A held thruster burns every tick it is held for, which is the whole reason
the pad exists: the console can only say a key went down, so a thruster
driven by it could be pumped and never leaned on.
The burn happens on the same tick gravity does, and for the same reason -
a sixteenth of a pixel is the smallest step this arithmetic takes, and
applied sixty times a second it is an enormous acceleration. On the tick,
thrust and gravity are two numbers whose RATIO is the whole feel of the
thing. Position still moves every frame; only the acceleration is stepped,
and nothing can see that.
Two against gravity's one, so climbing and falling are the same speed.
Three was the first try and it left the moon after about a second of
holding.
If there is a pad the console's arrows are ignored, because under a window
the same keypress reaches both - the pad as a level, the console as a byte
- and a thruster that fired twice for one press would be a mystery to
anybody tuning it. q still quits, since a pad has no letter for it. With
no pad the arrows still burn once a press, which is the most that can be
done down a wire.
And break.sh now rebuilds the disk images as well as the binaries. Half
the things worth breaking here are SplitBit assembly rather than C, and
those live on the fixture disks - so an edit to a .asm file changed
nothing the suite could see, and the tool reported that nothing caught the
break. That is the exact lie it was written to prevent, turning up in a
new place. With the disks rebuilt it catches this one: the lander falls
between the two captures instead of climbing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5
b1dde7908c