ED Mission Operator — a mission HUD with a voice, for Elite Dangerous

What it does

module manifest

What it reads the journal is the whole input — nothing is guessed

Live mission tracking

Cards with category, destination, reward, kill & cargo counters and live expiry timers
A synthesized objective checklist the game never gives you
The whole board: couriers, cargo, passengers, massacres, assassinations, donations, scans, hacks, smuggling, on-foot

Flight safety & ship status

Fuel gauge + live hazard strip from the game's status feed
Speaks what matters: "interdiction — submit and boost", overheating, low fuel
Reads your docking pad number the instant control clears you
Warns before a jump when the next star can't refuel you
Menu-aware — no "stalling" nags while you plan a route

Knows your ship, mats & surveys

The checks the board never does: "that won't fit your hold", "no cabins for these VIPs"
Running tally of engineering materials and unlocked engineers
Flags bodies worth mapping — with the survey value riding in your hold

The operator one personality, and it does the talking

Proactive heartbeat

Notices when you stall: hand-ins waiting, a kill system unengaged, a contract about to expire — and says so, out loud
Names the actual RES site or Nav Beacon it found in-system
Keeps a miner company: rich-rock callouts, tonnage milestones — on strict cooldowns

AI operator (optional)

One button — the app installs its own engine and model, nothing else to configure
Answers grounded in your real missions, market and system intel
A hardware advisor reads your RAM and graphics card and says which models fit

A campaign that follows you (new in 1.4.0)

The story that survives the jump: a pursuer and a patron — real minor factions elected from your journal (interdictions, crimes, contracts, standing), never invented
Six-segment threat clocks tick on real events; a filled clock pays off in all three voices
A standing vow read off what you actually fly: "See the Sirius Corp work through — 3 contracts still open"
The voices share the threads: the traffic gossips it, the wire covers the gossip, the operator quotes the chatter — and states only what really happened
A compact HUD strip: ⚔ pursuer / 🤝 patron with clock pips, and the vow
Oracle commands, typed or spoken: "reveal a detail", "advance a threat", "flashback"

Offline neural voices

Two bundled Piper voices — no cloud, ever; fifteen more one click away
Every voice you add is new people on the radio — the comms cast multiplies each one by timbre shifts
Text never leaves your machine

Ears (optional, off by default)

Hold CtrlShiftSpace — even mid-game — speak, release, it answers out loud
Local Whisper transcription; your voice never leaves the machine
Holds the thread — "and how far is that?" works

Eyes & a living copilot (optional, off by default)

Glances at your screen and understands what you're doing — even what the journal doesn't record
Everything streams into one running conversation — it rides the whole session with you
Each screen is read into a description first, so remarks land on what's actually there
Danger callouts instant; ambient beats paced; screenshots never saved, never leave your machine

A memory

Remembers you across sessions: factions, systems, lost ships, personal records
Brings memories up at the right moment, on strict cooldowns
First run reads your recent journals — it knows you from day one

The Saga

Log off and the session becomes a numbered space-opera episode — real events, real credits, real names
Continuity from the last chapter, a cliffhanger for the next

The panels the game keeps from you everything here exists because you cannot read it while flying

Route plotter — ship & fleet carrier (opt-in)

For the ship: the neutron highway, plotted against your real jump range
For the carrier: the whole trip jump by jump — the thing the game refuses to do
The next stop lands on your clipboard automatically on arrival — jump, paste, jump
The tritium math: "short 2,739 t — seven runs with your 400 t hold", icy-ring stops flagged
The operator follows the same route and calls each waypoint out loud

Orrery — where everything is, right now

Not a picture — the arithmetic: real orbital elements place every body where it is this instant; a warp control runs the clock forward
Planet distances to scale; moons spread only enough to be seen; every body named; drag to pan, scroll to zoom
Surfaces generated, not downloaded, and lit by the star that actually lights them — ice reads as ice, giants get bands
Every dock you've visited is marked beside the world it belongs to
Your ship drawn honestly: the supercruise leg as a progress band (the game reports no position), a filled chevron when parked
A follow camera flies the leg with you — tightening as you close, yours the moment you touch the wheel
Tap a body for its card: gravity in G (amber past 2, red past 3), temperature, atmosphere — and surface materials annotated with how many you already carry
Reads your whole journal history: one real system — 126 scans across 510 files, found in under a second, drawn as 36 bodies and 12 ring bands
Tabs switch with the game: market up brings the shopping list, undocking brings back the map — off with one toggle

Run it on the processor (new in 1.3.0)

The graphics card is the thing the game needs — so the AI can run on the CPU: one dropdown, no reinstall
Measured on a 9800X3D vs an RX 7800 XT: prompts read 2.7× faster, answers 41% quicker, 3.6 GB of VRAM handed back to Elite
Gemma gets a tiny multi-token prediction helper: generation 8 → 15 tok/s, identical output
Two models, both earned by measurement: Gemma 4 E4B (default — fastest, vision, tools) and, new in 1.7.0, Gemma 4 12B QAT — the finer voice: sharper, better-disciplined radio scenes at about twice the time per line, with vision, and the fast-generation helper on the card. Four other candidates failed the same bench the week it passed
Your own GGUF model+projector pairs on disk are discovered and offered too

Comms traffic — the channel other people are on (new in 1.1.0)

Not the operator — other people: traffic control, hauliers, carriers, your own crew; a transmission is a scene, not a line
Briefed from your journal: the faction board, the stations, the signals — a scene that would work in any system has failed
Allowed to invent — the one voice that may; the operator, wire and copilot stay fact-checked because you act on them
Range is real: station traffic fades in as you close; deep space is what's left when nobody is in reach
Voices come back — callsigns keep their voice and turn up again; threads set up, complicate, and turn
Knows when to shut up: every ambient channel goes silent in a firefight — the operator keeps talking; that contrast is the point
Your local AI writes fresh scenes continuously; bundled templates are the floor, not the ceiling
New in 1.7.0: 234 authored situations across seven channels, crossed with 25 kinds of moment — the same situation played warm, suspicious or absurd is a different scene, and the pairing doesn't repeat for 3,575 scenes
Cycles, never shuffles: measured 88% distinct over an hour, nothing back inside 19 minutes
The Comms tab shows every channel, why one is shut, and what dropped what; the template file is plain text and yours to extend

The radio (new in 1.1.0)

Every voice through a real channel: telephone-band EQ, noise bed, squelch gap, roger beep
Distance degrades it — a station two thousand light-seconds out is narrower, hissier, breaking up
Two buses: the operator on priority, ambient ducked 14 dB under and dropped rather than queued — a joke never delays a hull-breach callout

Music on the third bus (new in 1.7.0, off by default)

Internet radio while you work — thirty-one curated stations, from deep space ambient and real NASA mission audio to seventies album rock, frontier americana, and Galaxy News Radio
It ducks properly: hard under the operator, only thinned under comms traffic — the same bus arithmetic the voices use, not a volume trick
The dial follows the work: the rings get drone, long hauls get rock, the black gets ambient — or switch that off and pick your own
The current track shows on the HUD
New in 1.8.0 — a radio tab with an old-school analyser. Every station one click away, so changing the record never means opening Settings. Twenty-four segmented bars, green through amber to red, with peak caps that hang and fall
The bars are tapped off the music bus itself, not the stream — so when the operator cuts in and the radio ducks, the display dips with it. It shows what you are hearing, not what is being sent
The whole dial, not just the calm end: 90s hip hop and instrumental trap, vintage soul and R&B, classic and modern country, classic rock and Radio Paradise's hand-picked rock mix, indie pop, dark industrial, vaporwave, IDM, DEF CON's music-for-hacking channel, and a run of synthwave and darksynth from Nightride FM
Tuned like a tuner (new in 1.9.0): thirty-one stations on a slide-rule dial — the scale travels under a fixed needle, so you drag it like a knob, click a name in view, or step with the arrow keys. The names are grouped by mood, so scanning one way gets quieter and the other way gets darker
No invented frequencies on it. The graduations are stations, because a printed 98.4 MHz would be the one made-up number on a panel that never makes up numbers
A strip at the bottom keeps it in sight: the HUD retunes its own view as you fly — the orrery on arrival, the market on docking — so the analyser and the track name live under whatever tab is showing, and one click puts the full set back
Streams from SomaFM, Radio Paradise, Nightride FM and 181.FM — all listener-supported or advert-light. Off unless you turn it on, and it sends nothing about you or your game

System architect — the build, as a shopping list

Dock at a construction site and the requirement becomes an ordered plan: your hold first, this station, this system, then the galaxy
Every line opens to where to buy it — price, stock, and how old the report is (a two-month listing shows red)
Grouped by seller: one real 6,703 t build — two in-system stations covered 99% of it
Counts trips against your hold ("×6" = six full loads) and credits deliveries the moment you make them
Every docking teaches it; an empty shelf is never suggested again
Every site you dock at is remembered (new in 1.9.4) — one colonisation system holds forty-two depots, and the next docking no longer erases the last one's tonnage
And the ones you have not visited are listed too: what each site is reported to accept, what it paid, its pad and its distance — with nothing where tonnage would go, because community data does not carry it

The local wire — news for the system you are in (new in 1.0.3)

Galnet reports the galaxy; your own AI writes the local paper from what the journal says is true right now
Six desks take turns — civic, industry, economy, crime, sport, life
The economy desk is a real market report: "Steel at Niinimäki is 3,905 cr, up 13%"
Remembers what it invented — same teams, same barman, edition to edition; may never invent a faction, station or price
Since 1.3.0 it files one story at a time, as prose — a story that goes wrong costs that story, not the edition
New in 1.4.0: the paper follows the campaign — the gossip the traffic started turns up as coverage

The Booze Cruise (new in 1.7.0)

The annual run to Rackham's Peak, tracked: is the party on, what a load is worth, and how many trips are left
The holiday is read from the price, never from a date — 33,000 cr/t is a quiet peak, 270,000+ is a public holiday — so it still works the year the event moves
Your lap time is measured, not guessed: the median gap between your own deliveries, so the ETA is your real pace with your real ship
Run profit from your prices — a carrier gouging on wine shows up as a smaller number
Running tally of loads, tons and credits that survives a relog, plus credits/hour
Warns in the bubble that the peak has no large pad, rather than on approach
It does not predict when the holiday starts. The community says plainly that it is a bet, and a made-up countdown would send you 5,000 ly on a number the app invented

Trade leads & profitable runs

Every market you open is remembered; a spread past your threshold becomes a trade lead card
Ask and it finds the best buy-here, sell-there run — sized to your hold, filtered to pads you can land on
Copy button on every destination; a multi-hop Spansh loop is one question away

Exobiology, worked out for you

The sample distances the game never states — 500 m for Bacterium, 800 m for Osseus — called out as you walk them
Before you land: what's down there, what a full set is worth, how much walking it costs
Untouched body? It says so — a first sample pays five times as much

What it will go and fetch only when you ask, and only what the question needs

Reads your live data on the fly

"What's worth buying here?" — it reads the live market before answering, never guesses
Tool-calling models reach for what the question needs: markets, runs, cargo fit, missions, materials, intel
No tools on your model? Still answers grounded in what it can see. All local

The wider galaxy, on request (opt-in)

"Any news?" reads the Galnet wire and passes it on as news
"Where can I sell this?" searches markets across the galaxy (Ardent Insight / EDDN)
"Worth the detour?" checks the exploration catalogue — an empty answer means nobody's been, and it says so
Each source off until you switch it on; each sends the bare minimum

Settings that stay out of the way (new in 1.9.0)

Five categories — AI, Audio, Feeds, HUD, Data — instead of one 3,700-pixel column. The tallest is a third of the old height, and most fit a single screen
Pick the instrument's colour: amber, green, red or grey. It repaints the frame, the title, the gauges and the edges — the instrument
The signal colours never move, because here a colour is a fact: amber is money, cyan a destination, green delivered, red expiry. Each phosphor sits below the chroma of the signal it stands nearest, so a green instrument can't swallow a green "delivered"
Red is the night setting, and not as a gimmick — it's the one instrument colour that leaves your dark adaptation intact

Installation — step by step

novice friendly

Download the installer

Click the download button above — you get a single file, ED-Mission-Operator-1.9.4-setup.exe (about 132 MB — it carries the offline voices). Your browser may ask where to save it; Downloads is fine.

Run it — and get past the blue warning

Double-click the downloaded file. Windows will very likely show a blue "Windows protected your PC" screen. That's SmartScreen being cautious about a small hobby app that isn't code-signed — not a virus detection.

SmartScreen — what to click Click "More info" (small text, middle of the dialog) → then the "Run anyway" button appears. Click it.

The installer needs no choices and no administrator password — it installs only for your user account and starts the app when done.

Meet the HUD

A small dark panel appears and floats above other windows — that's the operator. Drag it by its title bar to wherever suits your cockpit. It reads "Journal connected" at the bottom when it has found your game files (automatic — no setup needed if Elite has ever run on this PC).

Start Elite Dangerous — in Borderless mode

In the game: Options → Graphics → Display → Borderless (a true Fullscreen display hides all overlays — this is a Windows rule, not the app's). Your active missions appear on the HUD by themselves; accept a new one at any mission board and the operator will introduce it, out loud.

Turn on the AI operator — one button

Everything above already works. To give the operator its voice, its stories and its eyes, open Settings ⚙ → AI engine, choose "This app (no other software needed)", and press the button. Nothing else to install — the app fetches a small inference runtime and a model, picks the right one for your graphics card, and runs it all on this machine.

The download is about 4–6 GB depending on the model your card can take, one time, and it resumes if you cancel or lose connection. Progress shows in Settings; the HUD says "Local AI engine ready" when it's serving.

Already have models on disk? GGUF model + projector pairs the app finds on your machine are offered alongside the bundled catalogue and run in the same engine — no second copy of a multi-gigabyte download needed.

The model choice is made for you, and it's a Gemma: a vision model that grounds its talk in your real game data — the job, the payout, the deadline. In testing, bigger or roleplay-tuned models sound colourful but invent lore (station reputations and history that aren't there), so more parameters isn't better here.

Voices & taste

The operator speaks out of the box (Alba, a Scottish neural voice — fully offline). In Settings ⚙ you can switch to the bundled male voice, download fifteen more with one click, adjust rate and volume, tune how chatty the storytelling is — or mute everything with the 🔊 button.

Want to talk back? Tick Voice input in the same Voice section and grab the one-time speech-recognition download (~150 MB, fully local). Then hold CtrlShiftSpace — even mid-flight — speak, release, and the operator answers.

If you ever want it gone

Windows Settings → Apps → Installed apps → ED Mission Operator → Uninstall. It leaves your game and its files untouched (it never wrote to them in the first place).

Keys	Action
`Ctrl` `Shift` `M`	Show / hide the HUD
`Ctrl` `Shift` `H`	Ask the operator "what should I do right now?"
`Ctrl` `Shift` `V`	Toggle voice
`Ctrl` `Shift` `J`	Cycle through active missions
`Ctrl` `Shift` `K`	Collapse to a compact bar
`Ctrl` `Shift` `T`	Click-through mode (mouse ignores the HUD)
`Ctrl` `Shift` `Space` (hold)	Push-to-talk — speak to the operator (Voice input, optional)

Privacy & fair play

flight rules

● What it will never do

No cloud, no account, no telemetry. The AI runs on your own machine — all inference traffic is to the built-in engine on 127.0.0.1. The only downloads are ones you click: the AI engine and its model (from their official sources), extra voices, and the opt-in community lookups — all off by default. Spansh routes and Ardent market searches send just a system name (and the commodity you asked about); the exploration catalogue sends only the system name; Galnet sends nothing at all.
Two things can send more than that, and both are off until you switch them on. The music player streams audio from SomaFM, Radio Paradise, Nightride FM or 181.FM and asks what track is playing — continuous while it runs, but it sends nothing about you or your game. The online neural voices are the bigger one: choosing them sends the text of every line the operator speaks to Microsoft, which includes system names, station names and the questions you type. That is a genuinely different bargain from the rest of this app, which is why it is not the default and why it says so in the settings panel. Every other voice — the bundled Piper voices, and your own Windows voices — is synthesized on your machine and sends nothing. Spoken lines are cached on disk, so a repeat is never sent twice.
Memory stays home. The operator's long-term memory is one local JSON file you can open, inspect, or wipe with one click ("Forget everything"). Screen glances are off by default; when enabled, screenshots go only to your local LM endpoint and are never written to disk.
Your voice stays home. Push-to-talk is off by default; when enabled, speech is transcribed by a local Whisper model on your own CPU. No cloud speech service, ever — the microphone is only live while you hold the key.
Open source. Don't take any of this on faith — the full source is on GitHub (MIT license): the tested TypeScript mission engine, the Rust shell, the prompts, everything. Build it yourself with Node + Rust, or read the network code for yourself — every request the app can make is in the Rust shell, and each one is named on this page.
Read-only. It reads the journal text files Frontier writes for third-party tools; it never writes to the game's folders.
No game hooks. It never touches game memory, injects code, or talks to game servers — the same mechanism trusted community tools have used for years.
Your words stay home. The bundled voices synthesize speech locally; nothing you read or hear leaves your PC.

Does it need the internet?

No. Missions, voices, leads and stories all work offline. Internet is only touched for the one-time AI engine + model download, extra voices, or the optional community lookups — Spansh routes, galaxy-wide markets, the exploration catalogue, Galnet news — each on your explicit click, all off by default. The one exception is the music player: switch it on and it streams continuously from SomaFM until you switch it off. It ships off.

Will it cost me frames?

The HUD itself is negligible. AI answers use your GPU for a few seconds when generated — and the built-in advisor deliberately recommends models that leave the game's share of the graphics card alone.

Which game modes?

Open, private groups and solo — it only reads what the game writes locally, so it works identically everywhere, including Horizons and Odyssey, on foot or in a ring.

Something broke?

The HUD degrades politely: no AI set up → deterministic guidance; no voice → text; no game running → it waits. Restart the app and it rebuilds everything from the journal.