Head of Staff and Acting Captain

Upon starting a round everyone inside of a department is informed of the identity of the Captain or Acting Captain and of their personal department head. These are roles that have some social and mechanical responsibilities but it should be noted that they are not as intimidating as they seem.

In reality, the responsibilities of each Head of Staff is to ensure that your department functions and that there is someone inside of the department who is nominally aware of what is going on inside of it. As a head of staff you are expected to resolve disputes between players of the same department and to be able to answer questions people have about what your employees are doing, but other than keeping an eye on your office you can generally just do the same as playing any other role in the department.

The only real added responsibility a head of staff has is, that if they are highest active on chain of command on roundstart, they have to get the Captain's Spare ID and secure the Nuclear Disk. These are both important for game progression reasons, but they are also not actually as intimidating as one might think.

The Captain's Spare ID Card

The Captain's Spare ID Card is a card with access to every single department, capable of opening any door and almost any lock on the space station. If you are acting captain, you will spawn with a code to the safe in the bridge which has this ID Card inside.

Holding it is obviously a responsibility, and keeping it safe from abuse is one of two responsibilities the Acting Captain has. In practice, what this means is that if someone is stuck in a room that they don't have access to, or needs something from secure tech storage, it is up to you as acting captain to either ignore or oblige them, depending on the nature of the request. The only other responsibility related to this item is to use it in order to get guns out of the armory when you feel like it is an emergency that warrants it.

The Nuclear Disk

The acting captains other responsibility is to secure the nuclear disk, which spawns inside of the captains office, and should be picked up as soon as you get the captain's ID. If placed inside of the nuclear bomb on every station, then when combined with the nuclear code, it can explode the station killing everyone on board. Bummer!

Mechanically speaking, the way that the disk works is as follows.

1. If the disk would leave the Space Station via any means other than the emergency shuttle, it will teleport back to a random location in the station. This includes
• Going to lavaland
• Walking too far into the ice moon wastes
• Getting kidnapped by traitors or sacrificed by heretics
• Going far into space
  
2. If the disk is kept still in one location or goes too long without interacting with a human player, it will attempt to spawn a Lone Operative to try to arm the nuclear bomb.

What this means in simple terms is that, mechanically, securing the disk is a matter of any living player keeping the disk inside of their internals box. There are no other responsibilities with the nuclear disk, however the moderation team of Orbstation would like to note that, while this is the mechanical true way to keep the disk safe, it is not against our policies to try to secure it via other means, just know that you might spawn a Lone Op in the process.

The Captain

So what does this mean about the actual role of Captain?

As we said in the Job Rules page, the captain is the final arbiter of disputes, someone who delegates other people on the station towards various goals or generally tries to keep the station running smoothly. You are free to do this with whatever methods you see fit, just remember that just because you're the boss doesn't mean that people have to listen to you or like every single choice you make. You have no other responsibilities other than to keep the station running until the round ends. Do whatever needs to be done or make other people do it, be a doting mother hen to every department or just play completely hands off and just keep drinking in the bar. As long as you keep your radio on and respond to the requests of your fellow players, it isn't really all that different from playing as any other role.

Delegating

The strongest tool that you have as either Captain or Acting Captain is to delegate tasks to other players. You have access to everything on the station, all of the computers, the armory, the vault, so feel free to promote some other people to lead their departments, go ahead and use loyalty implants on people to prevent midround antagonist spawning (though this does not remove their antagonist status if they have one), and give them a security belt and some security access. If you don't like fighting and don't want to actively hunt antagonists, just find three people and tell them to do it. Of course, none of this is mandatory, no one has to follow your orders, but like we said you will always have things that other people want.