Trek73

The Mission

TREK73 drops you into a single running battle. Your ship was on a peacetime errand — a distress call, a diplomatic run, a survey — when a squadron of enemy battle cruisers turned onto an intercept course. There is no map to explore and no crew to beam down. There is only the fight, and it starts the moment sensors resolve the contacts.

You win by removing every enemy from the fight — destroyed, crippled, driven off, or surrendered. You lose if your ship is destroyed or beaten into helplessness. Everything in this manual serves those two facts.

Taking the Conn

Before the shooting starts the game asks three things:

• Your last name and M/F — flavor only; it sets how the crew addresses you.
• How many enemy vessels you want to face, from 1 to 9. This is your difficulty dial, and it is not linear — see the warning below.

You then get a captain's-log briefing (your mission), a sensor identification of the enemy type and their commander, and a roster of the ships attacking you. Read the roster: those are the names you will be locking weapons onto. Enemy crews come in several races, and a few of them behave differently under pressure — Romulans in particular are harder to bluff and likelier to parley.

How a Turn Works

This is the concept most new commanders miss, and it decides more battles than marksmanship.

Almost every command you enter consumes a turn. When it does, the game resolves a full slice of real time: the enemy captains choose their moves, then everyone's weapons and engines run through several firing/movement ticks at once. Firing phasers is a turn. Loading tubes is a turn. So is checking your own damage. You do not get to fire phasers and torpedoes in the same turn — pick one.

Only three commands are free — they show you information without advancing the battle, and the game marks them with an asterisk:

Reading Your Instruments

The game plays as a command console. On the left is the transcript — the running battle log. On the right is the status rail: two live readouts that refresh every turn, so you rarely need to spend a turn checking anything. On a phone the rail collapses to Log / Tactical / Ship tabs you flick between.

Tactical station — live position & map (12 & 13)

The top of the rail is your sensor picture, the same information commands 12 and 13 used to print, now always on:

• A contact list of every enemy ship with its bearing, range and warp, tagged closing or eluding.
• A tactical scope plotting everything by true bearing and range, centered on you.

Read the scope like a radar screen. You are the gold Starfleet delta at the center, and the short gold bug on the inner ring shows the way your nose is actually pointing — useful for telling whether a target is ahead of you or behind, in your phasers' rear blind spot. The compass runs 0° right, 90° up, 180° left, 270° down. The marks are:

• Ship — a filled dot with a three-letter tag; brighter red when closing, muted when eluding.
• Probe — a hollow ring.
• Torpedo — a small filled diamond; a cluster of these bearing in on you is a torpedo salvo.
• Debris — an ×, a jettisoned engineering section.

The scope auto-scales to frame the ships, so the zoom stays steady as the fight moves; the range it's using is shown beneath it. You can still use command 13 to pin a specific range, and the readout will say so. Anything past the current range clamps to the outer ring, so you always know it's out there.

Ship station — live damage report (17)

The lower rail is your own ship at a glance — effectively command 17, always visible: your four shield bars, fuel against capacity, regeneration and efficiency, your helm (warp and course), any damaged systems, and your survivor count. Watch the shield bars — a quadrant dropping into the red is your cue to reset shields before the next volley lands.

Issuing commands

Type a command code and press Enter, or click a button: the quick bar under the input holds the common orders, and All Commands opens the full grouped list. A button simply enters that code for you; you then answer the same prompts you would have typed. Either way the command flow is identical.

Bearings

Bearings and courses use a compass where 0° is right, 90° is up, 180° is left, 270° is down. A ship bearing 180 from you is directly to your left; to point at it, come to course 180.

Command Reference

★ marks the free commands — 12, 13, 29 (and 17 in practice, since your ship status is shown live in the rail). Everything else spends your turn. Enter a code and press Enter, or click it in the quick bar / All Commands, then answer the prompts shown under Input.

When a prompt asks which banks or tubes, enter the digits any way you like — 1234, 1 2 3 4, and 1,2,3,4 are equivalent. Each digit is one bank/tube (so 12 = banks 1 and 2), and anything out of range is simply ignored.

Weapons & Damage

Phasers

Four banks, instant beams, effective to about 1000 units. Lock them onto a target (3, needs a working computer) so they track it, then fire (1). When you fire you set a spread from 05 to 45:

• A tight spread (low number) concentrates the beam — more damage, but the target must be well inside the bank's arc or the shot misses.
• A wide spread (high number) is forgiving on aim but hits softer.

Phasers cannot lock onto anything in your rear arc — the dead zone from 125° to 235° relative to your nose. If a target slips behind you, a locked bank simply holds fire until it comes back around, so keep your quarry in the forward arc. Phasers draw from a charge that regenerates between turns (see 19). One thing they do quietly: a phaser beam also strikes any torpedo or probe crossing its arc, burning down that warhead's payload — real point-defense against an incoming salvo.

Torpedoes

Six tubes firing antimatter warheads. Your tubes start empty — load them from fuel with 9 before you can fire. A normal load is 10 units; overload to 15 for a bigger warhead. Lock tubes onto a target (4) and fire (2).

A torpedo's detonation is an area blast, and its radius scales with its payload: units × 50. A 15-unit torpedo reaches 750 units in every direction — and the blast does not care whose ship it touches.

Probes (10 & 11)

Launch with 10 — it needs a working probe launcher and enough fuel — setting pods (10–40), a time-delay fuse (0–15), a proximity fuse (50–2000), and either a target name to home on or a bare course. Probes home and are steerable in flight with 11, which lets you detonate every probe at once, or pick one by ID number and detonate it, re-target it, or set it a new course. They are the biggest bombs in the game — the same pods × 50 radius means a full 40-pod probe blasts out to 2000 units. Devastating, and even easier to catch yourself with than a torpedo. Launch them at range, not in a knife-fight.

Firing Parameters (20)

Global settings for your ordnance: torpedo launch speed (0–12, default 12), the time-delay and proximity fuses your torpedoes arm with, and your phaser firing % (default 100). Dropping the firing % gives weaker shots but lets a bank fire more times before it needs to recharge — a way to trade punch for sustained fire.

Shields, Power & Fuel

Shields

Four shields cover four quadrants around you. How much a hit is absorbed depends on the drain (power you allocate) times the shield's current strength. Every hit chips a shield's strength down, so a quadrant that has been taking fire absorbs less and less — until hits start passing at nearly full force and the 40-point breach threshold comes into play.

Power Distribution (19)

This is the dial that governs how your antimatter is spent. It sets three things:

• Regeneration rate — how quickly fuel replenishes each turn.
• Shield drains, one per shield, each 0 to 1 — how much power a shield draws. Higher means a stronger shield but a thirstier one; set a drain to 0 to drop that shield entirely.
• Phaser charge rates, one per bank, each −10 to 10 — how fast a bank recharges. A negative rate drains the bank back into your fuel reserve, trading firepower for range.

Fuel is antimatter is everything

One pool of antimatter powers your warp engines, recharges your phasers, and feeds your shields. It is also the raw material for ordnance:

• Loading tubes and launching probes spends fuel, and lowers your fuel capacity until you unload the tubes (probe pods are gone for good). Load 90 units into your tubes and you have just cut your usable fuel — and your top speed and endurance — accordingly.
• Regeneration slowly refills fuel each turn, up to your current capacity, at the rate you set in 19.
• Efficiency (shown in your damage report) is really an inefficiency figure: it starts near 1.0 and rises as you take damage, and the higher it climbs the more fuel every warp move costs. A battered ship is a thirsty one.

Maneuvering

Three ways to move: Pursue (14) locks your heading onto a target and closes; Run (15) turns you away from one; Manual Helm (16) lets you set an exact course and warp. Warp factor runs from about −9 to 9 (negative is reverse; 0 stops).

Pursue includes a helm assist: as you close on your quarry it eases you down to roughly a 1000-unit standoff instead of barrelling past — close enough to fight well, far enough to keep the enemy in your forward arc and (usually) outside your own worst blast radius. It never overrides your throttle upward and never touches your heading; it only keeps you from overshooting.

Victory, Defeat & Parley

You win when no enemy is left in the fight. That can mean every enemy destroyed, every enemy crippled into uselessness (out of fuel and out of loaded weapons), every enemy driven off the field, or the enemy accepting your surrender demand. Driving them off still counts — Starfleet commends a commander who out-maneuvers an aggressor as readily as one who destroys it.

You lose if your ship is destroyed, or left so helpless — no power, no working weapons, no propulsion — that the fight is over.

Ruses (23 & 24)

Two one-shot tricks can buy you time. Play Dead (23) drops your shields and cuts power to feign a wreck, transferring that power to your engines (E) for a getaway or phasers (P) for an ambush — roughly a 30% chance the enemy buys it. The Corbomite Bluff (24) broadcasts Kirk's classic threat of mutual destruction; it works about 40% of the time against Romulans and 60% against everyone else. Each can be used only once, and firing while a ruse is live tells the enemy it was a lie.

Parley (25 & 26)

Surrender (25) offers to end the fight on the enemy's terms — accepted about 50% of the time by Romulans, only ~5% by others. Demand Surrender (26) tries the reverse, and only lands on an enemy already badly beaten — low on fuel, weapons gone, heavy casualties. A healthy enemy will laugh it off.

Self-Destruct (27 & 28)

27 starts a 20-second (~10-turn) countdown, turning your ship into a bomb built from all your remaining fuel and loaded torpedoes; 28 aborts it while time remains. Any enemy caught close when the timer runs out goes up with you. Use it to turn a certain loss into a mutual one — not as a threat you don't intend to keep.

Tactical Doctrine

Everything above, distilled into the habits that keep commanders alive.

• Keep your shields whole. The 40-point breach is the fastest way to die. Never wander into a fight with them dropped.
• Respect your own blast radius. Torpedoes reach units × 50; a full probe reaches 2000. Shoot heavy ordnance from distance, not in a clinch.
• Guard the warp drive. The ship that controls the range controls the battle. Losing propulsion usually loses the fight.
• Don't charge a swarm. Pursuing one ship drives you into all of them. Against three or four, break contact and string them out so their torpedoes arrive scattered instead of as one chain-reacting wall.
• Let the enemy's chain reactions work for you. Bunched enemies bomb each other. Position so their volleys cluster on their formation, not on you.
• Focus fire. One dead enemy stops shooting; two half-dead ones don't. Concentrate on a single target until it's out.
• Use phasers as point defense. Firing at a ship also thins any salvo crossing the beam. Facing incoming torpedoes is a reason to fire, not to hold.
• Keep the target in your forward arc. Phasers can't lock through the 125°–235° rear dead zone. Turn to face, don't present your tail.
• Spend fuel like it's your life. Don't over-load tubes; keep enough in the tank to maneuver and to feed your shields.
• Spend turns like they're rationed. They are. Use the free commands (12, 13, 29) to plan, and make every turn-consuming order — scans included — count.

Quick Reference