Keep a probe in contact

Fit an uncrewed ship with a working aerial, check the radio chip before you need it, and find out on the map what is about to break the link.

You need this whenever the ship you are flying has nobody aboard. Lose contact and every control goes dead until it comes back.

Every link ends at the one Comm Station, on Earth. There is no dish on the Moon or Mars, however many worlds you have opened, so a probe working out there is either in Earth's sight or talking through a relay of yours. Plan the relay before you launch the probe.

• The ship is uncrewed. A pod with an astronaut in it never needs a link and never shows the chip.
• You have the Radio Comms tech node for a whip, or Deep Space Comms for a dish.

Before you launch

1. Put an antenna on the ship. Open the Comms tab in the hangar's palette and pull one out onto a flank. A whip is fixed and works from the pad; a dish rides up folded and has to be opened later.
2. Check the antenna is switched on. Tap it and look at its Antenna on toggle. It is on when the part is new, and an antenna switched off is worth exactly as much as no antenna.
3. Give the ship charge to run it on. An antenna draws continuously, so add a battery and a solar panel. Parts: Comms gives each antenna's draw.
4. If you fitted a dish, put it in a stage, after the stage that finishes the climb, so the boom swings out on its own once the ship is settled.

In flight

1. Find the radio chip in the top left. It reads "LINK" with either "DIRECT" or a hop count beside it, and a signal percentage under that. The waves drawn beside the mast are the same reading.
2. Open a folded dish once the burn is over. Tap it and tap Deploy. Until the boom is out the dish counts for nothing and the ship is flying on whatever else it carries.
3. Watch for the chip turning amber. Amber means the weakest link in the chain is nearly at its limit. On an ordinary orbit that is tens of seconds of warning.
4. Open the map and tap the comms chip on the left. Each tap moves it on: off, then CHAIN, then NETWORK. CHAIN draws only the hops carrying this ship. NETWORK draws every link you own and rings any unreachable relay in red.

   

5. Finish anything that needs the controls before the chip goes red. A burn already running keeps running with no link, but you cannot start, stop or change one.

What you should see

The chip stands in cyan with its full fan of waves for as long as the ship is in reach and nothing is in the way. It turns amber near the limit, then red with a bar through the mast when contact is lost, and it comes back on its own the moment the ship is in view again.

If the chip says "NO LINK"