User:Studenterhue/Communications Officer

Manta

What if we told you there was a position on the NSS Manta where you get paid to just stand around and talk? That's essentially what you do as the Communications Officer. All you do is just sit in your office, watching the communications tower and informing the crew of what's happening on the ship, ideally with some flair. Because of this, it's easily the most laid-back Head role on the ship and is an easy choice for those looking for simple responsibilities and ample roleplaying opportunity.

The Communications System

The comms system of the NSS Manta centers around the communications tower in the Communications Office, the pigsty of antennas and blinkenlights that looks like a rejected tree design from A Charlie Brown Christmas, depicted on the right. Pretty much all communication systems, aside from machinetalk and announcement computers (and, obviously, writing and talking), are relayed through this central hub, including:

• PDA messages.
• Headsets.
• Phonelines.
• Intercoms.
• Station-bounced radios.

Should the communications tower be taken offline, such as via a bomb, the system will attempt to fix itself by establishing an uplink to Oshan Laboratory. This takes about eight minutes, and in the meantime, all the aforementioned systems will be completely nonfunctional--period. You can't just spam messages until it goes through like in a solar flare. Despite what you might think, the extra distance doesn't slow down or otherwise affect radio communications, and they continue along as normal once the uplink is established.

Your Role

As Communications Officer, Nanotrasen has entrusted you with protecting that absolute disarray of a comms array. Naturally, you don't get any weapons, or access to some, to defend it if someone tries to break into the comms office to destroy it, and you really don't have any way to repair it or replace it if it gets damaged or taken out. On top of this, the most popular method of disabling the comms tower by far is to bomb the maintenance area above the comms office, which you really can't do much against.

In short, you're protecting something you have no power to protect and managing a system that usually doesn't have a problem and fixes itself when it does. This is better than it sounds, for it lets you concencrate your far more interesting duty of...

The Radio Lab

Explain how to work the radio equipment, probably gonna link to the Radio Host page, after adding better instructions on the page.

Radio Show Ideas

Probably gonna look similar to a theoretical list of radio show ideas that would theoretically be on the Radio Host page