Wingman & voice

Ordering your flight, and talking to other players.

Wingman radio menu (C)

Order your flight. C opens the menu, 1–6 pick a command (arrows + Enter also work), Escape closes it. It auto-closes after 8 s if you leave it open.

The menu does not suspend flight control, unlike the console — the aircraft keeps flying while it is up, because a radio call is a sub-second action and freezing the jet to make one would be wrong in a fight. Only the discrete keys the menu consumes are taken; the axes stay live.

Item	Command	What the wingman does
1	attack_my_target	Attacks whatever you are looking at — the hostile nearest your boresight. Nothing in the cone means the order is refused ("Two, no joy"), not quietly redirected at something else.
2	engage_bandits	Engages hostiles near itself, at will; returns to formation when the sky is clear.
3	rejoin	Returns to formation on you.
4	cover_me	Engages hostiles closing on you, then returns to your wing. (The difference from engage_bandits is whose threats it reacts to.)
5	hold_fire	Breaks off and holds station. Sets a weapons-hold flag the server's fire control enforces (#625): the held member's trigger and store releases are read and discarded until an engage order clears the flag.
6	return_to_base	Disengages and orbits home. (There is no landing system yet.)

The wingman answers with a brevity call on the HUD. In single-player you always have one — the embedded server is started with --flight-size 1. A dedicated server gives players a flight only if the operator sets [flight] size (default 0).

If another player is in your flight, an order is relayed to them as a radio call ("LEAD: Engage bandits.") rather than applied: the server cannot fly a person's aircraft for them, and compliance is their choice.

Spoken orders (F8)

The same six commands can be spoken instead of picked from the menu (#935). Hold F8 (WingmanVoiceCommand), say the order — "two, engage bandits" — and release; the phrase is matched against the six ordinals and dispatched through the identical path the menu uses, so a spoken order and a menu order cannot behave differently.

No language model is involved and none is needed. The match is a deterministic phrase matcher (WingmanPhraseMatch), which is why this tier works on any machine and on any server, and why it behaves the same every time. A phrase that does not resolve is declined rather than guessed at.

This needs a speech-to-text backend, which is not in the shipped builds: FL_ENABLE_WHISPER is off by default, so without a custom build F8 does nothing and the radio menu above is the way to order your flight. If you do build it, no model ships with the game — point [voice] stt_model_path in user.toml at a downloaded ggml-*.bin. See development.md.

Voice comms

Voice runs on radio nets the server defines, not as one undifferentiated channel. The bottom-left HUD shows which net your push-to-talk key will use, a TX indicator whose brightness follows your live microphone level — the first thing to check when nobody answers — and who is currently transmitting.

Key	Does	Binding
V	Push-to-talk on the selected net. Held, never latched	PushToTalkPrimary
Left Ctrl	Push-to-talk on the flight net; wins if both are held	PushToTalkSecondary
`\`	Cycle the primary key through the server's nets	VoiceNetCycle

Transmission is suppressed entirely while the console, the chat box or the game-master map has focus, so a push-to-talk key cannot send a room full of your typing to the whole team.

With no microphone, no permission, or no Opus encoder, the client is simply listen-only. None of those is an error you have to resolve before flying.

The server relays voice opaquely — it never decodes what you say.