Read the crew chip

Find out who is aboard, how close they are to passing out, and how much food is left, without leaving the flight.

Use this in the air whenever the chip at the top left changes colour, or before a hard burn when you want to know how much load the crew will take.

Before you start

You are in flight with at least one Meek aboard. The chip is not on screen for an unmanned ship.

Steps

Look at the top left, under the altitude. With one Meek aboard the chip is a face, their name, and one line under it.
One aboard. The second line is the trade, the load they black out past, and the food left.
Read the second line. In ordinary flight it names the trade, then the G they stay awake through, then the days of food aboard. Anything else and it has been replaced by a state, in capitals, in a colour.
Look for a row of faces instead. With more than one Meek aboard the chip shows faces alone, pilot first, so it does not fill the column. Its outline still takes the worst state aboard.
Three aboard, pilot on the left.
Tap the chip to see them large. One Meek aboard or ten, a tap makes the chip itself bigger, right where it is: every portrait doubles and every Meek gets a line of their own, in seat order behind the pilot, with their name and the same state line in the same colour. Nothing opens over the flight, and the chip stays big while you fly, so a Meek who passes out changes face in front of you; what sits under it in the column moves down to make room. It stays that way until you tap it again, on the next flight too.
The same three, tapped big. A second tap folds the chip back to the row of faces.

What the state line says

Line	Colour	What it means
ASTRONAUT · 6.4 G · 19 d food	grey	Ordinary. Their trade, the load they black out past, and how long the ship's food lasts everybody eating.
PANICKING · 6.4 G	amber	Within two G of their own limit. The world is already darkening at the edges. Ease off.
PASSED OUT	red	Out cold. If it is the pilot, the ship's controls are dead until they come to.
BRACING FOR IMPACT	amber	The ship is coming down faster than 100 m/s with under a minute of ground left. Everyone aboard shows this.
HUNGRY · 0.4 d food	amber	Under a day of food left on the whole ship. When it runs out, everyone eating from it is lost.
SAFE DESCENT	green	Coming down under an open canopy, slow enough that every part aboard would survive the landing.
EXCITED	green	They have just done something they had never done before. It lasts twenty seconds.
LOST	red	They died aboard. Their row stays on the chip for the rest of the flight, wearing the same dead face the Astronaut Center's memorial shows — even when they were the only one aboard and there is nobody left to fly the ship.

What you should see

The chip's outline takes the worst state aboard, so it goes amber if any one of them is panicking or hungry and red if any one of them is out or lost, whatever the others are doing. The faces change with the state as well: each of them wears their trade's working face while that trade has something to do, and their own expression when their body is in trouble. A face waits a moment and a half before it goes back to rest, so tapping the thrusters in space keeps the working face up rather than making it blink; any other change shows straight away.

Heads up

The food figure is for the whole ship, not for one seat. Food reaches every seat aboard through the joints, so a cabin eats from the pod's larder as readily as its own, and one number covers everybody.

Who is working, and when

Flying the ship is the pilot's job, not everybody's. Each Meek goes to work at the thing their own trade is aboard for, so the chip tells you what the ship is doing as well as who is on it — a botanist with a seedling means the crop is actually growing, whatever else is happening.

Trade	At work while…
Astronaut	They are the one flying: the ship is under thrust, being steered, or sliding on the thrusters. A second astronaut aboard is a passenger until they take the controls.
Engineer	An engine is burning.
Botanist	A crop is growing in a greenhouse aboard. Shut, dark or unstaffed, nobody is gardening.
Nuclear Scientist	A reactor's core is lit, or coming up to speed. The sealed AR-4 runs without anybody, so it gives nobody work.
Scientist	An instrument has just been read — for eight seconds after it, the moment their trade pays.
Medic	Somebody aboard is out cold, or holding on near their own limit.
Tourist	The ship is coasting: the camera is out, which is what they paid for.

The face is a picture of what is happening, not a hand on it: a medic at work still changes nothing about the flight, and a botanist grows the crop whether you are looking at the chip or not.