Wiki / Combat

Combat

Three weapon families - turrets, torpedoes and the spinal railgun - feed one typed-damage model, so what you shoot matters as much as where you shoot it. This chapter is the rules every weapon shares: who reaches whom, cover, what a round does inside a hull, magazines and point defense. What each weapon is and how it behaves lives on its own page - Turret, Torpedo bay and Railgun - and which weapon fires on which control is per ship and rebindable in the editor (see Keybinds).

Three reaches

The three families are three reaches, and the ladder is the shape of every fight: torpedoes at the long end, the railgun in the middle, guns close in. Reach is never an authored number - it is muzzle speed times how long the round lives - and so is the time a shot takes to arrive, which is what actually separates them.

• Turrets are the close fight: a mount leads its target and chips it down over a burst, and everyone's guns reach the same 2 km. The Turret page has the mount's arc, its barrel discipline and how it picks a torpedo to shoot down.
• Torpedoes home on the lock and burst against the skin. The Serpent weaves through point defense and the Lance runs straight and fast; the Torpedo bay page runs both in and puts the warhead through a hull.
• The railgun is a spinal gun the hull aims: a 1.5 second charge, a slug at 15,000 m/s, and a corridor three cells wide through whatever stands in the line. The Railgun page has the scope for what one shot takes out.

How enemy ships use the reaches

Reach is how far a round can travel, not how far anyone fights. Enemy ships fight much closer than their weapons reach. These are the default gates in their pilot; a scenario can give one ship its own detection, engagement, standoff and point-defense figures.

Against ships, an enemy's turrets fire on every clear shot until each mount reaches the last 20% of its magazine. That share stays ready for point defense, which fires without pause and can spend it all.

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. It loses more than the shot: with the line blocked it loses the pick, and a ship with nothing picked goes back to its passive routine at once - a patrol route or an orbit directive if it was given one, and otherwise a coast to rest. There is no grace period and no attack orbit held open for you. It re-acquires the instant the line clears, and its passive routine may well have carried it somewhere that clears the line on its own. That makes hard cover a real tool: breaking the line of sight buys you a full disengage, 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 meters 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.

A planet does none of this. It never wears, and its gravity well cannot be shot away.

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. A railgun slug is this rule at its ceiling, with one thing a gun round never has: a sphere trailing its tip that widens the cut into a corridor, paid for out of the same depth budget.
• 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 1,000 m/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. A railgun slug leaves at 15,000 m/s, fifteen times the anchor, so it sits at the Pierce ceiling whatever the two ships are doing - closing speed is not a lever on the railgun.

Magazines

Every weapon with a magazine refills it on its own. A magazine is a rate limit, not a hard stop while you have the ammunition to feed it: what a weapon imposes 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. Each batch draws matching ammunition from your ship's inventory - PDC rounds, rail slugs, or torpedoes - and moves it into the magazine round for round. With none of that item left in your hold, the delay stops advancing and the magazine stays exactly where it ran dry, until you take on more.

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 and its reserve can supply a batch, the incoming batch pulses above the solid live rounds and brightens toward completion, and the gauge stays visible until it lands. With no reserve left, the gauge shows no reload at all - just the rounds you still have. (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.

The Turret page has the scope: set a burst and a pause and read what a gun, a bay and a railgun actually hold.

Point defense

A mount defends itself. Every gun runs its own point defense, picks its own inbound torpedo from the ones it can actually bear on, and holds it until that torpedo dies or leaves its arc; the Turret page has the geometry. What it means for an attacker is saturate a facing: torpedoes arriving from one side, or from below a hull, meet only the mounts that can train on them.

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 does not defend itself at all - take an armed ship's last gun or its flight computer, or an unarmed ship's last thruster, and it is out of the fight for good. Ships & damage has the rule.