The The Bridge 🖖
You are the new Systems Officer aboard the UES Magnanimous: nineteen years old, three decks with a smell Engineering has stopped apologising for, and software held together by optimism. Every mission is a real coding problem wearing a uniform, and the ship's computer checks your work.
Season 1 Shakedown Cruise
Output, variables, types and decisions. Opens at Cadet.
The Long Cold Cup
The beverage replicator has opinions about temperature. The Captain has opinions about the replicator.
Roll Call
The morning roll call announces every officer as 'None None reporting'. Chief T'Kala would like her name back.
Which Deck?
The turbolift keeps delivering people one deck short. Lt. Skree has measured this and is not amused.
The Badge Printer
The name badges for the diplomatic reception have come out in whatever case and spacing the crew typed. The Captain's says ' yves '.
One Hundred and Forty Percent
The shield display reads 140%. The shields are not at 140%. Nothing is ever at 140%.
The Airlock Interlock
An airlock is a door that must never open at the wrong time. Somebody has written the rule with an 'or' where they meant an 'and'.
Absolute Zero, Approximately
The science lab wants Kelvin. The sensors report Celsius. Between them is a floating-point number and a great deal of feeling.
Ration Arithmetic
How many days of food are aboard? The answer the computer gives is a fraction, and nobody eats a fraction of a day.
Season 2 Routine Patrol
Loops, collections and iteration. Opens at Cadet.
The Manifest
Forty crates came aboard. The manifest says the total mass is 'crate'. That is not a mass.
The Hottest Reading
Which coolant loop is running hottest? The display shows the first one, always, regardless.
Signal Cleanup
The long-range array reports a thousand readings, most of them noise. Lt. Skree wants only the ones that matter, in the order they arrived.
Duplicate Requisitions
Ensign Tannenbaum submitted the same requisition eleven times, 'to be safe'. Stores would like the list without the repeats.
Countdown to Warp
The Captain likes a countdown. The current one goes '5... 5... 5... 5... 5... engage', which is not the same thing.
The Most Requested Item
Stores wants to know what the crew asks for most, so they can stop running out of it. The answer is not, in fact, plasma couplings.
Smoothing the Signal
The raw signal jitters. Lt. Skree wants a moving average, and has views on what happens at the edges.
The Diagnostic Sweep
Every third relay needs coolant, every fifth needs plasma, and every fifteenth needs both. The old sweep just counted.
Season 3 First Contact
Functions, structured data and parsing. Opens at Ensign.
The Crew Directory
A signal on long-range sensors. The Captain wants every lieutenant on the bridge, and the directory cannot say who they are.
Parsing the Log
The contact's transmission is a text log, one line per entry, pipes between the fields. Some messages contain pipes.
Inventory Reconciliation
What Stores thinks it has and what Stores actually has are two different lists. Chief T'Kala wants the differences, and only the differences.
Coordinates, With Feeling
The contact's position arrives as text. Some of it is not a position.
The Duty Roster
Who is on watch after Ensign Tannenbaum? The roster says 'nobody', which is how you get an unwatched bridge.
Overlapping Watches
Two stardate ranges. Do they overlap? The answer at the exact edge has caused an argument.
Heading: Validated
The helm accepts any heading you type, including 'left', 400, and -12. Tactical would like it to stop doing that.
Transporter Safety
Somebody wants to beam across to the other ship. The transporter should have opinions about that, in a specific order.
Season 4 The Anomaly
Objects, traits, errors and iterators. Opens at Lieutenant JG.
The Shield Generator
The shields need to remember how charged they are. Right now every hit is the first hit.
Readings, One at a Time
The other ship's sensor log is enormous. Lt. Skree wants to read it one value at a time, not load it all and hope.
Errors With Names
'Something went wrong' is not an error message. Chief T'Kala wants failures that say what failed.
The Loudest Three
A million readings, and Lt. Skree wants the biggest few, largest first, without breaking a sweat.
Cargo Priorities
If we have to abandon ship, what goes on the shuttles first? Priority first, then the light stuff, and no arguing.
The Access Code
The other ship's core wants an access code. Chief T'Kala wants every reason a proposed code is weak, not just the first.
Signal Compression
The spikes are a message, and the message is repetitive. Lt. Skree wants it compressed so the shape shows.
Which Ship Is Newer?
Two ships, two software versions, and a comparison that thinks 1.10 is older than 1.9. It is not.
Season 5 Deep Space
Concurrency, async and performance. Opens at Lieutenant.
Everyone Wants the Sensors
Six science teams, six timeslots on the array, and two teams have been given the same one. Lt. Skree says this is arithmetically impossible, and yet.
The Parallel Sweep
Reading eight sensors takes eight times as long as reading one. It does not need to.
The Slow Lookup
Which of our two hundred thousand log entries also appear in theirs? The current answer will be ready in about a week.
The Warp Tables
The warp energy table is computed by a formula that calls itself twice. By entry forty it has called itself four hundred million times.
Reading the Traceback
A median routine with several things wrong with it. Sickbay is where you find out which, one symptom at a time.
Write the Test
This time you do not write the function. You write the thing that decides whether somebody else's function is right.
The Flaky Sensor
One sensor times out a third of the time and is fine the rest. Retry it, but know when to stop, and know when not to start.
The Warp Core Sequence
Cold, warming, ready, engaged. The core must go through them in order, refuse to skip, and always be able to scram.
Season 6 Terminus
Four long systems, and an ending. Opens at Commander.
The Manifold
Tomorrow's stardate is in both logs. The other ship's release notes say what fixed it. Now write the fix.
The Two Logs
Two logs, nineteen years apart, and one place where they stop agreeing. Find it, count it, and read what comes after.
The Handshake
Before the other ship's computer will hand over the rest, it wants a framed, checksummed message, and it will reject anything malformed.
Terminus
Tomorrow. The seal is replaced, the logs agree, and the Captain would like a course. Every station, one last time.
The dedication plaque
Every ship in the service carries one. Ours has had a blank line on it for nineteen years.
The stations
Every mission is posted to a station, so you can see which kind of problem keeps catching you out. Promotions open more of them; they never make the missions harder, only wider.
- Helm Control flow, loops and keeping the ship pointed somewhere
- Ops Collections, manifests and resources that must add up
- Engineering Concurrency, performance and memory
- Science Algorithms, parsing and making sense of signals
- Tactical Errors, validation and refusing bad input
- Sickbay Debugging, testing and diagnosing the ship
The objectives run in your own browser (Python) or through our playground proxy (Rust), which means a determined person can read them. That is fine. This is a place to learn, not an exam, and nobody is awarded anything at the end. Building elaborate tamper resistance would cost real effort and protect nothing worth protecting.