A Horizons crew is six officers, each at their own console, each holding part of
one ship. Nobody can do another officer's job from their own seat — that is the
whole design. The helm cannot raise shields, weapons cannot restore power, and the
Captain cannot do anything except decide and ask.
The six roles
| Role | Short | Owns |
|---|
| Captain | CAP | Deciding. Has almost no controls, on purpose. |
| Flight | FLT | Where the ship is and where it is pointing. |
| Tactical | TAC | Weapons, targets and shields. |
| Operations | OPS | Comms, crew, cargo and the alert condition. |
| Sciences | SCI | Knowing what things are. |
| Engineer | ENG | Power, and repairing what breaks. |
Each role has a colour that identifies it consistently across every console and
on the Game Master's displays: Captain purple, Flight blue, Tactical red, Operations
yellow, Sciences green, Engineer orange.
Roles belong to the ship, not to the game
This is the part that surprises people. The six roles above are what a
Horizons‑class ship declares. They are not a fixed global list — each
vessel class declares its own roles, and which console screen each one opens.
So a small craft may offer only Flight, a specialised hull may offer a role that
does not exist anywhere else, and a mission built around unusual ships may put your
crew in seats you have never seen. When you take a station you are taking a role
on a particular vessel.
Your console shows what your ship has
The other consequence of the same design: a console is not a fixed layout. Parts
of it are assembled from the components actually installed on your vessel.
A component declares which role's console should display it and in which group. A
shield generator, for instance, puts a shield panel on Tactical and a shield
frequency panel on Engineer. Install it and both panels appear; fly a ship without
one and neither does.
This is why the honest answer to "what does my console have on it" is look at
it. The role entries here describe what each officer is responsible for and the
panels you will usually have, not a guaranteed inventory.
Alert conditions gate what works
One shared mechanic matters to everyone, and new crews lose fights to it. The ship
has an alert condition, Operations sets it, and it decides which systems are
allowed to be switched on at all. On the standard four conditions:
| Condition | Meaning | Cannot be brought up |
|---|
| Blue | Docking operations | Shields, weapons, cloak |
| Green | Standard operations | Shields, weapons |
| Yellow | Elevated | Weapons, cloak |
| Red | Battlestations | Cloak |
Read that table again as a sequence, because that is how it plays: shields
cannot come up until Yellow, and weapons cannot come up until Red. A
Tactical officer stabbing at a dead fire control while Operations has the ship at
Green is the most common failure a new crew has, and the ship does say so — the
refusal is reported to both Tactical and Engineer.
Vessel classes can define their own conditions instead of these four, so check
yours if it behaves differently.
Working as a crew
- Say what you need, not what you want done. "I need to be within
scan range of the freighter" gives Flight something to solve. "Fly to the freighter"
does not say why, and Flight will stop in the wrong place.
- Announce state changes. Going to Red, dropping shields to
recharge, taking power off weapons — every one of those changes what someone else
can do.
- The Captain is a router, not a bottleneck. If three officers wait
for permission to do their own jobs, the ship stops.
- One officer can hold two consoles. Short‑handed crews often
pair Sciences with Operations, or Tactical with Engineer. It works, and it is a lot
of windows.
Controls
Every console is usable entirely with a mouse or a touchscreen. Flight and
Tactical also have keyboard defaults and gamepad support, because they are the two
roles where holding an input matters. Bindings are per role and can be rebound; the
authored defaults are listed on each role's entry.
