Ships has a number of devices. What are they? How do they work? These questions are answered here.
This page gives general details of how a ship works.
A key part of Jartrek is managing your ships power budget. At the start of a phase the generator produces power and stores it the ship's 'invisible' capacitator device. Each ship device the operates, in turn, starting with the most critical and ending with the least critical (actually the same order they are in in the devices display). The device works out how much power it needs and tries to draw it from the capacitator. If it succeeds the device functions if not it doesn't.
At the end of the phase any remaining power, in the capacitator, is used to recharge batteries.
Note : The ship can only handle a certain maximum amount of power per phase (busbars only have a limited thickness) so even if the battery is fully charged it cannot provide significantly more power than the ships generators can produce when healthy.
If a device is healthy and 'on line' but doesn't seen to work have a look at the power meters. Something else is probably using all available power. Try reducing your ships power consumption. Stopping moving is a good way of doing this.
This ship can be at one of two possible alert modes controlled by a button at the bottom of the screen and indicated by the colour of the 'wom wom' light :-
Green Alert is usually used when no enemy ships are around. In this state the ship switches off most of its combat systems, conserves power and does not take unnecessary risks.
Red Alert is usually used when going into battle. The ship switches on it's combat systems, switches off non essential systems and is prepared to overload devices if necessary.
The way that many devices function in red or green alert state can be customized via the device's 'control panel'.
Sometimes the ship may wish fire it's weapon at other ships. Which weapons are fired, when and at what is set up via the battle computer's control panel. Basically any subset of weapons can be set up to fire either :-
By command i.e. When the mouse is clicked on a target.
When the ship is in red alert state and a target of the specified type (friend, neutral or/and enemy) is in range.
When the ship is in green alert mode and a target of the specified type is in range.
Note : The closest target of the available type is fired at so any attempt to attack 'friend' will fire at your own ship i.e. Is an effective form of suicide. If you wish to attack another races ship you should first use the politics panel to set them as 'neutral' or 'enemy'.
When a weapon hits a ship it will inflict a certain amount of damage. The damage allocation system breaks this up into a number of 'chunks' an applies them to random ship devices. If a ship has more devices (and thus one assumes is bigger) more, smaller, chunks are generated.
If the devices adsorb the damage OK. . If not remaining damage gets reallocated to another random device. If this goes on for too long then the ship is falling apart ... and explodes.
This sounds messy but seems to work.
Most ships have a built in 'damage control' device. This will repair minor damage however it is relatively slow and cannot replace destroyed devices. If a ship becomes too badly damaged it must dock at a starbase to be rapidly, and fully, repaired. This also re-supplies the ship's projectile weapons.
To dock at a starbase click the 'docking' button at the bottom of the screen. This will bring up the 'docking panel' showing a list of available, friendly, facilities with 'stardocks'. Select the nearest facility and click 'dock now'. Your ship will attempt to move to the facility and dock with it.
To undock . There are two ways of undocking:-
Open the 'docking panel' and click 'undock'.
Just move out of the facility ( Note : This is a temporary 'bodge'. Do you really think you can release the sort of energy produced by an impulse engine in a confined space and not vaporize everyone involved ?)
At present any ship which looses the capacity of moving to a starbase is effectively dead. In the future some sort of mobile repair facility/tug may be implemented. If a starbase is destroyed then the resulting explosion will also destroy any ships docked at it.
At present a ship in dock can still power up and use it's weapons. This is a bug and will eventually get fixed.