Starship supports a wide array of interface types. Custom adapters and StaX create an interface to various instruments and protocols to enable Starship to monitor, command and control.

Adapters

An Adapter is a separate application that communicates with the Starship Exercise Manager.  Adapters isolate the engine from external communication issues (i.e. stopping/restarting an execution manager, unstable, new communication architecture versions), support multiple interface architecture versions and decouple the primary development environment from an interface architecture mandated development environment. Adapters provide external methods of communicating with a monitored application leaving the internal engine structure unchanged.
 
Adapters are available for the following Interfaces:

• OSAgent and TENa Participants - Interface that identifies the Tena Execution Manager to Starship and sets options for the OS Agent.
• HLA - Simple interface configures the HLA Mom Adapter to the RTI Rid file and Matrex version while defining the Federation name and FOM files do they can be monitored in Starship.
• ADMAS - Adapter relies on the Aberdeen Test Center’s Discovery Message Rebroadcast Service. It is a service that listens for ADMAS UDP announcement messages and rebroadcasts them on a Multicast address.
• Distributed Network Agent - provides an eternal interface to hardware devices that implement a SNMP interface. The adapter converts the information into a StaX format and sends the information to the engine.

StaX

StaX is a XML/UDP protocol developed to enable instrumentation developers to quickly design and build distributed test control interfaces which interface to the Starship system.

Lead time, cost, and coordination for building instrumentation (participant) interfaces to Starship limit it’s usage in many domains. StaX fills this gap. With StaX instrumentation can be added to Starship without extensive Starship developer involvement. A StaX Software Developers kit is included with the Installation DVD's.

StaX works in the following manner:

• Instrumentation auto-announces to Starship
• Instrumentation provides their interface definition (in XML) to Starship
• Starship automatically registers the discovered Instrumentation Type
• Two way communications is enabled.

Benefits of Stax

• StaX helps to put more control in the device/application developers’ hands:
• A device developer can specify the interface to the application in an XML message matching the XML Schema included in the SDK. Previously, this process required multiple interactions between a Starship II developer and the device developer to identify the structure of the interface. Then, the interface would have to be entered into the Starship II database installation package.
• It allows device developers to change their interface when needed without requiring support from the Starship development team
• Identifying problems with the interface and fixing them can be done via XML validation by the device developer. Previously, this was done by the Starship developer by debugging Starship code. 
• StaX provides Starship with an “Interface” 
• Having a “published” interface provides developers a pattern of how to talk to Starship.
• XML and UDP provide an easy way to interface with Starship