NovaProtocol

Wiki / Glossary

Glossary

Short definitions for the terms and units that recur across the wiki, grouped the way the book reads: units, then flight, ships, targeting, combat, the interface and the world. Each entry points at the page that owns it.

Units

  • m / km - the distance units. Ranges and radii read in meters below a kilometer (e.g. a standoff of about 500 m) and in kilometers above it (e.g. 1.24 km). Every distance readout on the HUD and in the interface uses them.
  • m/s - the speed unit, meters per second. The speed chip beside the velocity sphere reads in m/s, and a target's closing speed reads as a signed m/s.
  • World unit - the engine's own length, and the build grid is the only place you meet it: one world unit is 10 m, so a cell is one on a side. Nothing you read or write is in it - every distance on these pages, on the HUD and in a content file is meters, so a blast_radius of 300 is a 300 m blast. See Sections in the creator guide.
  • hp - hit points, the health a section or a torpedo carries. Every hit subtracts from it and the part dies at zero; each section page lists its variants' figures under Variants.

Flight

  • Newtonian - momentum persists and nothing dampens you: a burn adds speed, only an opposite burn takes it away, and turning the nose does not turn your velocity. There is no flight-assist toggle - see Flight & autopilot.
  • Prograde / retrograde - prograde is the direction you are moving; retrograde is the opposite. STOP flips you to retrograde and burns your speed off.
  • Burn - a held main-drive throttle. The main drive is the sum of every thruster that points forward, spooled smoothly up and down rather than snapped. See Manual flight.
  • GOTO / ORBIT / STOP - the autopilot verbs. Each flies a whole maneuver on the real controller and thrusters and hands the ship back. CANCEL, a burn, a bound thruster key, entering RCS or the engaged verb pressed again disengages it; moving the mouse does not, because the computer holds the rotation command while it flies. GOTO burns to the nav lock and settles at the standoff, ORBIT holds a ring around the dominant well until you break away, STOP flips retrograde and burns your speed off, down to 2 m/s on a residual the drive is already pointing at and up to a 7.5 m/s deadband on one it is not. See The autopilot flies the hull.
  • Arrival envelope - the autopilot's one rule: at any distance it caps closing speed at what a flip-and-brake from there can still cancel, so the braking ramp always lands on the standoff.
  • Flip - the swing to retrograde that puts the drive against your velocity before a braking burn. The autopilot schedules it a swing early, because the swing itself takes time.
  • Predicted path - the line the HUD draws for GOTO and STOP, and the Map for GOTO: the autopilot's own flight, run up to 30 seconds ahead of your ship. A forecast, not a route plan; nothing on it is avoided. GOTO adds a dim straight guide from its end to the target, which the autopilot does not fly.
  • Standoff - the resting distance GOTO stops at, just off a target (about 500 m plus the target's radius, measured from the surface) rather than ramming it.
  • RCS - reaction-control fine translation for docking: hold Shift and steer with the mouse and scroll wheel to nudge the hull straight along its own axes, no rotation, paid from a magazine that refills once you let go. A trim a scenario grants rather than standard flight - see RCS.
  • DOCK - the verb that clamps your hull to the ship you have locked, port face to port face. The two ships stay two ships: nothing merges and neither pilot loses the helm for good. The pair flies as one body: the other ship flies it until H takes the helm, and D again lets go. It needs a docking port on both hulls. See Docking port.
  • Centre of mass - the point the flight computer balances every burn through. A section weighs the box it is hit on, so the centre moves as the hull is built and as it is shot apart, and the computer rebalances live. See Balancing thrust through the hull.
  • Gravity well - only planets and anchors are static well sources. Every mobile asteroid and every ship, as well as gun rounds and torpedoes in flight, responds to their pull. See Gravity wells.
  • Sphere of influence - the reach of a gravity well, set by the body's authored mass alone: the distance where the pull decays to a fixed cutoff. Outside it the well does not pull on you; only the dominant well inside it matters.
  • Dominant well - the one well that counts where you are. ORBIT circularises around it and STOP budgets for its pull. See The dominant well.
  • Hysteresis - a bit of stickiness that stops a state from flickering at its edge. A lock, a fine-lock section, and the dominant well all hold a little past their switch point so they do not chatter.

Ships

  • Section - one part of a hull: a hull block, a controller, a thruster, a turret, a torpedo bay or a railgun. Each is its own body with its own mass, its own health and one job. See Ship sections.
  • Cell - one 10 m cube of the build grid, and the one world unit the engine counts it as. Sections are sized in cells - a torpedo tube is two, a railgun three - and a hull's mass is the sum of its boxes.
  • Hull section - the passive structural block the other sections mount to, and where most of a ship's mass is. See Hull.
  • Controller - the flight computer. It turns the ship, flies the autopilot verbs and works point defense; lose the last one and the ship is neutralized. See Controller.
  • Socket - a face a section bolts on through. A thruster offers only its forward face, so it always seats nose-in with the plume clear of the ship. See Thruster.
  • Variant - one shipped prototype of a section kind, listed at the foot of each section page: the Kinetic and Pierce PDCs on their two mounts, the Serpent and Lance bays, the base ships' own engines and pods.
  • Cladding - decorative plating and fixtures. They take damage and sections can shield them, but they neither shield anything nor slow a blast's pressure. See What damage looks like.
  • Structural depth - how far into a hull a blast reaches. A section that survives its pressure stops the wave; a destroyed one passes 65 percent on. See What a warhead does to a hull.
  • Wreck - a healthy piece of hull that a cut disconnected from the controller. It keeps drifting, keeps its shape and still takes damage, but nothing aboard flies or fires it. See Taking a ship apart.
  • Neutralized - out of the fight for good. An armed ship that loses its last working gun, or the flight computer it had, stops fighting; an unarmed ship that ever had a thruster goes the same way once the last working one dies. Either way the hull survives: the viewfinder tags the wreck NEUTRALIZED, its mounts stop answering, and it keeps drifting rather than despawning. See Taking a ship apart.

Targeting

  • Radar sweep - hold Ctrl to run the radar: it tracks the best body inside an 18-degree cone around your aim and re-targets as you sweep. See Holding to sweep.
  • Lock-on dwell - the short hold a lock has to be earned through. Pointing at something does not lock it; holding steady on it does.
  • Nav lock / combat lock - the two lock slots. A lowered (white) stance sweeps a nav lock the autopilot flies to; a raised (red) stance sweeps a combat lock the guns aim at. See Stances and slots.
  • Stance - whether your weapons are lowered or raised. It picks which slot a sweep fills, and it is one of the two things that make the weapons hot.
  • Fine-lock - drilling a combat lock into one specific section of an enemy hull, so turrets and the viewfinder focus that part. See Per-section fine-lock.
  • "Hot" weapons - your weapons are hot while you hold a raised (red) combat stance or while a combat lock exists. Hot means the viewfinder frame goes red and you can fire.
  • Weapons safety - the lowered state, the opposite of hot: no trigger fires, a bay keeps its iris shut and a railgun will not start a charge. Raise the weapons or take a combat lock and it is off.
  • Lock range - how far out the radar will take and hold a lock. See Lock ranges.
  • Clearing - dropping locks, in stages rather than all at once. See Clearing locks.

Combat

  • Reach - how far a round, slug or torpedo gets before it expires: muzzle speed times lifetime, never an authored number. A PDC round reaches 2 km, a railgun slug 18 km, a torpedo about 30 km. See Three reaches.
  • Engagement ladder - the three reaches on one axis, and the shape of every fight: torpedoes at the long end, the railgun in the middle, guns close in.
  • Closing speed - how fast you and your target converge along the round's line of flight. It scales Kinetic damage and Pierce depth in both directions and moves the reach with them. See Closing speed.
  • Cover - a round expends itself on the first tangible thing it meets, so a rock between you and a hostile eats the burst that was meant for it. See Combat.
  • Kinetic / Pierce - the two bullet behaviors, told apart by tracer colour. A Kinetic round punches: it stops at the first section it fails to destroy. A Pierce round rakes: it crosses several sections and damages every one on the way through. See Damage types.
  • Explosive - the torpedo's damage type: area pressure falling off from the centre of the blast, with no speed term, worked through the hull by structural depth.
  • Power - a Pierce round's depth budget. Every section it crosses spends some of it, the tougher the section the more, and the round stops when it is gone. A railgun slug carries 1800. See How far a round travels.
  • Intercept lead - aiming where the target will be when the round arrives, computed in the shooter's own frame. Every turret does it. See Aiming with lead.
  • Barrel discipline - a gun fires only while its barrel is actually on the aim point, so it holds through a slew and a mount that cannot bear simply waits. See Barrel discipline.
  • Blind cone - the sky under a turret's own keel that its barrel cannot depress into: ten degrees below level and everything under that. See What it can bear on.
  • Point defense - your turrets' automatic close-in fire against inbound torpedoes. Each mount picks and holds its own torpedo, and your flight computer works the mounts you are not using; every intercept costs real ammunition. See Turret for the mount and Combat for the battery.
  • Saturation - firing at a facing from more directions than it has mounts to answer. Torpedoes arriving from one side, or from under a hull, meet only the guns that can train on them.
  • Magazine - what a weapon holds and how it gets it back: a batch lands after a quiet delay, all at once or not at all, and any shot restarts the clock. See Magazines.
  • Lance / Serpent / Breaker - the torpedo types, each named and tinted on the viewfinder when you lock one. The Lance runs straight and fast, so point defense can answer it; the Serpent corkscrews on approach and costs far more rounds to stop; the Breaker is the huge crimson siege warhead scripted batteries fire. (The railgun's catalog entry is named Railgun Lance; these pages call it the railgun.)
  • Weave - the Serpent's terminal corkscrew, laid over its guidance so a lead solution is never quite right, and tapering out on the doorstep.
  • Arming gate - the short time or distance after launch before a torpedo's guidance and fuze go live, so it cannot go off in your lap.
  • Fuze - a torpedo bursts about thirty meters from the nearest part of its target's skin; with nothing left to reach it bursts a half-radius short. See How a torpedo runs in.
  • Blast - the warhead's pressure: full at the centre, zero at the edge of its radius, and worked through a hull by structural depth. See What a warhead does to a hull.
  • Iris - the six-petal muzzle door on a torpedo bay. It opens for a launch and for nothing else, so an open iris on another hull means a torpedo is coming. See Shut until it fires.
  • Railgun - the spinal gun: three cells of rails with no traverse, so the hull is the aim. A tap commits a 1.5 s charge that only the weapons safety can stop, and the slug that leaves rakes a corridor through everything in the line. One shell, a twelve-second reload.
  • Charge - the 1.5 seconds between the trigger tap and the shot, committed: the slug leaves whether or not the nose is still on the target. See Committing the shot.
  • Bore sight - the HUD line a railgun-carrying hull draws from its muzzle to where the slug would stop, with a ring on every section the shot would destroy. Up while weapons are hot; dimmed through the reload.
  • Corridor - what a railgun slug leaves: the bore column the slug's tip cut, widened by a sphere trailing the tip to about three cells across, entry to exit. Every section in it pays out of the one power budget, so a wider rake is never more damage, only a differently shaped hole - see What one shot takes out.
  • Rake - the sphere a railgun slug drags behind its tip. It widens the cut into the corridor and only ever touches what the tip has already reached.
  • Recoil - the shove a railgun gives the ship that fired it, landing at the muzzle: a gun off the ship's axis yaws it as well as pushing it back. See The recoil.
  • Carve - what a hit does to a rock: it takes real material out of the asteroid's shape, so the silhouette and the thing you can fly into both change. Only rocks carve - a ship's parts keep the shape they were built in until they die. See Shooting rock.
  • Crater - the hole a carve leaves. It stays, and fire landing near it deepens the same hole instead of opening a new one.

Interface

  • HUD - the heads-up display: diegetic, because the instruments read the ship's real state, and contextual, because elements surface while their moment is live and settle back when it passes. See HUD.
  • Diegetic - part of the world rather than an overlay bolted on top. The HUD instruments read the ship's real state and the autopilot flies the same real thrusters you do, so what you see is what the ship is actually doing.
  • Velocity sphere - the flight readout that shows where the ship is going, with the speed chip beside it. It turns violet while RCS is held. See Flight readouts.
  • Viewfinder - the target frame: what you have locked, how far it is and how fast it is closing, and the NEUTRALIZED tag on a wreck. See Target viewfinder.
  • Allegiance markers - the always-on ship markers, tinted by how each ship stands to you. See Allegiance markers.
  • Keybind dock - the strip of chips listing the verbs your ship has right now. A chip appears only when the ship has the verb, RCS included. See Keybinds.
  • Interface - the Tab panel with Map, Ship and Inventory panes over the frozen world. See Interface.
  • NOVA COMMANDS - the : prompt on the ship's CRT monitor: inspection, settings, the flight log and armed cheats, over any screen. See Commands.
  • Comms - the story panel where a scenario talks to you and lists its objectives. See Comms and objectives.

World

  • Allegiance - Player, Enemy or Neutral: the one side every ship carries. Any two things resolve to Own, Hostile or Neutral, and that relation drives acquisition, whose rounds hurt whom, and reticle tint. An armed Neutral ship that is hit answers the shooter alone, reading Hostile to just that one ship without changing side. See Factions.
  • Raider - an enemy gunship. It flies the same catalog guns as you on scavenger-grade mounts, closes to about a kilometer and fights there. See Turret.
  • Scenario - a placed world and the events, filters and actions wired over it: the same machinery for a five-minute tutorial and a combat sandbox. See Scenarios.
  • Objective - what a scenario asks of you, listed on the comms panel and advanced by the scenario's events.
  • Basic Training - the first-flight course, the flight Your first flight walks through beat by beat: a Fleet gunnery qualification flown on an armed picket.
  • Rock - an asteroid: mobile, carvable cover that eats rounds and responds to gravity wells; asteroids do not create wells. See Shooting rock.