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.
This commit is contained in:
Anachronaut
2026-09-03 23:02:19 -04:00
parent 800f555ffb
commit 922511c8a7
13 changed files with 130 additions and 15 deletions
+1 -1
View File
@@ -15,7 +15,7 @@ Mode.sbx 48
Flip.sbx 173
Sprite.sbx 442
Depth.sbx 672
Lander.sbx 5751
Lander.sbx 5823
Pad.sbx 264
Crash.sbx 632
vars.script 50