Add distress beacons to the Horizon's shuttles.

[greenjoe]

Title, basically. It would be useful for the Horizon's shuttles to be able to use distress beacons the same way as 3rd party ships.

However, the not so simple part is that something would need to be in place to stop it being used in place of the Horizon's own distress beacon, and bypassing the two command ID swipe for that.

[Venty]

I heavily agree with this. There have been so many times where I was out as Ririlsk, got into some emergency, and was stuck in place without any way to contact the Horizon (asteroids destroying power, injuries making it impossible to fly, glitches with flying make it impossible to leave a place or planet). I always had to hope that someone would notice. Having a way to send off an emergency signal or a distress beacon would help so much. One thing that could help is maybe splitting things between a major distress beacon, and a pre-recorded signal that can be sent to the Horizon? Like, a message over the Command or Hailing radio saying something along the lines "An error, issue or abnormal circumstance has left [insert shuttle here] in potentially dangerous circumstances. Assistance required."

[Estutes]

Perhaps some kind of "sectorial" fax machine that allows to send written messages long distances throughout the sector.

But I don't think adding your regular fax machine to other vessels would be much of a problem... What's the CCIA players input on this?

[NerdyVampire]

This makes me think of my beloved Death Alarm. Why not "implant" the shuttles with one that goes off automatically the first time the navigational consoles become inoperable (due to loss of power, or destruction)? I would suggest it sends to command, engineering and operations. The death alarm, conversely, sends to command, medical and security.

I wouldn't be opposed the the pilot having a way of manually triggering the alarm or a similar alarm.

Fax machines, I think we should keep off the shuttles, it seems a bit wrong that they can communicate in that manner. One of the exciting things about the shuttle systems is the inability to easily communicate over large distances.