Secondary Abilities:
CommThe tricorder should be able to handle comms, but by making it like an iPhone you actually make it more primitive than all commbadges. This is because the current commbadges handle perfect voice recognitiion and person to person connection. Either, you have to accept that you are making a more primitive system in order to keep a coherent in-universe placement of features, or you have to accept an out of context, but more advanced system for the traditional voice commbadge. I would accept either execution in this case, but I lean toward having a free floating out of context communications menu to reprisent the normal comm badge. I realize this means it being unlikely to have feature duplication through the tricorder. That's the reason why I'm ambivilant, the comm controls will look better through the tricorder and in its own way that is more important since comm control will be visual rather than verbal.
Outside of communicating with crew, the tricorder should have scientific communications options. I'm not sure what these features would be, but some would involve signal gain and breaking jamming, as well as directional signal detection and transmission, perhaps even signal recordering and transmission to the ship for code breaking. The tricorder can even be where dialog is archived.
Since everything should be networked, it should be possible to record what a commbadge hears through a remote tricorder.
Ship System AccessThe tricorder should be capable of interfacing with every ship's systems, even the helm. It should be cumbersome since the interface is smaller, but it should possible to work every system. This would require a command code, the same thing Kirk used to defeat Khan. It wouldn't be something you manually input, instead an automated sequence would happen, your character speaks the code and it apears on screen as confirmed.
This would be a special command program that only the highest ranking officers have. Even abrieviated versions would be too much of a risk since they would need the ship code to work.
I came up with an idea for remote control of ship's weapons on the ground at the STO forum. I'll modify it for this to some extent.
Orbital Bombardment and Orbital Support Fire are attacks I almost desperately want for the game. I can think of several ways it can be done.
Orbital Bombardment
* You get a world view centered on your current ground based location. It's much like Google Earth and it marks off everything of importance based on the zoom scale. You see this through the tricorder screen. This allows orbital bombardment on any scale.
This would be the tricorder linking to the ship's sensors and data banks, as well as its own sensors and storage to create the global view. Imagine you find a structure underground while you are in orbit and it is either shielded or so deep underground that transporters won't function. So, you open the map (either from the tricorder or a ship console) and target the specific structure, either dropping its shields or digging a whole. While on the ship, instead of the tricorder filling your view, the main view screen or whatever console you use will fill your view thanks to zooming. Or, an extremely hostile alien of great power, a virus, a parasite, or otherwise very hostile civilization. They have to be eliminated for the safety of your crew and of the Federation as whole. So, you target a large swath of land and wipe it off the world with a single torpedo set to max yield. The above situations have happened in various episodes to one extent or another giving all the more reason to have such abilities in the game.
Orbital Support Fire
* You whip out a tricorder and use it to guide a narrow beam from orbit, allowing you to sweep the beam where ever you point the reticule.
* You hold your tricorder on a particular target, be it a person, vehicle, or structure, and the ship automatically determines what is needed to kill the target.
* You click and drag a circle with the tricorder to determine the radius of the phaser strike.
* You target a person, vehicle, or structure and drag the radius of the circle, using the stationary or moving target as the center of the strike with an area effect of your choosing.
We've seen abilities similar to these in episodes and and movies which answers whether such powers can be in the game, why they should be in the game is because they would be awesome, fun, and useful.
The weaknesses of such attacks would be the minimal safe distance at which you can use those abilities. Starship weapons are extremely powerful, although, torpedoes do seem to be able to confine their energy to target shields without an area effect, so torpedoes would be good against hard targets such as vehicles and structures. Phasers have dangerous area effect, but would be faster responding and good against soft targets, people and unprotected vehicles, especially groups of soft targets. They too can be confined.
I think the real weakness of these attacks would be the fact that if you are setting up to use these, then you aren't firing on the enemy. It should take a few seconds to get these attacks going, and in that time all it will take is a few phaser hits to put you down. So, that will limit orbital support fire mostly to when you are fighting really large groups, or when you have the element of surprise so you can set up an orbital ambush. If you don't know where the enemy is, then you won't be able to use orbital support, although, with a general idea and a wide enough attack you could get some lucky hits. Even so, if most combat is indoors, it will simply be too dangerous to try using orbital support fire, since you could collapse the building on yourself, but it would be awesome if you did need to call support fire on yourself to get out of a shielded building or ship.
Contextual ControlIn addition to control of systems as broken down by department, it should also be possible to point the tricorder at an object in order to see if you can gain access. Whatever the pertinent control is for that object should automatically activate. That way, if you are at a shield emitter in a hallway, you hit the easy access button on the side of the tricorder and it brings up that particular object's controls. Point it at a rock and you get geological analysis. Point it at a person and bioscan activates. Point it at a phaser and you get a tech scan option, and it would tell you have to set the thing for overload, as well as how much of a charge it has, and its settings and statistics. Point it at a safe and it will bring up an encryption breaking program. At alien text and it will provide a visual translation. This would cut down on what could otherwise be endless searching through control hierarchies. None of this would mean those are the only options for those objects, but it would be the generally most useful option.
BeamingBeaming should be under a single button with all beaming methods under that. But for quick beaming, there should be a single click beam button that will beam up whatever you are point at, as long as you are in beaming mode. One of the side buttons would take on this function, so there would be the contextual switching button, and the contextual use button. There should be a more advanced beam window that allows you to beam whatever you look at, but which has options for where on the ship the thing is beamed, be it the med bay, a cargo hold, brig, transporter pad, or space on a wide beam dispersal setting.
