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The Signal Book

Every ship that talks to shore keeps one. This page maps the words the rest of this site uses onto what each one means on the ground, in both directions — the one place here where the fiction and the machinery stand side by side on purpose.

The world

The load-bearing vocabulary: these words appear in the documentation, the tooling, and the output of the tools themselves.

galaxy
a host machine or VM — a laptop, the box under the desk, a rented server. Several ships can fly in one
ship
one running stack — everything one `./basilisk up` brings into being. Every full raising is a NEW ship, under a name never worn before; the old one is buried in the log of ships
hull / Basilisk-class
the stack design itself; every ship of this line is a Basilisk-class ship, differing by complement rather than by class
the yard
the Basilisk repository — where hulls are laid down
room
a container, known by its type: ready room, bridge, engine room, sick bay, transporter room, radio shack. The room's type slug is its compose service key and its in-network address
keeper / crew member
the resident who keeps a room. Container names carry the keeper's minted name — read the current roll off the muster, never from memory
posting
the job a resident stands: Captain, First Officer, Ship's Engineer, Transporter Chief, Comm, Doctor
minted name
a keeper's personal name, coined fresh at every raising and never reused
species / module-sku
which line a room comes from — readymax, gendl, cyclops, eyes-only, given as repo:tag. The sku names the room, not its resident
fitted room
a room module built and sold by the works — a Cyclops transporter room, an Eyes Only radio shack. It arrives pre-staffed, and its resident carries no compiler: built to run one system rather than to develop new ones
manned
a resident carrying a compiler — an Engineer can design a ship from inside one
vatgrounds
the ground a yard grows hulls on: your own machine, with docker fitted — a laptop, the box under the desk, a rented server
cockpit
minted by a ship at will, via the /galaxy-world endpoint. A cockpit can separate from the hull to become its own shuttle and explore the solar system or the galaxy — fly a sample at galaxyworld.space
the articles
basilisk.sexp — the file naming what a given ship carries: her rooms, their species, their postings and their hailing frequencies
stack pouch
a small repository of deviations and additions, installed beside the yard — how a ship takes on more than the base complement
incantation
a command you type. The yard keeps replicator recipes rather than build scripts, so a hull is spoken into growth: `./basilisk up` is one incantation
grow
how a hull comes into being. A Basilisk is a ridged BIO-hull, grown by biological technique rather than assembled from parts — the yard keeps a replicator recipe, not a parts list. Ashore that is pulling the images the articles name and creating the containers from them. A ship is grown before she is crewed
muster
fill a grown hull with crew and set her aloft — start the rooms. `./basilisk up` grows and then musters, and prints the roll as "Crew muster:"
raising
one full `./basilisk up`: a new ship, a new name, a fresh complement of minted keepers
the log of ships
where a retired ship's name goes at the next raising — kept so no name is ever worn twice
watch change
a container restart: the ship holds station, the room's keeper is relieved under a fresh minted name
yard period
the host itself went down or was rebuilt
the slipway
the raise lock: one raising at a time, per yard
command
authority over where the ship goes. The CAPTAIN commands, and exercises it by writing the standing orders — the routing rules in cyclops.sexp
the helm
the levers and knobs a ship presents to whoever takes them. No posting aboard stands the helm today — the seat is being fitted out as the player's own controls at galaxyworld.space. Authority and execution are different things, and the two words are not interchangeable
heading
a port offset — how several ships fly in one galaxy without colliding
subspace
the MCP channel every room answers on, carried by Cyborg Whisperer — whose running instance aboard is the Protocol Officer, receiving each arriving cyborg and dispatching it to the crew member it came to see
cyborg
a connecting AI agent — Claude, Cursor, Gemini, Codex, or any other MCP-capable client
the bridge viewscreen
the Eyes Only board — the display itself, as distinct from Comm, the posting that runs it
freeze-dried
a dumped Lisp image: state saved to disk, able to be brought back later

Canon lives in the Basilisk repository — BASILISK.md and README.md — and this page follows it, not the other way around.

Rooms, postings, and species, at a glance

A posting is a job; a room is where it is stood; a species typically stands it. The three are deliberately decoupled — the image keeping a room can be swapped without renaming anything that refers to it, and the container's own name is its keeper's, minted at the raising.

postingroomtypical speciesthe job
Captainready-roomreadymaxthe console; holds command — the standing orders are written here
First Officerbridgegendl (CCL)bridge duty: assists the Captain and the ship's visitors
Ship's Engineerengine-roomgendl (SBCL)engineering for ship and passengers — compiler aboard
Transporter Chieftransporter-roomcyclopsworks the consignments under the Captain's standing orders
Communications Officerradio-shackeyes-onlykeeps the board — the bridge viewscreen
Doctorsick-bayautohealwatches for the wedged and revives them

A posting, a room, and the module-sku keeping it are three separate facts. The sku names the room, not its resident — a Cyclops is a transporter room, and the Chief who arrives with it is simply the Chief. Whether a resident carries a compiler is derived, never declared — which is why the sick bay's watch is free while a fitted transporter room costs $99: you are buying a room that stands a watch, not a seat that designs ships.