Slingshot Speeders 0.1.2 — boards wiped, the ship gets lighter as you burn
v0.1.2 is live. Inverse-square gravity, one Stock ship, public boards. This update changes how the ship flies, so the live lists are empty and you are racing a new physics.
Boards wiped
SCORE / TIME / Δv and Trefoil start over. Old times were flown on a constant-mass hull. They are not comparable to a ship that gets sharper as the tank goes.
The pre-alpha lists are on the Pre-Alpha Archive. Names and times stay there. The pre-alpha database is backed up.
The ship is half fuel
Half the hull is propellant. Thrust force stays the same. Burn it off and you accelerate twice as hard, and the nose comes around twice as fast. The last burns of a run are the sharpest.
The HUD tank is Δv — how much speed change is left. Empty still says OUT OF FUEL. A full tank is about 234 m/s. There is no refuel. Dumping early to get light also throws away the Δv you needed to use that pace.
Sip still beats dump on mixed score. Time and a full tank weigh the same. Burn low still wins (Oberth).
The gold thrust arrow grows with how hard you are actually accelerating — empty tank or afterburn. Dry afterburn is twice the dart of a full-tank main.
Temple
New Hard map. Two wells. Time the sliding door, then slip through rotating spokes into the green ring on the right. Capture is a closed orbit there. The spokes still kill if they hit you in the ring. You start in a tight, fast orbit around the first well.
Chaos is retired (too close to Asteroids). Asteroids sits under Orion, wider capture ring, no stray well out to the left of the start.
Watch one run. VIEW the field.
Click a row and you watch that tape: purple when slow, light orange when fast, pink thrust ticks (red on afterburn), yellow rotate marks where you yawed. PATH (or P) hides the flown line and the marks. The trajectory line stays.
Home VIEW next to PLAY opens the map with every stored run line. That is the density view. Replays stay clean.
Flying the HUD
Q/E are two small yellow arrows at the nose and tail, like RCS jets. Counter-clockwise: nose left, tail right. They ease in like the gold thrust arrow. Kill-rot shows the same couple while it is braking; they shrink with the live torque and ease out as the spin dies.
The trajectory line holds if you almost stop and fall back. Rotating does not flicker it. A WASD burn still redraws.
Crash is a red CRASH card, same as OUT OF FUEL. R tries again. HOME is a button in play and Watch; Esc still leaves. SHARE copies one watch link (?r= or ?race=). Solo and sandbox time out at 10 minutes. Trefoil is still 5.
Also
FAQ says scored runs are public, the tank follows the rocket equation, and inverse-square in words. Home ROADMAP is stretch goals (community maps, ship classes, a $10 supporter pack). Not this cycle.
3 replies
I gave a few stages another try, loving the changes! Though, I keep hitting an issue where races don't get validated if I restart with "R," I hope you can have a look at it
Also, I'm getting the feeling that always using burn is still the best way to fly (for score, in the normal stages), though accelerating with burn and decelerating without it is pretty close... I'd have to spend some more time testing things out
Thanks Derg, I'm glad you're enjoying it, I saw your run on the Trefoil and it's been great to see you improve. I'll look into that issue for the v0.1.4, just posted the v0.1.3 changes which was a massive update. Yes using afterburner can be the fastest strategy on the shorter simpler maps, but it consumes 225% fuel, so an extra 25% premium for that double boost.
Also remember, your ship becomes lighter as your fuel leaves your vessel, so your acceleration increases as your tank gets lower! So yes, using your afterburner to burn more fuel faster can definitely be the strategy, I'm glad it's working.
Yep, makes sense that the afterburner value would fall off on longer maps where the time gained might be less valuable than the fuel spent! Makes me wonder where the crossover point could be... It's not an easy problem since accelerating close to a body gives so much extra power, hmm