XmlTrek User Manual

Your ship is capable of determining from which direction a message is sent. To put your ship on an intercept course with the last message received, use the ESC Ctrl-Mcommand.

Setting Warp Speed

The maximum cruise speed your ship can be from Warp 10 to 16, depending on ship class. Negative warp values indicate that your ship is moving in reverse. Use these commands to affect your speed:

It is important to know your ship class's Maximum Turning Warp and Maximum Cruising Warp values. If you attempt to turn your ship when traveling faster than your Turning Warp, your ship will incur damage. Going faster than your Maximum Cruising Warp will also give your ship damage.

Transwarp Drive

The Excelsior and DY-600 class ships are transwarp capable. Transwarp lasts for about 10 seconds, and during this time your ship will have an effective speed from around Warp 20 to Warp 30. Transwarp drive can be engaged only when the ship is already traveling at Warp 3 or better.

A high warp speed when entering transwarp, however, insures a faster transwarp speed and a correspondingly greater distance traveled during the 10 or so seconds of transwarp. Structural damage occurs when transwarp is engaged at less than Warp 4. Transwarp costs a substantial amount of Warp Energy.

Tracking in Transwarp

The Excelsior is equipped with "tracking transwarp", and transwarping is engaged while something is being intercepted, transwarp will disengage at the exact moment needed to place you as close as possible to what was intercepted. Transwarping without tracking is a blind blast through space and often places your ship far away... from everything.

The Excelsior class starship does not start out with transwarp capability; a visit to Earth is necessary to get this.

Navigation

Nearly all navigation can be done by setting intercept courses with other ships and objects. Use the i command to set an intercept course with what is currently being scanned. A second i command toggles intercept mode off. Be careful to not use this command when exceeding your Maximum Turn Warp. The command ctrl-I shipletter can be used to intercept a nearby ship which isn't being scanned. Specific coordinates can be intercepted with the I command.

Heading can be manually changed by turning off intercept mode and using one of these commands:

Your ship is capable of determining from which direction a message is sent. To put your ship on an intercept course with the last message received, use the ESC Ctrl-M command.

Orbiting and Docking

You can pick up various things for your ship by docking at starbases and orbiting planets. The same procedure is used for both. First scan your destination. (Use "O1" "O2"... to scan one of the starbases, or something like "Oq" for Rigel XII, or "Ov" for Vulcan.) Pressing "i" will engage autopilot intercept on whatever you are scanning. Use "@" to set your Warp Speed to your Maximum Turning Warp. (Your maximum warp speeds are displayed using "ESC w".) Going any faster than this will automatically disengage the autopilot intercept.

Slow down to Warp 3 when within 50 units of your intercepted destination. Stop your ship with Ctrl-W when a distance of 0 or 1 is displayed. You can now orbit or dock by using the "." command. It takes a few seconds before you start receiving things onto your ship.

The Scanner portion of the screen is used to display information about another player's ship or information about one of the other "objects" in the game. The "o shipletter" command is used to scan other ships. In the example above, the command "oh" was used. In a similar manner, objects are scanned with the "O objectletter" command. For example, to scan Vulcan the command "Or" would be used. Any object in the game can be scanned at any time, but ships must be in the tactical display to be scanned. Ship letters are always lower case, whereas object letters can be either upper or lower case.

The Scanner portion of the screen is also used for these commands:

Ship Power

The total amount of power a ship can use is the sum of Warp Energy and Impulse Energy. You can allocate this to one or more functions of the ship: Warp Drive, Shields, Load Phaser, Load Torpedo, Damage Control and Cloak. Both Warp Energy and Impulse Energy output can be damaged when under attack. Warp Energy output is also damaged by traveling faster than your ship's Max Cruising Warp speed. Warp Energy and Impulse Energy are restored to normal with Damage Control. Extra Warp Energy above a normal level can be obtained by visiting a dilithium crystal planet such as Rigel XII.

The Freighter DY-600 can repair its Warp Energy to its maximum value, so it doesn't ever have to go to a crystal planet.

Anti-Matter

This can be viewed as your ship's fuel. Maximum Anti-Matter onboard a ship is 5000. Anti-Matter is used up at a rate based solely on the amount of Warp Energy your ship is using. All Impulse Energy is used before any Warp Energy is; so Warp Energy used is the amount of power allocated to ship functions minus the amount of Impulse Energy available. Additional Anti-Matter is picked up from your ship's home planet or from A-Class planets which don't have ship-types based there.

Shields and Damage

Shields absorb the energy of incoming attacks, except for ramming. Each time shields absorb an attack, they are lowered by an amount proportional to the energy of the attack. Once shields have dropped all the way down, further attack energy causes damage to Warp Energy, Impulse Energy, and Damage. The Damage field refers to the structural damage of your ship. A Damage amount greater than 100 causes Life Support to drop by about 1% per second. Damage greater than 200 results in immediate explosion of the ship. Shields are ineffective inside a Nebula.

Commands for Shields:

Damage Control

Power allocated to Damage Control repairs damaged parts of the ship. The more power allocated, the faster repairs happen. Given enough time, Damage Control will fully restore Warp Energy and Impulse Energy to normal levels, and completely repair any Damage.

Commands for Damage Control:

Tractor Beam

Your ship's tractor beam is used to pull one of the Observer Devices or a Lithium Mine around with your ship. Use the % command when weapons are locked to toggle on/off the tractor beam.

Transporter

Cloaking

Some ships can engage a cloaking device which makes them invisible to all other ships. Ships can cloak only for a limited time; the time remaining is shown in the Cloak field. When time runs out, the cloaking device has burned out. Upon disengaging, the cloaking device immediately regenerates available cloak time. To repair a burned out cloaking device, or for the II-A to obtain a cloaking device to begin with, you must visit Romulus. The "z" and "Z" commands turn on and off the cloaking device. The BOP's cloaking device uses 80 power units.

A cloaked ship can lock weapons on nearby ships, but it cannot fire phasers or torpedoes. Mines, buoys and drones can be launched while cloaked, however.

Sending Messages

Your ship allows you to send messages to another player, to all players, or to a select list of players. Sending too many messages during a short time causes your transmitter to burn out; and you must travel to a FR (Fix Radio Transmitter) planet to get it fixed. Stars, comets, nebulas, quasars and pulsars cause radio transmission and reception interference.

The 3 ways to send messages to other players:

Combat

To lock weapons on a ship or object, it must be within the maximum torpedo range of the ship you are piloting. First scan it, then use the Ctrl-L command. To lock on a ship not being scanned, but within scanning distance, use the ESC Ctrl-L shipletter command. Most phaser and torpedo weapons require that weapons be locked to have maximum effect.

Phasers

Phaser range is typically from 0 to about 500 units depending on ship class. Damage done by phasers is maximum at point-blank and minimal at maximum range.

Phasers are loaded in increments of 5 power units. The waiting period after firing phasers before they can be loaded again is based on the firing strength. Firing phasers without weapons being locked causes them to be fired wide. This gives half the normal damage, but to everyone within phaser range; including ships which are cloaked.

Commands for Phasers:

Expanding Sphere Inducer Phaser - Cardassian and Ferengi

When fired, the ES Inducer gives damage to everything in phaser range, cloaked or not. The amount of damage depends on how close the enemy ships are to you, and how many of them are in range. Locking weapons does not affect the ES Inducer in any way. The closer the enemy ship is to you, the higher the damage; but a ship at the same coordinates is not hit. Damage given to individual ships is drastically reduced with more ships in phaser range. ESI does not hit anything at 0 distance. Be careful near planets and Starbases because if you accidentally shoot one, it will shoot back and continue to do so until you dock or orbit. At that point, it will take up to 1000 gold from your ship before giving you peace.

Teleporter Phaser - Freighter DY-600

This is one of 2 phaser weapons on the Freighter. Instead of causing any damage, it teleports the enemy away. The higher the phaser strength, the farther the distance of the teleport. This is used on ships in Phaser range, with weapons locked. Switching between phaser types is done with the ESC Ctrl-P command.

Agonizer Phaser - Warbird

This is used like other phaser weapons, but it uses a single 40-energy charge, and uses up one plasma torpedo. It gives the same damage to all ships in phaser range, whether the other ships are cloaked or not. The damage is not divided among several ships if more than one is hit. It gives constant damage at all distances within phaser range.

Disruptor Phaser - Klingon D-10

This weapon is used just like regular phasers, except that it deals the same amount of damage at all distances within phaser range.

Torpedoes

Commands for Torpedoes:

Photon Torpedo

This weapon has a range which is from about 500 units to about 2200 units, depending on ship type. A ship can load only as many as it has torpedo tubes. Unlike phasers, torpedo's give maximum damage at maximum range, and minimum damage at minimum range.

Torpedo - Freighter DY-600

The Freighter DY-600 is equipped with a conventional torpedo weapon; which gives 100 damage. These can hit from 0 to 1000 range.

Obliterator Torpedo - Klingon EV-12 & PB-13

Several obliterator torpedoes can be loaded and fired at the same time, with each one drawing 10 power units. Unlike photon torpedoes, these give the same damage throughout their entire range. The Klingon ships replenish obliterator torpedoes automatically without requiring a trip to a starbase.

Plasma Torpedo - RBOP & CV-97

Some ships use plasma torpedoes instead of photon torpedoes. There is 1 torpedo tube in plasma equipped ships. Loading a plasma torpedo uses 85 energy units. The energy used to load a plasma torpedo is immediately available on firing or unloading. If weapons are locked, this is fired in the direction of what is locked on to. If weapons are not locked, this is fired straight ahead. Unlike the other phaser and torpedo weapons, this does not hit instantly. The plasma torpedo is a device which travels from warp 9 to warp 10; and shows up in the tactical display. It gives massive damage if it hits the target, but it is possible to avoid. This is loaded, unloaded, and fired with 'T', '^t', and 't' respectively. The plasma torpedo lasts 20 seconds, and each of its last 5 seconds, it loses 10% of its strength. Plasma will give 1500 damage units at full strength. This will hit any other ship which comes within 200 units of it; friendly or not.

Variable Speed Plasma Torpedo - WARBIRD

This type of plasma torpedo can be set to travel at speeds from Warp 5 to Warp 10. Set a specific speed with the the "ESC T speed" command. Use "ESC T a" to have the plasma speed automatically be set to the speed of your ship. The faster the plasma torpedo speed, the more damage it gives (eg., a Warp 10 torpedo gives a maximum of 1200 damage units).

Plasma Bolt Torpedo - Gorn CV-97

Only one plasma bolt torpedo can be loaded at a time, and one of these requires 85 power units to load. These only hit a target when weapons are locked on a ship within torpedo range. 750 damage units are given to a ship when hit with this weapon.

The Gorn CV-97 can fire both plasma torpedoes and plasma bolt torpedoes. Use the "ESC ctrl-T" command to switch between them.

Mine

It takes no power to lay a mine. You must wait at least 10 seconds after laying a mine before you can lay another. Mines are placed 150 units directly behind your ship, or 150 directly in front when you are traveling negative warp. Mines have an activation radius of 100 units. The M command is used to lay mines.

The transporter can be used to pick up stray mines by using the $ command. Your ship must be within 110 units, but outside the 100 unit mine activation radius to transport mines aboard.

Drone

Drones, like mines, require no power to fire and have a 10 second waiting period. They behave like guided missles and have about half the strength of a mine. Weapons must be locked on a ship or object when a drone is fired, or it won't hit anything. Drones have an activation radius of 100 units. Use the d command to launch drones.

The Cardassian ships can use the Ctrl-D command to set drone speed. The faster the drone speed setting, the less damage the drone gives.

Ramming

You can ram your ship into another if distance is displayed as 0 units. The 'r' command is used to do this. Ramming gives 20 to 25 Damage to both ships. Shields are ineffective against ramming.

Inventory objects

Buoy

A buoy is used to detect the presense of enemy ships, even if they are cloaked. Ships have an unlimited supply of buoys, require no power to launch, and have a ten minute waiting period before another can be launched. The lifetime of a buoy is a few minutes. When another, possibly cloaked, ship comes within 2000 units of your buoy, you are notified of the ship's exact location. Your ship's last-seen-at data is updated to reflect this, allowing you to set an intercept course to the enemy ship. The b command drops a buoy at your current location.

Ship Death

Self Destruct

Ships are capable of self destruction. When your ship gets wounded beyond repair, engaging the auto-destruct mechanism may be the best action. The D command is used to do this. The auto-destruct sequence is aborted by using the D command again. The amount of damage an exploding ship gives to nearby ships is dependent on the amount of antimatter on board the exploding ship, and the distance to the other ships.

Keymaps

You can assign keymaps, also known as keyboard macros, to most keys.

To set up a keymap, type (, then the key you want to map. You then will be prompted to type in a line of what you want it mapped to. To unmap a previously mapped key, use ) followed by the key. Keymaps are preserved across saving and restoring ships.

The text of mapped strings uses a format similiar to that used by C Language strings. Use \r to indicate a return. Control chars are specified with their octal equivalent such as \033 for escape.

It is inconvenient to manually set up favorite keymaps each time you start a ship. A way to deal with this is to yank keymap definitions out of one xterm window and paste them into the game xterm window. In the Windows world, that translates to using Notepad and creating a TXT file for your keymaps. Each time you start a new ship, open that document, and copy its contents into your telnet window.

Octal equivalent of control chars:

Example

If you like to have a keymap for each digit 1-3 to set warp to the corresponding value and to map '$' to send a true message to all players, you can use a file like this:

When you're creating your keymaps, keep in mind that you do so with the EXACT keystrokes that you would press normally (substituting \r for any carriage returns). For instance, loading and firing torpedoes: you load with shift-t and fire with t. To scan the nearest ship, you press o., to lock weapons you press ctrl-l. To combine that into a single action, you could map your 0 (zero) key to:

The '\014' is the octal equivalent of pressing ctrl-l (^L).

So anytime, you need to shoot your torps, you press 1 key, instead of 8! And that's for a ship with only 4 torpedo tubes!

You can increase the complexity as much as you like:

This will turn damage control off, scan nearest ship, lock weapons, load and fire torps, and IF your torps don't fire UNLOAD all torp tubes, bring up the status message showing how many torps you have left, fire a drone, and apply some free energy to damage control.

Keymap Sample

Below, you'll find some generic keymaps that will work for any type of ship. These are very basic, so as you learn the game, you will want to expand upon them, tailor them to specific ship classes, and adjust them to accomodate your typing skill and style of play.

Misc

Observer Device

There are several Observer Devices which can be used to scan ships from very far away. For example; Mars Observer, Hubble Telescope, Skylab, and Voyager 7. Every 5 minutes, these choose the nearest ship within 5000 units, if any, and continually broadcast the vital statistics of the ship. You can see this information by just scanning the Observer Device itself. These can even scan cloaked ships.

Scoring

There are six components of a ship's score:

Gold-pressed latinum bars are used as the currency and score. Supplies normally cost some gold, but are free if you are broke; which you are when you start out. There are 3 ways to acquire gold bars:

Dock at a starbase after giving damage to other ships. The starbase will award you gold equal to (DmgGiven+Bonus)/10.

Destroy another ship with gold onboard. When a ship explodes, loses life support, or just quits; all of its gold up to 1000 plus 10% thereafter is left behind for you to pick up.

Also, ships with greater than 100 Damage accidently drop chunks of gold bars you can pick up.

When a ship is destroyed, its gold bars are left in the "ship debris". If you are the first one to the debris or gold, you can retrieve the gold by locking weapons on the "ship debris" and activating the transporter.

What is gold? How do you get it? What can you buy with it?

Some people would like to think it gives an indication of how good a player they are, but the other fields in a ship's score are more revealing about that. Anything you get for your ship (crystals, torps, drones, mines, antimatter) normally costs you some amount of gold, but if you have under 1000 gold, it is free. You can also lose gold by dropping it when you are losing life support, by paying to repair a cloak or transmitter, or by buying peace with a planet or starbase after shooting it.

There are three ways to get gold (from the docs):

Dock at a starbase after giving damage to other ships. The starbase will award you gold equal to (DmgGiven+Bonus)/10.

The starbases in alpha and beta follow the above equation. This gives you 10% of your DmgGvn+Bonus; however in gamma, docking at a starbase will give a ship 11% of it's DmgGvn+Bonus.

Destroy another ship with gold onboard. When a ship explodes, loses life support, or just quits, all of its gold up to 1000 plus 10% thereafter is left behind for you to pick up.

Also, ships with greater than 100 damage accidentally drop chunks of gold bars you can pick up. [Usually gold is dropped in 10% chunks.]

Another way to get gold is to destroy a starbase. When a base reaches 200 damage it will detonate and send gold chunks flying.

Additionally, ships which break save (connection closed without dying, quitting, or saving at a starbase) lose 1/3 of their gold, and 10% of their total gold (before the break penalty) remains behind to be picked up.

To pick up gold, you scan and lock weapons on the ship debris or chunk of gold and them beam it aboard using the transporter. However, the transporter only works within 200 units. You can also pick up gold by running over it, but if you are going too fast, you might miss it.

Command Summary