A station in orbit, going round and not yet dockable

S1 of the station: it exists, it orbits, it wraps, it is drawn. Docking
is deliberately not here - the point of stopping at this rung is to fly
up and find out whether matching a four pixel a frame target feels good
before any rules are written about what happens when you reach it.

IT NEEDS NO PHYSICS OF ITS OWN. A body at 64 sixteenths is exactly what
a circular orbit is under the rules already here: the pull and the swing
cancel at that speed at ANY height, because gravity never falls off and
the moon is a cylinder that does not rotate. So the station is a
position, a constant, and the same fourteen bit wrap the lander uses.
That also means there is no prograde or retrograde to choose - nothing
privileges a direction, which is what makes a second station going the
other way a thing that can exist later.

Four rows above the world's origin: off the top of a forty column screen
and comfortably inside a wide one, so it is somewhere to go that the zoom
is needed to see. It starts half a moon away and a lap is 256 frames, a
little over four seconds, so it has to be found but will not stay lost.

Its column is the middle of the screen plus how far round it is from the
lander, wrapped to fourteen bits - which measures the long way round
whenever it is behind, so anything past the half way point becomes a
negative offset instead. Off the edge needs no test at all: a sprite's X
is signed and sixteen bits, so a station three hundred pixels to the left
is asked for at minus a hundred and forty and the device declines.

Blue, and that is not taste. White is counted to find the ceiling
warning, cyan to find the landing pads, magenta is the instruments and
yellow is the lander. Blue is the one ink no check measures, and picking
a measured one has broken a test twice already.

toPixelsSigned is factored out of showLander, since the station wants the
same sign-extended conversion.

Four checks, each seen to fail on its own break. Measured going round at
244 pixels in sixty frames, off the far side of the moon, and back on the
other edge.

Programs/CosmOS/README.md

@@ -727,7 +727,7 @@ from every assembly file in it. Several are old programs written for the bare ma
 | Grid | The first program to use the screen as a screen. Redefines a tile above the font, fills all 128 map rows, and scrolls it diagonally a pixel at a time. |
 | Sprite | Moves a ball across the shell's own text, writing not one byte of the map to do it. It leaves the sprite in the table on the way out, because clearing them is the system's job - see below. |
 | Pad | Says what the controllers are doing, printing a line whenever one changes. It tells apart the three things that look identical from inside a game that is not responding: a pad nobody noticed, a pad mapped to nothing, and a mapping that is wrong. |
-| Lander | Lunar Porter, rung one: a lander over a moon that wraps. Flown with a controller if there is one - a held thruster burns every tick it is held for - and with the arrow keys if there is not, where one press is one burn and that is the most the console can say. A bar at the bottom is the sideways drift, drawn as a sprite stretched to the speed - a moon has no air, so a drift never stops by itself and stopping one means cancelling it exactly, which is hard to do blind. It lands or crashes on arrival, and what decides is the speed at the moment it touches: gentler than three quarters of a pixel a frame downwards and half of one sideways, or it is a lander on its side. A fuel gauge sits in the window layer, where the moon turning underneath cannot scroll it away, and every thruster costs a unit of fuel every tick it fires. An empty tank is not an ending: it is a lander still flying that can no longer do anything about where. Four landing pads are carved into the moon after it is generated, levelled to whatever height their first column happened to have, and marked in cyan by an attribute rather than a tile of their own. The lander starts above one, because that is where a porter's day begins. Each pad is a base, told apart by the colour it is drawn in, and landing at one either loads cargo for the base across the moon or delivers what is aboard and pays eighty units of fuel. A landing is not an ending: the lander rests where it is until the throttle opens again, and A or Start says "read it" as readily as a key does. What a base says goes in the window rather than out of the console: the console draws into the map, so a message printed while flying is one the lander then flies over, and printing scrolls the whole world up a row. Opening the throttle wipes the line. Two bars read the speeds and are green while a landing would survive and red while it would not, so "can I put down" is a glance rather than a sum. A third runs up the left edge and is how much sky is under the lander, half a pixel of bar to a pixel of it; it reads nought the moment the lander is down, and it exists because the orbit takes the lander off the top of the screen and a panel that only works while the ground is in sight is no use above it. And gravity here is the pull MINUS the swing outwards, which is what makes an orbit rather than a one way trip: under four pixels a frame sideways the pull wins and the lander falls, over it the swing wins and the lander climbs, and at it they cancel and it circles. Falling buys sideways speed and climbing spends it - at a rate set by the product of the two, so the trade stops by itself as the sideways speed runs out - and that is the cycle: a fall carries the lander past orbital speed and becomes a climb, the climb pays it back and becomes a fall, periapse and apoapse, round and round. Orbital speed is marked on the drift bar, sixty four pixels either side of the middle, because a number nothing points at is folklore. Gravity never falls off and the moon wraps, so a circular orbit is the same length at any height and one orbital speed serves everywhere. There is a ceiling sixty four pixels above the screen, which pins rather than ends: leaving upward is recoverable, so the lander is held there and told so, and one sideways is spent every tick it tries to climb - without that the pin wiped the climb, the trade saw neither fall nor climb, and the speed pushing it up never changed. What kills you out here is running dry a long way from the ground. B, or z on the keyboard, swaps the screen between forty columns and eighty, which is the same map, the same cells and the same engine at half the size: nearly two thirds of the moon at once for the orbit, and twice as big for the landing. The twenty extra rows that buys go to the SKY and not to the moon - the wide view starts twenty four rows above the world's origin rather than at it, so the ground sits near the bottom and the whole flyable band is on the screen. Drawn down from the origin instead it was 71 per cent rock, which is a zoom that shows you more of the thing you cannot fly through. A lander at the ceiling is off the top of a forty column screen, which is where the orbit lives and why the altitude bar had to exist; zoomed out it is in the picture. |
+| Lander | Lunar Porter, rung one: a lander over a moon that wraps. Flown with a controller if there is one - a held thruster burns every tick it is held for - and with the arrow keys if there is not, where one press is one burn and that is the most the console can say. A bar at the bottom is the sideways drift, drawn as a sprite stretched to the speed - a moon has no air, so a drift never stops by itself and stopping one means cancelling it exactly, which is hard to do blind. It lands or crashes on arrival, and what decides is the speed at the moment it touches: gentler than three quarters of a pixel a frame downwards and half of one sideways, or it is a lander on its side. A fuel gauge sits in the window layer, where the moon turning underneath cannot scroll it away, and every thruster costs a unit of fuel every tick it fires. An empty tank is not an ending: it is a lander still flying that can no longer do anything about where. Four landing pads are carved into the moon after it is generated, levelled to whatever height their first column happened to have, and marked in cyan by an attribute rather than a tile of their own. The lander starts above one, because that is where a porter's day begins. Each pad is a base, told apart by the colour it is drawn in, and landing at one either loads cargo for the base across the moon or delivers what is aboard and pays eighty units of fuel. A landing is not an ending: the lander rests where it is until the throttle opens again, and A or Start says "read it" as readily as a key does. What a base says goes in the window rather than out of the console: the console draws into the map, so a message printed while flying is one the lander then flies over, and printing scrolls the whole world up a row. Opening the throttle wipes the line. Two bars read the speeds and are green while a landing would survive and red while it would not, so "can I put down" is a glance rather than a sum. A third runs up the left edge and is how much sky is under the lander, half a pixel of bar to a pixel of it; it reads nought the moment the lander is down, and it exists because the orbit takes the lander off the top of the screen and a panel that only works while the ground is in sight is no use above it. And gravity here is the pull MINUS the swing outwards, which is what makes an orbit rather than a one way trip: under four pixels a frame sideways the pull wins and the lander falls, over it the swing wins and the lander climbs, and at it they cancel and it circles. Falling buys sideways speed and climbing spends it - at a rate set by the product of the two, so the trade stops by itself as the sideways speed runs out - and that is the cycle: a fall carries the lander past orbital speed and becomes a climb, the climb pays it back and becomes a fall, periapse and apoapse, round and round. Orbital speed is marked on the drift bar, sixty four pixels either side of the middle, because a number nothing points at is folklore. Gravity never falls off and the moon wraps, so a circular orbit is the same length at any height and one orbital speed serves everywhere. There is a ceiling sixty four pixels above the screen, which pins rather than ends: leaving upward is recoverable, so the lander is held there and told so, and one sideways is spent every tick it tries to climb - without that the pin wiped the climb, the trade saw neither fall nor climb, and the speed pushing it up never changed. What kills you out here is running dry a long way from the ground. B, or z on the keyboard, swaps the screen between forty columns and eighty, which is the same map, the same cells and the same engine at half the size: nearly two thirds of the moon at once for the orbit, and twice as big for the landing. The twenty extra rows that buys go to the SKY and not to the moon - the wide view starts twenty four rows above the world's origin rather than at it, so the ground sits near the bottom and the whole flyable band is on the screen. Drawn down from the origin instead it was 71 per cent rock, which is a zoom that shows you more of the thing you cannot fly through. A lander at the ceiling is off the top of a forty column screen, which is where the orbit lives and why the altitude bar had to exist; zoomed out it is in the picture. And there is a station up there, four rows above the world's origin, going round at orbital speed - which needs no physics of its own, because a body at 64 sixteenths is exactly what a circular orbit IS under these rules, at any height, since gravity never falls off and the moon wraps. It is off the top of a forty column screen too, so it is somewhere to go that the zoom is needed to see. It cannot be docked with yet: it goes round, and that is all. |
 | Depth | Four pillars at four distances and a ball walking past them, behind the near ones and in front of the far ones. The ball is sprite nought and every pillar is numbered after it, so table order puts it in front of all four - what actually decides is the depth buffer, asked a column at a time. |
 | Flip | Draws a whole screen into the bank that is not being shown, waits, and then shows it in one byte out of one port. It writes nothing else at all - not a tile, not a colour - so it does not ask for the screen to be saved, and the line it printed is still there when it comes back. It deliberately does not put the displayed screen back either, because that is the system's to restore: a program that faulted while flipped could not have. |
 | Edit | A line editor. |