Congratulations on your position as the Comm Officer. Your job is to repeat the messages sent to your ship from those too lazy to read the Comm Console, to make shipwide announcements, and to sound cheerful and dutiful even when a blob is eating the engines and the Captain has been removed from command by the Commander and the Chief Medical Officer for 'spending all of our space cash on space hookers'. You are often seen as the least important of the Bridge Officers, but you're the only one whose specific job is to man the Comm Console, and this means you see every message that comes in before everyone else and decide which messages are important enough to pass on. With that said, a bad day in Telecommunications can make your job largely redundant, and a particularly dismissive Command presence can make your job miserable. Just remember that you also have the power to invoke Corporate Command if conditions aboardship become too intolerable…
Bare minimum requirements: Mind the Comm, take over for other Bridge Officers if they fall ill or worse.
The job of Comm Officer is probably the easiest job on the ship assuming you aren't abruptly forced into the role of a fellow Bridge Officer. You watch the Comm Console, you report on the interesting things you see, and yet your job can be easily done by any other crew member that cares. The only thing you have that they don't is Bridge access, which just means you can enter and leave the Bridge to run errands if your Captain really feels like sending you off to get donuts and coffee.
On the other hand, you also have plenty of time to make friends with the AI, and anyone else who spends a lot of time on the radios, and you have access to every radio frequency. You might find yourself very well protected indeed when things go sour. Just remember that you may not get much in the way of respect from your crewmembers unless you go out of your way to earn it.
This is the ship's pair of eyes, a medium-range sensor suite that can identify targets at short range and see them coming from a fairly long range. Multiple individuals can use the DRADIS console at any given time and it is a requirement to effectively pilot the ship or aim the guns. Because of this it's possible to have the Dradis console open alongside other consoles, which is the intended way to use it. Apart from having a single detection radius, it is also possible to switch to a sonar mode. This mode makes the dradis send out a ping every few seconds, which then reveals every ship in the system. Of course such a powerful tool comes with a huge downside, when the sonar is active every ship in the system can detect the pings and thus know where you are. Usually it is best to only reserve the sonar for hunting down stealth ships at the end of the fight to avoid having to fight the entire fleet all at once.
You report to Command, most of the time, and your primary job is making sure Command and the other departments stay in contact and updated on what's going on. You are also responsible for keeping in contact with the Salvage Shuttle, planetary landing parties, and the like. If Marines are in deployment, you are responsible for keeping contact with the nonmilitary personnel, while the Overwatch Officer focuses on military personnel. If there is no Overwatch Officer, you are the most likely Officer to fill in for them.
Command can technically place their own requests for things rather than make you run down there in person. In practice, they are well within their rights to tell you, the Comm Officer, to make requests over the radio for them if you aren't particularly busy (especially if they are). You can also access the Supply Requisition Terminal to place order requests, though the Quartermaster is well within his rights to insist that purchases be authorized by the Head of Personnel or one of the Command trio personally. Just don't be too surprised if you get asked to deliver paperwork should the Quartermaster be a real stickler.
“I'm no bridge bunny, and I'm certainly no coffee girl. Today they'll find out why they shouldn't've forced me to run all their dirty errands…”
A Traitor Comm Officer is almost as unintimidating as a Traitor Civilian, but they do have access to the Bridge, at least. While poisoning the coffee or donuts is an easy way to take out your fellow Bridge staff, survivors will know exactly who to blame. You are under the eye of Command practically all the time, and while you can probably get into most places with a good reason, pulling off a heist or a murder may just be above your paygrade. If you have to go with poisons, consider slow-acting poisons that won't be immediately detected when consumed so that you have more time to make your escape, and hope that the Chef is unscrupulous enough to deserve the blame.