The Signal Book

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

hull / Basilisk-class

the stack design itself; every ship in this fleet is a Basilisk-class ship, differing by complement rather than by class

the yard

the Basilisk repository — where hulls are laid down

post

a container, and the job it stands: captain, pilot, medic, jr-eng-human

crew

the posts a ship musters when it comes up

crew member

one container, standing one post

species

which image is standing a post — skewed-emacs, gendl, genworks-gdl, cyclops, eyes-only

drone

a post with no compiler aboard: a runtime binary that runs the one system it was built for

manned

a post whose image carries a compiler — an Engineer can design a ship from inside one

roster

the file naming what a given ship carries — a host overlay's service declaration

crew level

a named point in roster-space: standard, piloted, guild. A roster matching none of them reports as custom, which is an outcome rather than an error

fittings

fittings.sexp — the published catalogue saying what each post means in container terms

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 a roster names and creating the containers from them. A ship is grown before it is crewed

muster

fill a grown hull with crew and set it aloft — start the posts. `./basilisk up` grows and then musters, and prints the manifest as "Crew muster:"

watch change

a container restart: the ship holds station, the watch turns over

relief in place

the whole complement swapped — a recreate — with the hull untouched

yard period

the host itself went down or was rebuilt

the conn

authority over where the ship goes. The CAPTAIN has the conn, and exercises it by writing the standing orders — the routing rules in cyclops.sexp

the helm

the station that flies those orders. The PILOT stands it, navigating the ship out to take on materials, goods and personnel — raw stock, processed or manufactured goods, and people who can be put to work — and out again to deliver what the ship has made of them — the relativity of it being that the ship travels to each consignment rather than the consignment travelling to the ship. Authority and execution are different posts, 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 post answers on, carried by lisply-mcp

the bridge viewscreen

the Eyes Only board — the display itself, as distinct from Comm, the post 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 — GLOSSARY.md and LORE.md — and this page follows it, not the other way around.