Light your ship at night

Fit lamps to a ship, choose how they shine, and switch them on, so you can land on a world's night side and be found in the dark.

You need this when the ground under a landing is too dark to read, or when you want a ship to be easy to spot beside another one.

• You own the Lighting node. See the tech tree.
• The ship carries charge: a floodlight at full brightness draws 0.06 u/s, a signal light 432 u/day.

Steps

1. Bolt the lamps on. In the hangar, open the Utility tab of the palette and put an FL-30 Floodlight or an SL-1 Signal Light on the side of the hull. Both throw their light out of their outer side; a floodlight's beam points straight out from it.
2. Aim the floodlight. Tap the floodlight twice to open its sheet and move Aim: it starts 30° toward the bottom of the part, which lights the ground beside a lander. Turn the part with Rotate to point it another way altogether.
3. Choose a signal light's colour and blink. On a signal light's sheet, pick Colour, red or green, and move Blink off Steady to make it flash, up to four times a second.
4. Set the brightness. Brightness, from 10 to 100 %, sets both how far the light reaches and how much power it draws.
5. Switch them on. Either tick On in the hangar, so the ship leaves the pad lit, or in flight tap the lamp and press Turn on. You can also put a lamp on a stage: in the staging list, choose Turn on or Turn off for it, and a stage can light your landing lights on the way down.

What you should see

A glow at each lamp's lens, and the dark lifted from whatever its light reaches: a floodlight lights a patch of ground where its beam lands and the ships in it, a signal light tints the hull around it in its colour. In the readout at the top left, the ELECTRICITY row's bracketed rate shows the lamps' draw.