17 May 2026: Star Systems View, zoom into the system in 3D
Pressing + once more at full zoom drops you inside the system · Star + planets on orbit lines, structures on the planet surface, ships drifting around · Live combat lasers and explosions · Click ships to read their HP · Drag to orbit the star
Star Systems View: a new zoom tier
- Press + once more past system focus. Once you've zoomed into a system on the galaxy map and the System Panel is open, one more + cross-fades the 2D map out and drops you into a 3D scene of that system. Press − or Esc to come back out. Next / Previous on the System Panel swap the 3D scene to the next system without dropping back to the map.
- The star and planets are real. Every system has a generated set of 1-12 planets sitting on visible orbit rings, plus its star at the centre. There are 14 star types (red / orange / yellow / white / blue dwarfs through supergiants, plus brown dwarfs, neutron stars and pulsars) and 31 planet types (terran, lush, ocean, desert, ice, lava, gas giants, ringed giants, asteroid belts and more), each with their own colour and (eventually) texture. The data is generated once at galaxy creation and is the same for every player; planets drift slowly along their orbits in real time, inner planets faster than outer ones.
- Units are visible too. Your ships and everyone else's drift around the star as small coloured circles (your faction colour for yours, the other player's flag colour for theirs). Each carries a 3-letter type tag underneath: HER for Hercules, MAG for Magnus Corvette, VYP for Vyper Interceptor, and so on. The catalog now has a real 3-letter label for every unit type instead of placeholders. About 80% of ships ride the trade plane just above/below the ecliptic; the rest roam off-plane. Structures sit pinned to a planet's surface.
- Click a unit, read its health. Click any ship or structure and a small green / red HP bar appears under its label: green for hits left, red for damage taken. Click empty space to clear. No popover, no zooming around: the click is just "tell me about this".
- Drag the mouse to orbit the system. Default cursor is a pointer hand. Hold the mouse button and drag: the cursor goes to grab and the camera rotates freely around the star. Release and the cursor returns to pointer. Mouse wheel zooms in / out within sensible bounds; the orbit is pan-locked so the star stays centred.
Live combat, lasers, explosions, fly-ins
- Combat is rendered. While in 3D, every couple of seconds the client pulls the system's recent combat log and draws lasers between attackers and defenders for real hits (thick red beams) and tracers for shots that missed (thin orange streaks toward a random enemy). A tick's worth of fire is smeared across the next ~2 seconds so a big battle reads as a continuous exchange rather than a strobe.
- Destroyed ships explode and vanish. When a combat event flags a ship as destroyed (or the next polled unit list shows it gone), an orange explosion sprite blooms at its last position and the blip disappears. Mass-casualty events stagger the explosions across ~1.2 seconds so they look organic, not synchronised.
- Reinforcements fly in. Any new ship that appears in the system between polls jump-arrives along a fixed entry trajectory and eases into place. Squadrons / wings / flotillas owned by a player with a Carrier-class ship in the system instead spawn from the carrier's position and fly outward into the cloud.
- View a single ship up close. The popover on a ship has a VIEW button that flies the camera in and locks onto that ship. While locked, you can mouse-orbit around it (placeholder cube for now; proper 3D models come later); the ship rotates slowly and fires a short cyan pulse from its nose every second or so. Press the × in the top-right or hit Esc to come back to the system overview.
Combat tick deadlock: fixed
- Game clock could get stuck during ship-capture combat. When two players with capture-capable hulls (Hercules-class frigates, for example) fought each other, the combat resolver tried to write a "claimed" outcome to the combat log. A check constraint didn't allow that value, so the entire combat tick rolled back on every attempt and the in-game time froze until the players left the system. The constraint is now widened to permit "claimed", and combat proceeds normally including boarding captures.