The station can be docked with: close enough, and slow enough RELATIVE TO
IT, or it is a wreck. Its speed is orbital speed, which is what the marks
on the drift bar point at, so the instrument for this was on the screen
before there was anything to dock with. A dock pays eighty units of fuel,
once and not once a frame, and holds the lander a tile under the station
until a thruster lets go - checked before the speeds are put back, or a
burn would be wiped on the frame it was made and the lander could never
leave.
---- And the ceiling went up, which is what made it work ----
Sixty four pixels was the whole of the sky a forty column screen had over
the world's origin. It was never a fact about the world, it was a fact
about the view, and the wide one starts twenty four rows higher: a lander
stopped at the old line was stopped a long way short of the top of its own
picture for no reason it could see. It is 192 pixels now, the top of the
wide view.
The station went from four rows up to twelve - about two thirds of the way
from the ground to the ceiling. At four it sat exactly where anything
climbing away from the surface had to pass, and being run down there is
not a hazard, it is a toll: ELEVEN of this suite's flights were being run
down as collateral, including the ceiling check, which has to climb past
it to reach the ceiling at all. Moving both fixed all eleven at once.
The height bar divides by sixty four rather than thirty two, because the
band it describes is 368 pixels now and half a pixel of bar to a pixel of
sky would stand 184 tall and run off the top of the forty column screen it
is drawn beside.
---- What is checked, and what is written down instead ----
The wreck is flown. The fixture is narrow - the window measured 496 to 514
frames of climb and it sits at 505 - and that is said in place, along with
the instruction to re-measure before believing the code is broken. It was
not always narrow: at the old altitude any climb from 135 to 300 frames
struck. Narrow is the right way round, because it means the station is
hard to blunder into.
The successful dock is NOT flown, and ninety six pad files failed to find
it. That is not the search's fault: climbing spends sideways speed, so a
lander cannot rise while matched. It is measured working instead - tank
100 to 180, message up, and the pair holding together one tile apart for
two hundred and forty frames.
Anachronaut
804dd3040e