Wiki / Combat & weapons

Combat & weapons

Two weapon families - precise turrets and area-effect torpedoes - feed one typed-damage model, so what you shoot matters as much as where you shoot it.

Turrets

A turret is an articulated mount that aims at your combat lock with true intercept lead - the solution is computed in the shooter's own frame, so a moving ship's rounds actually land - bounded by its yaw and pitch limits and fire rate. Its rounds are sensor projectiles: they deal damage on contact with no physical shove, they pierce what they destroy, and they curve through gravity wells like everything else. The point-defense cannon is tuned to chip a target down over a visible burst rather than delete it, and prioritizes shooting down inbound torpedoes. A mount can carry more than one barrel - a twin-barrel PDC aims and fires every muzzle it has, throwing two streams at once (each at its own fire rate) that share the turret's one magazine, so it also drains that magazine twice as fast.

A gun is a short-range weapon. A round is not tracked forever: it expires after a couple of seconds, which puts a PDC slug's reach at about 2 km. Everyone shoots the same gun, so a raider's rounds reach exactly as far as yours - what a scavenger-grade mount gives up is toughness, not range. Enemy ships know it - they close to roughly 1 km and fight there, and they hold fire until they are inside their own reach, so a hostile burning toward you is not being polite, it is out of range. Closing speed moves the number in both directions: rounds inherit the ship that fired them, so a charge carries them further and running from your target cuts what they can reach along with what they hit for.

Torpedoes

A torpedo homes on the combat lock with proportional-navigation guidance - turning toward where the target will be - after an arming gate clears (a short time or distance from launch, so it cannot go off in your lap). It deals blast (area) damage that falls off from the center, so torpedoes are about zoning and catching clustered or fragile targets where turret fire is precise and pointed.

A torpedo aimed at a locked ship or rock bursts about thirty metres from the nearest part of that body's skin. That near-contact margin keeps the physical torpedo from becoming a dud on the hull, while the warhead still delivers almost all its rated pressure and puts the crater on the target. Fire one at a bare point in space instead - a scripted volley, or a torpedo whose target dies mid-flight - and it bursts a half-radius short, because there is no surface left to reach.

A bay does not just launch "a torpedo" - it launches a torpedo type, and a ship's tubes are loaded with one before the fight starts. Two types fly in the base game, and they carry the same warhead, the same rack and the same blast. What differs is how they run in, and each has its own colour in flight so you can see which one is coming.

Serpent - the assault torpedo. Once armed it runs in on a terminal weave: a slow corkscrew laid over the guidance solution rather than instead of it. Point defense fires on a lead solution - where the torpedo will be when the round gets there - and a weaving torpedo is never quite there, so the defender spends roughly three times the ammunition on the same intercept and only kills it on the doorstep. The weave fades out on the final approach, and the torpedo arrives dead on the aim point - which is also the defender's cleanest shot at it. It pays for that with speed: the Serpent cruises slower, so it takes noticeably longer to arrive and gains ground on a fleeing target far more slowly.

Lance - the bombardment torpedo. No weave at all: the bare intercept, flown straight, and the faster cruise of the two. It is the cheaper one to shoot down and does not pretend otherwise, which is exactly why it is what you fire at something that cannot answer: it gets there sooner, and against a ship running away it closes half again as fast as a Serpent. A defender meeting Lances is a defender whose point defense works.

Which type is in the tubes is the difference between a salvo that costs a defender a magazine and one that costs it four. The campaign uses that on purpose: the first gunship that fires torpedoes at you fires Lances, and the flagship at the end fires Serpents. The torpedo bay page runs both run-ins side by side against a defending mount, with the measured cost of each.

Cover & line of fire

Rounds are physical: a bullet expends itself on the first tangible thing it meets, so an asteroid between you and a hostile eats the burst that was meant for you. Hostiles respect the same geometry - a gunner with a rock on the firing line holds fire instead of hosing the rock, and won't waste a torpedo on cover either. Its attack orbit keeps it circling all the while, so expect the pressure back the moment its motion clears the angle. That makes hard cover a real tool: breaking the line of sight buys you a pause in the pressure, not just a bullet sponge. Two caveats: a rock is cover that wears out where it is hit - see below - and intangible volumes (beacon rings, trigger zones) stop nothing. Point-defense is the exception - a turret swatting an inbound torpedo keeps firing no matter what is in the way.

Shooting rock

A hit on an asteroid takes a real bite out of it. The hole is in the rock's shape, not painted on it: the silhouette changes, the collider changes with it, and it is still there when you come back. A rock has no health bar, because it has no health - what is left of the rock IS what is left of the rock.

Three things follow, and all of them are things you do with the trigger.

• Hold it and the same hole deepens. A round that lands within about ten metres of the last one joins that crater; a round further off opens its own. So the hole follows your aim instead of piling into the first place you shot.
• Rocks take real time. Material costs the same everywhere - a pebble and a planetoid give up the same amount to the same round - so a small rock is seconds of fire and a big one is minutes. Sustained fire is the only way through; a torpedo bowls out a large bite in one go.
• Bite deep enough and pieces come off. Anything a crater cuts loose becomes its own tumbling body, carrying the drift and spin the rock had. Everything smaller goes out as dust. Cut a rock in half across a firing line and you have opened it, not cleared it.

An invulnerable planetoid does none of this. It is scenery, it never wears, and its gravity well cannot be shot away.

Barrel discipline

A gun fires only while its barrel is actually on the point it is aiming at. The tolerance is what a round can still hit: about a degree, which is a corvette's beam at a kilometre. So a mount shoots while it is tracking and holds while it is slewing, and two things follow from that. Wrenching the ship around mid-burst stops the guns until the barrels catch up. And a mount that cannot train on your target at all - the port gun ordered onto something off the starboard quarter, or anything under the keel - simply holds, while the mounts that CAN bear keep shooting. It is your ammunition either way; the rounds a gun does not spend are the ones that were going to miss.

Point defense

Every gun runs its own point defense, and each mount picks its OWN inbound torpedo rather than the whole battery swinging onto one. That is not a fairness rule, it is geometry: a turret is bolted to a hull and cannot depress its barrel back through its own ship, so a mount handed a torpedo coming in under the keel would sit there contributing nothing while a torpedo it could have hit flew past. A mount is only ever given something it can actually bear on; the fire splitting across a salvo falls out of that.

Mounts also hold what they are tracking. Slewing takes real time, so a gun stays on its torpedo until that torpedo dies, drifts out of its arc, or something far more urgent arrives - a battery that re-decided every moment would spend the whole engagement swinging and hit nothing.

The practical consequence for you: saturate a facing. Torpedoes arriving from one side, or from below a hull, meet only the mounts that can actually train on them. The turret page draws the band one mount covers and the cone it cannot.

Your own battery

Your flight computer works the guns you are NOT using. There is no toggle and no key: while you hold no combat lock and your weapons are lowered, the computer may put your idle PDCs onto inbound torpedoes and fire them - the weapons safety does not stop it, because the safety is your trigger discipline and this is not your trigger. A thin line runs from each mount the computer is working to the torpedo it picked, so you can see what the ship took and what it chose.

You always win the argument. Lock a target, or raise the weapons, and every mount is yours that instant - the computer drops its claim and lets go of the trigger it was holding. Let go again and the battery comes back to the computer after a short pause, so a tap-clear on the way to your next lock does not make the mounts swing away and back.

Scenarios can take the capability away: a hull whose flight computer does not grant point defense answers a salvo only by hand.

A neutralized hull stops defending itself. Take a ship's last gun or its flight computer and it is out of the fight for good - nobody is left aboard to work the mounts - so a wreck lets your ordnance fly straight past even with an intact turret still bolted to it. It is still solid and it still takes damage; it just does not answer.

Ammo & reloading

Every weapon in the game refills. A magazine is a rate limit, not a budget: no ship is ever left alive with nothing to fight with. What a weapon imposes instead is a rhythm, and it is the same rule for all of them - a batch lands only after a whole quiet interval, and every shot that lands restarts that interval.

The level is diegetic, on a gauge riding the weapon itself: a ring on each turret that drains as it fires, and a row of pips on the torpedo bay, one per loaded torpedo. While a weapon stays quiet the incoming batch pulses above the solid live rounds and brightens toward completion, and the gauge stays visible until it lands. (Some tutorial or sandbox ships fly with unlimited ammo, and then carry no gauge at all.)

The six are the torpedo bay's real weapon. Fired together they are a salvo the defender's guns cannot answer all of, and that is what makes a torpedo fight an attrition fight: a salvo costs the defender rounds whether or not it connects, and those rounds come back at a rate too. Patience wins nothing for either side. Torpedoes get through by arriving faster than the guns can answer, not by outlasting them.

Damage types

Every round carries a damage type, and each turret has a loaded-ammo slot that sets its rounds' type. The type is visible on the outside of the fight as well as inside the numbers: the ammo readout is color-coded to it, and the round in flight is modelled and lit to match - a Kinetic slug is a stubby amber tracer, a Pierce round a longer, finer steel-blue dart. Close in you can see the difference in shape; across an engagement the color is what you read. A damage type is not a damage multiplier - the same round deals the same number to a hull, a thruster or a turret. What a type changes is how the round travels through what it hits, which is something you can watch happen:

• Kinetic - the punch. The hardest single hit, and closing fast makes it harder still. It carries on only through what it destroys, spending its damage as it goes, and stops dead at anything it fails to kill.
• Pierce - the rake. Lower damage per hit, but dealt in full to every section it crosses, alive or dead, and never worn down by depth. Closing fast buys it more depth, never more damage.
• Explosive - the torpedo's blast. Area pressure falling off from the centre, with no speed term. Ship sections shield what is behind them; a destroyed section transmits 65 percent of the pressure that reached it.

So the two guns answer different problems. Against one thin target the slug wins outright. Against something deep - a stack of sections, a ship you are shooting down its long axis - a rake puts damage into several sections at once, and its total can exceed what one round nominally carries. That is the trade, not a bug.

Closing speed

Closing speed is how fast you and your target converge along the round's line of flight. Sideways motion counts for nothing, so a target circling you is not fleeing.

Both curves are anchored at 100 u/s, a PDC round's muzzle speed - what it closes at when neither ship is going anywhere. At that speed the multiplier is exactly 1.0, so a station-keeping duel plays out on the weapon's own numbers. Charging raises it; running from your target lowers it, and a stern chase is a real penalty. Both are clamped at each end: a head-on charge at most doubles Kinetic damage and at most trebles Pierce depth, while the worst tail chase still leaves a quarter of a slug's punch and half a penetrator's reach.

The catalog ships two PDCs, PDC Turret (Kinetic) and PDC Turret (Pierce), on the same mount with the same fire rate and magazine. The Pierce gun deals half the damage per hit. Mount one of each and the punch-versus-rake trade is the only thing you are feeling.

How far a round travels

A round's type decides what happens after it hits something, and the two rules are different resources.

A Kinetic round carries its damage as a budget. A round that destroys what it hits spends only what that target had left and carries the rest on into whatever was behind it - so a 100-damage slug that kills a 20-point plate arrives at the next thing with 80. A round that fails to destroy its target is spent on it. Thin destructible cover is therefore a cost rather than a wall, and a slug can never deal more in total than it was fired with.

A Pierce round does not pay for travel out of its damage at all. It carries a separate power budget and spends that on thickness: crossing a section costs that section's full health rating, whether or not the round killed it and whether or not it was already damaged. So it crosses whatever it likes while power lasts, dealing its full damage to every layer, and its total damage happily exceeds what one round nominally carries.

Two things follow from pricing power on the rating rather than on what is left. Light plating is nearly free to rake through while a heavy hull block eats most of a round's power in one go - the spaced-armour intuition, intact. And softening a section with other fire does not open a cheaper hole through it, so there is no trick of chipping first and raking after.

Every rake also has a hard ceiling on how many sections one round may cross, so a round fired down the length of a lightly built ship cannot chain forever.

Nothing pierces a rock while its collider remains: an asteroid or a planetoid stops any round of any type at any speed. What a round does to a rock instead is take a bite out of it (see Shooting rock); an invulnerable planetoid does not even do that. Torpedoes do not travel through anything either - they detonate.

Blast pressure and structural depth

A torpedo blast reaches every collider inside its visible radius. Distance from the blast to that collider's centre sets the free pressure: full at the centre, falling linearly to zero at the edge.

Ship structure then gives that pressure something to travel through. For each section, the game traces a line from the blast centre. A section that survives its incoming pressure stops the wave and shields every section behind it. A section the wave destroys lets 65 percent continue. Existing holes cost nothing, so repeated hits drive a breach deeper into the same place rather than spreading damage evenly over the hull.

A warhead is charged for the material it really destroys, and it marks the hull once however many sections it reached. Two torpedoes on one flank are two wounds; one torpedo over forty sections is still one.

Only actual ship sections consume penetration. Cladding and fixtures still take pressure, and sections can shield them, but a thin decorative plate does not attenuate pressure travelling toward something behind it. Several warheads detonating in one fixed tick see the same initial structure: they can combine to remove the outer layer, but cannot use the new hole until the next tick.

The scope spaces its layers out so you can read the falloff. A real torpedo goes off against the skin, so the outer sections of the ship it hits sit at the sharp end of that curve, not out at 10 u.

The result scales through geometry rather than a ship-size bonus. A thin small craft can still be gutted by one direct hit. A deep capital loses a local bite - the sections around the impact, not the ship - and keeps fighting until later hits open it farther or push it below structural collapse. A section destroyed at any structural depth leaves a real hole. If that cut disconnects the graph, the controller-bearing hull keeps ship identity and healthy detached components drift away as inert, damageable wrecks. Which weapon section fires which control is per-ship and rebindable in the editor (see Keybinds).

Ordnance is not free to shoot down, either. A warhead carries more hit points than the hardest single PDC round can deliver, so an intercept costs a short burst rather than one lucky tap - and the siege bay's armoured torpedoes take sustained fire across the whole closing window.