeps working, and you keep seeing who comes calling on it.

Picking a target

Put the cursor on something and it becomes your target. That is the whole gesture. The mark stays where you put it: slide the cursor away, roll the ship, look somewhere else — the target holds until you pick another one, or until the thing you were reading stops existing.

Tab walks the target outward instead, nearest contact first, then the next one out, and around again from the front when it runs out of sky. Faster than chasing a moving hull with a cursor, and it works when you would rather keep the pointer on your guns.

Whatever you have marked wears a set of thin brackets, and the panel under your radar reads it out.

What the panel can answer

Four headings, and they do not all come from the same place.

Identity — name, class, size, faction. The transponder gives this up whether its owner likes it or not. Enough to know whether that dot is a hauler minding its business or a raider minding yours.

Activity — what it is doing, right now. This one costs nothing at all, because it is not a scan: you are watching a ship hold a beam on a rock, or turn and run. Eyes work at any range you can see.

Manifest — what is in the hold. That takes a real cargo scan, and the unit your hull came with does it.

Condition and loadout — hull, shield, armor, the guns it has bolted on, and the rack those guns sit in, cell by cell. Those need a battle-grade scanner, and you are not flying one. The panel lists both headings and then says NO READ under each, because your antenna knows they exist and cannot open them. That is not a bug in the readout. It is the readout being honest about the hardware.

Better units exist. Nobody sells them yet. The aftermarket keeps promising.

Reading intent

Activity is the line to watch, because it is the only one that tells you what happens next.

Prospecting. Working a rock. Hauling to station. In transit, loitering, departing via gate. Patrolling, hunting, engaging. Loading run, delivery run, awaiting cargo, standing by. A freight hull that reads AWAITING CARGO is parked at a pad with nothing worth carrying — its station is out of surplus, and it will sit right there until that changes rather than burn laps with an empty hold.

And under the activity, the intent — the thing it is shouting about. A miner that has been shot at breaks off, screams CALLING FOR HELP on its faction band, and runs for the nearest friendly guns: RUNNING FOR SHELTER while it is still crossing, SHELTERING once it is parked in the dock ring and refusing to come back out. Watching that line is how you learn a system’s temper — who answers a call, how fast, and how long it takes the belt to go back to work.

The codex fills itself in

This archive is not a textbook you were handed. It is your own log, and it writes itself from what your scanner actually registers. An entry you have not earned reads only UNDISCOVERED and the field it belongs to — never a title, never a summary, nothing to spoil. Cross a black hole’s well, meet a faction’s ships, dock somewhere new, and the matching page fills in the moment it happens; if you have the codex open when it lands, you watch the placeholder turn into a page. What you have not seen, you do not get to read. That is the whole rule.

See also: the chart itself in Navigation; pilot roles in Pilots & Behaviour