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

The free channel

Hover any contact on your charts and its transponder gives up the free channel: faction and class. Enough to know whether that dot is a hauler minding its business or a raider minding yours.

The deeper channels (cargo manifests, fitted modules) need scanner hardware nobody sells yet. The aftermarket keeps promising.

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