Navigation

Your helm has two views of the same live sky. Flight view stays close enough to read the Vindicator at combat scale. The chart is its own navigation view: orbit rings, names, lanes, and whole systems laid over the world while it keeps moving underneath.

• Zoom (mouse wheel, or +/-) changes scale inside the view you are using. Flight zoom stays in its close combat band; chart zoom runs from system detail out to the whole known galaxy.
• The map key (Tab or M) switches views. Press it once to open the chart; press it again to close the chart, discard its pan, restore your flight zoom, and focus the camera on your ship.
• Hold right mouse and drag to move the chart camera freely. Let go and the chart remains where you placed it, ready for inspection or selection.
• Lane lines trace the paired, organic currents the gates actually fling ships along—one outward, one home. A lit lane runs both ways; a dulled one means an endpoint is dormant or broken: the lane is charted, not crossable. See Starlanes & Stargates.
• Select, then act. In the chart, left-click a marked planet, station, gate, star, or a whole system — and it lights up as your selection. A right-edge selection panel shows who you marked, whether a lane route or fold is available, and an autopilot ETA (cruise estimate; multi-hop legs add a rough per-lane budget). The Autopilot and Fold buttons stay on the panel whether or not they apply to the current mark — one that cannot fire is disabled, not hidden, so the door is always visible. You can press the buttons or the bound keys (both live in settings). Economy / scanner intel on that panel is reserved for later hardware. While the chart is open your manual helm and both mouse buttons belong to navigation: held thrust, strafe, brake, boost, and weapons stay neutral, so inspection never flies or fires the ship behind your back. Close it and every held flight control resumes immediately. An engaged autopilot still flies its order while you study the route. Fold charge and readiness remain in the lower flight instrument. Pressing Fold from the chart drops you straight back to flight view — the charge and the wormhole throat happen around your own hull, not hidden under the map. Autopilot leaves the chart open, since watching the route is the point.

Every world, station, and gate flips from its real tiny render to a schematic icon at the same moment — one shared zoom band, not a size contest where a gas giant outlasts a moonlet. The chart draws names and rings for planets and stations while a system fills your view. Stations use a clean playing-card diamond; a stargate is the related diamond with a circle inside, so the two never masquerade as each other. At galaxy range only the systems themselves keep their names. Stars never draw an orbit ring of their own — even a binary pair reads as two points of light, not a traced path. Hover anything marked for the details.

Systems with none of your ships in them draw as dark silhouettes (charted, not watched), and ships or stations beyond your scanner’s reach are simply not on the plot. The chart shows what your hardware can vouch for; see Scanners.

The corner radar is a different instrument: close contacts, real time, always on. Its subtle square backing is the whole plotting surface—orbits and contacts use the space right out to its edge. A thin highlight on the right mirrors the identity block’s left accent; a fine four-sided border contains the plot, without a second little radar circle or title bar stealing room from the sky.

Flight, pause, and chart are contexts inside the same VINDICATOR // COGNITIVE OVERLAY. Blue-grey rails, pale cyan marks, and compact technical labels show which part of your cognition has focus. The same dense, quiet blue grid lives inside every cognitive surface—status blocks, chart plates, menus, the square radar, and the low flight console—without washing across the free space where you fly. Flight itself stays sparse: three small lines at upper left name your ship, local system, and credits, while one low centered trapezoid rising from the bottom baseline reports shield / armor / hull and speed / energy / fold from the live hull in two compact rows. Fold says READY, CHARGING, or a dash; it never invents ammunition or crystal counts. The pause surface suspends flight but keeps local input and calibration available: Key Bindings rebinds every helm and weapon key, Audio Settings sets VOLUME, MUSIC, and SFX levels that persist between sessions and mute themselves the instant the window loses focus. The chart uses one quiet navigation header, adds selection status, and prints its live controls along the lower edge—there is no staged scan/route menu to operate. Those rails never catch the pointer: LMB selection and RMB pan still belong directly to the chart beneath them.

Soft amber text is different on purpose. A line headed CASSIUS // EXTERNAL is received chatter or warning, never a helm command, a communication menu, or the owner of the surface. There is no permanent standby panel during ordinary flight: the annotation appears only when CASSIUS actually has something to say. When it disappears, every Vindicator control and route remains available.

Whose overlay is this?

Yours. The interface is the readable edge of your own substrate, shaped by the hull currently housing it. In the medical shuttle it wakes as a bare Continuity recovery interface. Once you enter the Vindicator, the same mind opens through the Vindicator cognitive overlay: helm, weapons, chart, damage, and memory presented as one continuous sense rather than a pile of cockpit screens.

CASSIUS can speak through it, mark a target, append a warning, or turn a life-threatening situation into an invoice. He does not own the overlay. He is an external contact on your comms — a very persistent one — and his voice sits inside your interface because that is where you receive him. There is no hail or communications-action system yet; no dormant action menu is pretending otherwise. The overlay marks that boundary in its visual grammar: cool blue-grey/cyan substrate rails and readouts are yours; amber CASSIUS // EXTERNAL COMMS annotations are received traffic. If the amber channel goes quiet, your helm and senses remain your own. The faint grid and flowing edge rails are substrate orientation marks, not physical cockpit glass; they stay behind every readout and never take the pointer away from helm or weapons. When the Vindicator eventually nests in a larger compatible host, the same overlay gains a host link; you remain Vann, housed in the Vindicator, with another ship wrapped around it.

How your hull flies

Space does not slow you down. Thrust builds speed and the speed STAYS — cut the engine and you coast on the same heading, as far as you like, for free. Spin the nose while you drift and your momentum keeps carrying you the old way: you can fly sideways, or backward, guns pointed one direction and travelling another. Nothing halts you but a wall or your own retros. The space brake is your stop: hold it and the ship burns hard against its own velocity until it hangs still in the void. Tap thrust, coast, line up a shot as you slide past, brake when you want to plant your feet — that is the whole of flying out here. (It is also why parking by a planet, below, is a thing: with the brake off you never truly come to rest, so you settle into the world’s own drift instead.)

Handing over the helm

Select a world — in your own system or a distant one — and press your Autopilot key: the helm takes the stick, and the ship turns, burns, and eases off on its own to arrive near-stopped at the mark. A green ring on the chart shows where the errand ends.

The helm does something better than chase a moving target: it leads it. Planets, moons, and stations do not wait — so the autopilot meets them where they WILL be, not where they are, and aims to arrive slow and close enough that the parking drift (see below) takes over the moment it lets go. You coast in beside the world and settle into its orbit without touching a thing.

Pick a target in another system and the autopilot will TRAVEL there — not across the empty void, but the sane way: it flies you to the right stargate, holds you in the ring until it flings you down the lane, and picks up again on the far side, hop after hop, until it sets you down at the mark. It is hands-off long-haul travel along the lanes you already know. What it cannot do is reach a system no lane touches — a fold-only place like Veil. For those, and whenever you would rather skip the trip, select the system and press your Fold key instead; see Folding. The chart only shows the Autopilot chip when a lane route exists, so you always know which door is open.

The helm is always yours. Touch the stick — thrust, strafe, or the brake — and the autopilot yields instantly, mid-burn, no argument, and the whole voyage is cancelled. It does NOT quit when a gate flings you down a lane, though: that transit is part of the plan, so it simply waits out the crossing and resumes on the far side. Only your own hand on the stick ends the trip. Your aim stays free the whole way: the cursor still points your nose the instant you take the helm, and the trigger never stops working.

Parking by a planet

Space is not still, and neither is the ground you park over. Coast to a near stop close to a planet, ease off the stick, and the hull settles into the world’s own motion: you drift along with the planet’s orbit instead of watching it slide out from under you. It is a soft pull, not a tractor beam — a few hull-lengths of the body’s own size is as far as it reaches, it only takes hold once you have shed most of your speed, and the first touch of thrust or strafe hands the controls straight back to you. A ship merely passing through at speed feels nothing.

Want to hold your mark against the sky instead? Hit the space brake. The brake kills your motion relative to space itself, so the planet resumes its slow crawl past your canopy while you sit fixed where you stopped. Brake to hold the void; let go to ride the orbit.