There is not a single image, model or audio file shipped with this game. Every vehicle, the launch tower, the tank farm, the village down Highway 4, every texture — hull steel, heat-shield tiles, frost, murals — and every sound, from the Raptor crackle to the generative music score, is generated by code at load time. That keeps the whole game a small download, makes every asset original (important for a fan project), and means the world can be revised the way software is revised.
The flight itself runs in a fixed-step, seeded simulation, fully separated from rendering. The same seed always produces bit-for-bit the same flight — which is what makes exportable replays possible, and lets the project run headless regression tests: every build re-flies full missions in CI and asserts that Max-Q, MECO, apogee, both catches and the final outcome all land inside validated bands. When a change to, say, the boostback ignition timing would shift the catch by a few seconds, the tests catch it before a player does.
The water deluge runs the real activation sequence (suppression pulses, trench then deck, pressure building to T−2) with a litre-accurate inventory that drains, recovers through the sump loop, and re-wets for both catches. Frost climbs the vehicles with the actual propellant fraction and burns back down in flight. Cryogenic boil-off pools around the tank farm. These systems run on the same deterministic clock as the rocket, so they behave correctly even at 150× warp.
This is a game. Guidance is simplified, aerodynamics are tuned rather than computed, the weather is generated, and the world is a stylised — not surveyed — Starbase. Where the sim stages an effect rather than simulating it, it stages it to match public footage as closely as we can manage.
The craft pass. The village got a full redesign — gabled roofs, palm fronds, sidewalks — and moved down Highway 4 away from the production site, as the real geography has it. Clouds rebuilt as flat-based clusters. Frost now climbs the tanks as a hard white fill line and burns down in flight; ignition gained its rapid-expansion white overpressure cloud; deluge water thickened from spray lines into solid streams.
The deluge update. Full Pad 2 water system: DSS pulses, trench and deck activation on the real timeline, twin trench-exit plumes, a live farm inventory on the HUD with same-day-retry recovery, layered deluge audio, and reverse-order low-pressure deluges under both catches. Chase cameras learned to orbit 360° with scroll zoom.
Phase 6. The city of Starbase, a finalized second pad, a performance pass across the whole world, a generative music score, and the payload bay's real PEZ dispenser cycle — magazine, lift, conveyor chains, one sat every 30 seconds.
True bay interior + ship QD arm. The payload bay became a real cut hull volume with an interior camera, and the ship quick-disconnect arm arrived with its full mate/retract/swing sequence.
Catch realism. Inverse-dynamics engine gimbal, a rewritten convergence-driven catch ease for the booster, air-braking entry at high AoA, and grid fins rebuilt from flight photos.
Time warp done right. The 1–150× ladder with automatic locks around every major event, so compression never steals a decision.
Release effort begins. Catch-collision geometry closed with an analytic clearance instrument, ship orientation corrected, aerosurfaces gated to the atmosphere, and the headless regression suite wired into CI.
Bugs, ideas, press, purchase problems: cyberwizardbusiness@gmail.com. For bugs, attach an exported replay if you can — determinism means it reproduces your flight exactly.