Built at the Gornskew works: Eyes Only, the fitted radio shack. The module arrives with its own Communications Officer, and her station serves one purpose — the board, and everything that has to reach you across a room you are already busy in.
Every Officer who comes with the line is nurturing, caring, and in everyone's business — sometimes to the point of being annoying. We advertise that last one too, because it is the point: a Communications Officer who waited to be asked would be no use at two in the morning. Their names are lilting and nasal and nearly always end on a hum, so an Officer's name trails off rather than stops. Alone among the crew, they sound like they are still transmitting after the speaker has finished.
We can tell you exactly what any radio shack of this line will be like, because we build them to be like this. Which Officer you get is another matter: her name is minted at muster, and until your ship comes up neither of us knows it.
Everything the ship is watching gets a tile: answering, degraded, or gone, with the history behind it. The board is built to be read from across a room rather than studied, so the bad news is the loudest thing on it — which is what you want from a Communications Officer and nothing like what you want from a Transporter Chief.
A Cyclops Chief keeps a vitals log and shows nobody. The radio shack is what reads it. We build the seam deliberately: neither room is diminished by the other's absence, and a ship can carry either one alone.
Shacks ship wearing our own colours and will take any others present, discovering them rather than consulting a fixed list. A livery is one stylesheet written against a published set of properties, so anyone may cut and sell one — the contract is open, and we seeded the first few ourselves.
The radio shack slots into Basilisk-class hulls as a room in its own right, the same way a Cyclops transporter room does. It does not have to be carried inside somebody else's engine to do its job.
The sku names the room, not the watch. Point the shack at whatever a ship is meant to be watching, aboard or elsewhere — the Officer demands reports from anything with a pulse to report.
A hull comes up perfectly well with no radio shack aboard. Nothing about the rest of the crew depends on being watched.