A retro thruster, at half the strength of the one that lifts
Arresting a rise meant a sideways burn and a wait for the orbit to come back round. That is how a rendezvous really is flown and it is a lot to ask of somebody who has not flown one before, so down now makes the correction directly. HALF THE STRENGTH, deliberately: one sixteenth a tick against two, which is exactly gravity's own step. So it can stop a climb and it can hurry a descent, and it can never turn a landing approach into a crash faster than simply letting go would - the cheap way out of a mistake stays the expensive one. Four against eight on a keyboard, which is the same ratio. It does NOTHING to a lander on the ground, and that guard is load bearing rather than tidy. touchdown has already had its say and returns early once a lander is down, so there is nothing underneath to stop it and no crash to say it happened: measured without the guard, holding it drives the lander clean off the picture and spends a fifth of the tank doing it. ---- And the fixture that hid all of that ---- The first version of the landed check passed just as happily with the guard deleted, and the reason is worth writing down. A lander that has landed WAITS to be told its message has been read, and the keyboard fixture pads with NULs, which are not keys. So the program sat in that loop for ever and the picture was frozen at the moment of touchdown - every thruster held afterwards did nothing, which reads exactly like a working guard. The pad now presses A to get past the wait before the check tests anything, and both the row AND the fuel are read, because an engine that fired and moved nothing would keep the row and one that moved the lander for free would keep the fuel. The altitude bar check upstream leans on that same freeze for its stable end, and its comment said "stays landed" when what it means is "is not running any more". Corrected, because that is the sort of comment that sends the next person looking in the wrong place.
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@@ -22,7 +22,7 @@ Mode.sbx 48
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Flip.sbx 173
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Sprite.sbx 442
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Depth.sbx 672
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Lander.sbx 5751
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Lander.sbx 5823
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Pad.sbx 264
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Crash.sbx 632
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vars.script 50
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