V808 OMS - Scramble Pads

Land your fleet. Command your dirt.

Scramble Pads adds a buildable defense pad to your outposts. A private one-ship standing guard, run from an integrated terminal. Your outpost stops being a quiet bench-of-machinery and starts being a place that runs a fleet.

Hire a contract pilot. Deploy one of your stored ships to the pad. Assign the pilot. Scramble it to orbit. It takes up station in your system, and stays. Every time you launch into orbit it's already up there waiting. Jumped by spacers on arrival? Your guardian is already on the way. Done with the standing watch? Recall it, and watch it fly back down and land on the pad. If a fight goes badly and your ship is destroyed, you lose the hull and the pilot with it. Defense that risks nothing isn't defense.

The build. One Scramble Pad per outpost. Standard outpost resources: 20 Iron, 10 Aluminum, 2 Zero Wire, 2 Beryllium. A small V808 Enterprises efficiency discount over building a pad and a terminal separately. The build cap auto-enforces (1 per outpost) via the vanilla outpost build system. No script tax.

The integrated terminal, four divisions:

Accounting. Hire your Contract Pilot. 10,000 credits, one time, persistent.

Business. Fleet status readout: where your ship is, who's flying it, what to do next. If a ship was lost in action, your next visit here confirms it.

Command. The action menu. Deploy Ship to Pad, Recall Ship to Fleet, Assign Pilot to Ship, Scramble to Orbit, Recall from Orbit.

R&D. "Restricted. Your interest has been noted." (More to come.)

Every terminal action confirms on-screen with a clear center-screen message. No guessing whether it took.

How it plays:

Build a Scramble Pad at any outpost. Hire a Contract Pilot. One-time fee, persistent crewmember. Deploy one of your stored, non-active ships to the pad. Even that captured, unregistered hull you've been wondering what to do with. Lands gear-down on the deck. Assign the pilot to that ship. Scramble to Orbit. The ship lifts off, climbs away, and takes up station in your system. And stays. Hop to another planet or moon in the system and back? It's still there. Every time you launch into orbit, it's already on station, ready to fight on your side using the same player-ally faction system vanilla allies use. No custom combat AI. Get jumped on launch in your own system? Your guardian is already there to lend a hand. Recall from Orbit. Done with the standing watch? Recall it. The ship returns from space, descends onto the pad, gear down, ready for next time. Lost for good. If your scrambled ship is destroyed in a fight, it's gone, and the pilot with it. Re-hire and re-deploy to scramble again. Honest stake. Why it lands as a moment:

There's something simple and good about seeing a second ship of yours just sitting at your outpost. Not buried in the ship-management menu. Just there. Gear down, silhouette on your skyline, the place that says this base runs a fleet.

The hired pilot, the technician, sandboxes around the settlement. Walks the deck. Does outpost-crew things. Has a life there. When you give the order at the terminal, you watch them run to the ship. Actually run, on the engine's own pathing, no teleport tricks. Hatch open, board, gear lifts, thrusters fire, full takeoff animation. Up, up, and away, as a certain Adoring Fan might say.

The ship sits in orbit until you recall it. Same animations on the way home. Descent, gear-snap, deck. No magic. Just an outpost that lives.

And it's your ship. Walk aboard your scrambled hull either groundside or in orbit. Your pilot is at the controls. Your ship. Your employee. If you've been hoarding captured spacer hulls with nothing to do, they qualify too. The vanilla game barely lets you do anything with those. V808 puts them to work.

The honest v0.9 envelope:

This is the first public release. A complete, polished, single-vessel core: one pad, one pilot, one ship per outpost. The vanilla outpost Landing Pad (where your home ship lives) is untouched and coexists. The Scramble Pad is for an NPC-piloted vessel only.

The scrambled vessel is one of your own stored ships, temporarily flown by the contract pilot. Not a spawn, not a clone. Your actual hull, taking actual risks, on station over your home system.

Why it's safe to install:

Vanilla-only. Sole master is Starfield.esm. No DLC, no Creation dependency, no other mod required.

No script extender. Zero SFSE dependency. Runs on a base-game install, which is what makes it Xbox-legal.

Base-game assets only. No custom meshes or textures in v0.9. Nothing to download beyond the plugin and its scripts.

Save-safety conscious. Purely additive. Adds its own records, overrides no vanilla records. Designed to install and run cleanly alongside a normal playthrough.

Built on proven vanilla mechanisms. Fight-on-your-side uses the vanilla player-ally faction reaction. Takeoff and landing use the engine's own gear-down animations. The pilot is a standard generic ship-crew NPC. The pad is a standard outpost buildable. The engine's own build-limit auto-enforces the 1-per-outpost cap.

Footprint: one plugin (~12 KB) plus three compiled scripts (~33 KB total). Under 50 KB installed. No archives, no assets.

Coming after v0.9:

Scramble Pads is the first of a family. Future versions expand to multiple pad types and sizes, additional pilots, and the broader V808 Enterprises operations the terminal's Business and R&D divisions hint at. The catalog grows from here. The v0.x label isn't unfinished. It's a real product with room to grow toward v1.0.

A V808 Studios catalog mod. Act 1's corporate substrate for the upcoming Infinitum Addendum: Blacklisted.

Requires: base game only (Starfield.esm). No DLC. No script extender. No other mods.

V808 Enterprises. Land your fleet. Command your dirt.