Cargo: bases with names, and a landing that is not an ending

Four bases, told apart by the scheme their pad is drawn in, so "the cyan
one" is a thing a person can say and a thing the machine already knows.
Yellow is missing on purpose: it is the lander, and a base the same colour
as the thing landing on it would be a poor joke.

Land empty at a base and it loads cargo for the base ACROSS THE MOON, two
along - so the pairs are cyan with red and green with blue, and the
wrapping surface is a route rather than scenery. Land carrying at the
right one and it takes the cargo and pays eighty units of fuel. Land at
the wrong one and nothing happens, which is why the destination will want
to be on the screen.

A LANDING NO LONGER ENDS THE RUN. The lander rests where it is, exactly on
the surface with both speeds zeroed, until the throttle opens again -
which is the only way to stop being landed. Gravity does not pull on
something already sitting down, and a base does not hand out cargo sixty
times a second to a lander parked on it.

The pad array holds the base's number plus one rather than a flag. Nought
still means no pad, so it is still one lookup, and a flag would have to be
followed by "and which of the four" - the same walk done twice for an
answer already in hand.

Pads are eight columns rather than four. Four was 32 pixels in a moon 1024
round, which is a target somebody flying by feel misses over and over.

WHAT IS NOT COVERED, and why: the delivery and wrong-base paths need a
lander flown from one base to another, and hand-authoring a recorded pad
input that hits an eight column pad across a 128 column moon is a piloting
exercise rather than a correctness one. Several attempts got within two
columns. Loading, crashing, landing off a pad and running dry are all
covered; delivery is built and flown by hand.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW

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. |
+| 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. |
 | 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. |