Vessel Classes

A vessel class is a ship type — the design. Missions place instances of it. It is the largest record in the game and the one that decides what a crew's consoles look like.

The sections

Roles: the most important section

The roles a class declares are the seats it offers, and each one names the console screen it opens. The flagship declares six:

<role id="Captain"    screen="captain"    abbr="CAP" commander="true" visible="false" />
<role id="Flight"     screen="flight"     abbr="FLT" visible="true" />
<role id="Tactical"   screen="tactical"   abbr="TAC" visible="true" />
<role id="Operations" screen="operations" abbr="OPS" visible="true" />
<role id="Sciences"   screen="science"    abbr="SCI" visible="true" />
<role id="Engineer"   screen="engineer"   abbr="ENG" visible="true" />

Each carries a short abbreviation and a colour used consistently across consoles and GM displays. commander marks the command seat.

Nothing requires these six. A small craft can offer one role; an unusual hull can offer a role that exists nowhere else, pointed at a screen your module provides. This is the main lever for making a module feel different: give the crew different seats.

Hard points and the Shipyard

Hard points are the mounting positions on the hull — where a component can be installed, and where it sits in space for aiming and for damage. The Shipyard tool fits Components to them.

Hard points define the ship's capability envelope; components define what is actually installed. Getting the hard points right first saves rework, because everything else attaches to them.

Statuses: the alert conditions

A class can define its own alert conditions. Leave the section empty and it gets the standard four — Blue for docking, Green standard, Yellow elevated, Red battlestations — each restricting which component types may be brought up. Those restrictions are what stop Tactical arming weapons below Red.

Define your own and you take on the whole job: a condition set needs a base, an elevated, a docking and a critical condition for the rest of the game to reason about it. This is a powerful place to express a faction's doctrine and an easy place to make a ship that cannot fight.

Cameras

Cameras are named viewpoints with a position, a target and a field of view, and they are what the Main Viewer and viewport panels show. Author them generously: a bridge forward view, side views, an astern view, and a set of external cinematic angles.

<camera name="Forward" position="0 70 130" target="0 70 -70" mode="Perspective" fov="55" showvessel="false">
  The main Bridge view
</camera>

showvessel decides whether the ship itself is drawn — false for a view from inside it, true for anything outside.

Occupants and crew

Large ships are populated by generator rules rather than individual people: so many officers of this rank, so many enlisted, so many marines, with health and efficiency defaults and tags. Operations and the decks display read this. A warship with no occupants authored is a warship where nothing internal can go wrong.

Decks and docks

Decks are the interior: the compartments that matter when boarders, fires or atmosphere become the story. Docks are where other craft attach, which is what makes a carrier a carrier.

Damage teams

The pool of repair teams Engineer distributes. The number is a real balance decision — it sets how quickly a ship recovers from anything.

Widgets

The class can push extra panels onto specific consoles, in addition to the ones its components bring. See Widgets for what a widget is; the short version is that a console is assembled from declarations like these rather than being a fixed layout.