Space Navigation

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As a Salvage Specialist, Engineer or Atmospheric Technician you may be expected to go out into space without a shuttle. This page goes over all relevant mechanics and tips to ensure you don't meet an untimely, comedic and swift death while doing so.

Preparation

Before you leave the station, be sure to check you have all the required equipment, adequate inventory space, and are ready if you encounter aggressive space fauna, hostile sentients or lose your navigation.

Here is an example checklist:

• Check your breathable gas tank is full. Oxygen for most species, but Nitrogen for Slimes/Vox.
• Check you have a Hard/Eva suit and helmet equipped. Hard suits have an integrated one, which can be put on by clicking on the helmet action. Breathing masks are redundant as hardsuit and eva helmets both function as one already.
• Check that you have a traversal method and that it is in space-faring shape. (see Modes of transport)
• Memorise the GPS coordinates of the station and bring a GPS if you plan to break line of sight with the station at any point. Salvage PDA's have a GPS installed by default, your current GPS coordinates can be found by examining it with Shift + Mouse Left .
• Notify your department and/or cargo that you are going out, so that cargo hopefully doesn't run into you in a Shuttle, and people know where to look for you, if you mysteriously go missing.

Salvage Specialists should generally take additional steps:

• Check that you have adequate inventory space for loot.
• Check that you have a weapon for fighting hostiles - along with the knife in your salvage closets, 4 proto-kinetic accelerators are available in all salvage vendors at the start of shift.
• Check that you have a Pickaxe/Ore Bag if you're planning to mine or a utility belt if salvaging debris and wrecks.

Modes of transport

Jetpack Propulsion

Mini and void jetpacks can be worn in the belt slot, while the rest can only be worn in the backpack slot. All can be used while being held in your hands. In exchange for the storage space they replace, jetpacks offer excellent mobility, allowing for easy dragging of large items to or off station, and provide great evasive potential if one is in a fight out in space.

Like air tanks, jetpack's require air of some sort to function, which also makes it possible to use them as internals if filled with the appropriate gas for your species.

Grappling hooks

Salvager's are most likely to be utilizing a grappling hook, especially early in the shift as 4 are available in every salvage vendor. Unlike other methods, grappling hooks offer virtually unlimited mobility, while expending no resources. This comes with the trade off of requiring very precise aim over long distances and good mental mapping out of the environment or a portable mass scanner. While grappling hooks can shoot infinitely far away off screen, they still have travel time.

The way to tell if the grappling hook has made contact with the target is a tell-tale jolt of movement pulling in the shot at direction. If out in space, you can tell if you are being pulled or the grappling line broke, by the movement of the background and stars in space, as they move in parallax with the camera if you are moving and pulling yourself.

Fire Extinguisher & Friends

If you're not using a jetpack or grappling hook, you're likely combining multiple methods of transport. You'll be limited to slower, more imprecise and resource limited, modes of transport.

Fire extinguishers, like jetpacks, use air to propel you in the opposite direction of where you click, unlike jetpacks they cannot be refilled in any way.

Throwing an item (even a single sheet split from a stack) also propels you in the opposite direction that you throw it. Note that some items stack whilst maintaining their weight. Carrying a few stacks of something (e.g. metal rods) can be useful.

Shooting provides a SMALL amount of propulsion opposite the direction shot. Usually this is just an annoyance, but because the PKA has infinite ammo it can theoretically be used as a last ditch attempt once running out of any other reasonable method of propulsion.

Orientation and grids

Knowing where you are in space is crucial to your sanity and possibly your survival. In order to preserve either it's good to understand how landmasses and navigation mechanically work.

Large traverseable objects in space made up of tiles, are colloquially referred to as grids, this includes the station, salvageable debris, space shuttles, but also severed sections of the station. As long as they don't have an active station anchor, grids can all be rotated and moved if hit by another grid or meteors. More intentionally, they can be moved by using an anchored thruster or gyroscope on said grid (see shuttle construction).

When leaving a grid, you keep it's rotation relative to other grids for navigation - ie. if you leave a shuttle that's at a 45° angle away from the station, the station will also look rotated by 45° to you until you go onto it's grid.

You can change the rotation of your view relative to your grid; by default using Numpad 7, which rotates your view left by 90° & Numpad 9, which rotates it right. You can also reorient to the grid's default orientation with Numpad 8, which is useful if coming to station from outside and trying to get your bearings. The former is useful aligning yourself with north while using a mass scanner.

When lost

If you have gotten lost you need to find a way to execute these three steps:

1. Find your own location

If you are carrying a GPS, you can easily do this by holding it in your hands or examining it with Shift + Mouse Left Click to see your current coordinates.

If you do not have a GPS you can try turning on your suit sensors to coordinates (done via Mouse Right click context menu on your clothing slot), but unless you are lost and on a player created grid, such as the station, ATS or a shuttle or some sort of other grid with an attended crew monitor - others will not be able to see you as you are off grid. Best you can likely do is recollect where you recently were, and what direction you exited the last grid you remember the location of, to gauge how far you've traveled and in what direction. Then you should coordinate with fellow crew to attempt rescue.

2. Find the station location

The easiest way to do this as a member of a crew is asking the crew where the base is. Anyone with a GPS, Handheld Crew Monitor device or Crew Monitoring computer will be able to tell you what their location is, as long as they are on the station.

If you have just spawned and are too serpentine or too stealthy to be able to do the above, remember that when taking over a space faring ghost role, the chat console will tell you in what cardinal direction you have to head to reach the station.

3. Move towards the station

When you know your location and the station location, you can then use propulsion to move yourself towards the station. DO NOT assume that up is north, your screen may have been rotated on the last grid you were on - notably, many stations, while typically aligned with the cardinal directions, do not have the default view rotation as north.

If you have a GPS and a way to achieve movement, slowly move in the direction you think the station is, and check your GPS to see that you are going the right way.

If you have no propulsion ability, ask for a shuttle to come pick you up or for a salvage crew member to save you. After asking for this, please hold your position and ensure you have supplied the correct coordinates (remembering that negative numbers are different to positive numbers).

Navigation Tips

• DO NOT assume that up is north
• You can change your screen so that north is up by using the keypad 7 & 9. However, you first need to know which way is north.
• The y coordinate is north and south. i.e. (x,y)
• The x coordinate is west and east. i.e. (x,y)
• Thus, if you are (100,0) and the station is (0,0), you need to go west by 100 units (left if up is north).