6-052: Merchant Freighter Spanial – Control Room
The immediately obvious difference is that most aerospace craft have an actual control column or joystick, whereas the Spanial seems to be missing that. Karmen shows her that it does actually have one, she presses a control and a small joystick rises out of Lia’s arm rest while the ship asks if she really wants to engage manual flight mode. Karmen says ‘no’ and retracts the joystick back into the chair (“We don’t use that much.”).
However, as Karmen takes her through the controls Lia realises that functionally, there are a lot of similarities. There is a big section related to plotting and controlling hyperspace jumps and FTL flight with which Lia is totally unfamiliar, and which Karmen doesn’t go into any detail about, but much of the rest makes sense in context when explained, although the layout of the interface to those functions is different.
KIarmen spends a lot of time on the standby monitoring settings, that is, the mode the ship is in normal space (N-space) when nothing much is happening and it is just cruising along in N-space – like right now. She goes over the communications and sensor array controls as if anything unexpected does happen while Lia is on watch, those are likely the first things she will need to use. As an aerospace pilot, Lia would have basic familiarity with such things, but the relevant skill is actually Electronics Operation. Lia can use her pilot skill (IQ-based) or her IQ as defaults.
That roll was IQ-based, but we’ll see how much she remembers of Karmen’s briefing if she actually needs to use those things… [evil GM face]
Karmen seems to be sensing her mix of excitement and trepidation, says indulgently, “would you like to put her through a maneuver?”
She gives her a wide eyed stare
“I think… that might be a bad idea… I don’t get to fly very often and I’ve never flown anything this big. My experience has mostly been with small aerospace craft…”
She cocks her head slightly.
“Maybe you could show me a maneuver?”