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
This commit is contained in:
Anachronaut
2026-09-03 12:04:27 -04:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5
parent 7257ad369c
commit bfb515e23b
14 changed files with 240 additions and 51 deletions
+1 -1
View File
@@ -22,7 +22,7 @@ Mode.sbx 48
Flip.sbx 173
Sprite.sbx 442
Depth.sbx 672
Lander.sbx 2108
Lander.sbx 2429
Pad.sbx 264
Crash.sbx 632
vars.script 50