UNDER THE HOODAbout & Devlog

V1.1.5, refined. Same-day follow-ups from the first flights:

• 🗼 The catch, perfected. The banking turn now truly rotates the ship's velocity — forward speed bleeds away as the turn carries it toward the tower, nothing surges. And the final approach is the real thing: over the tower's back shoulder with 25+ m of clearance, then a pure vertical settle into the chopsticks from the front. Zero lateral slide.
• 🌊 Waved-off ships land. An orbital NO-GO divert glided forever thanks to a gauge-scaling bug holding it 7 m above its flip trigger — every divert now flies its flip and splashes down. Suborbital water flips are gentler too (no more "spin"), and their callouts stopped claiming the ship was approaching Starbase.
• 📋 Poll polish. The deorbit burn can't be time-warped through, a HOLD on it counts down ~30 s and commits to GO, and holding one poll no longer paints the next one as held. The poll card header keeps its shape when the countdown changes. And an S grade now demands a flawless board — any wrong call caps you at A.
• 🚀 Aft accuracy. The ship's vacuum engines rotated to the true layout — two toward the bare-steel side, one toward the tiles. "Mechazilla has caught the Superheavy Booster."
• 📱 Mobile. A ⏭ skip button joins the time-warp controls, and announcements moved to the lower third — visible, not distracting, never buried.

Update — V1.1.5. The flight-dynamics update — you thought V1.1 was it?

• 🗼 The ship catch, rebuilt. No more sideways approach: the ship returns on an offset track behind the launch mount, flying flat along its own velocity. Committing the catch arms the banking swoop — nose and trajectory turn together toward the tower about a minute out — then it flips above the tower with clearance and settles onto the pins dead-centre. Traced and verified: 0.0 m lateral error at the catch.
• 🌊 Suborbital flights make sense now. A suborbital ship splashes down ~1,500 km downrange over the open gulf — deorbit burn, entry, bellyflop, flip and landing burn all BEFORE any loop back over land.
• 📋 Polls, rethought. Reentry is inevitable — it is no longer polled. The DEORBIT BURN is: every mission flies it, an orbital burn can be held but not aborted, and a suborbital abort still ends in a safe gulf splashdown (your call is graded on the boards). Catch polls now exist only where a catch does — and the ship only starts its turn home after your GO. NO-GO, and it carries straight past the site into the water.
• 🔥 Failures look like failures. Engine losses now erupt — fireball, sputtering flames, secondary pops and a trailing smoke signature. Flight 12's five surviving engines burn a full five seconds past the cascade before aborting together.
• 💥 The pad fights back. The ignition blast wall is denser, whiter and more violent out both trench ends; the dirt cloud stays low instead of swallowing the rocket; flames now lick anything the plume touches — the launch mount at liftoff, the hot-stage ring at separation — and smolder briefly after. And the Raptors now roar OVER the deluge instead of being drowned by it.
• 📱 Mobile keeps improving. Pinch to zoom the chase cameras, one set of GO/NO-GO controls (the bottom bar), a fix for the pad going dark mid-count, and more clip-proofing on alerts.

Update — V1.1, part 3. Flight-record accuracy + the mobile fit-and-finish pass:

• 🚀 Flight 12, to the frame. The correct five engines light for the boostback relight and abort; at the water exactly ONE of them — the same one as on the real flight — sputters back to life while the rest stay dark, and the booster hits the gulf at 1,800 km/h and explodes. The loss is scripted history: it never counts against your grade, but a GO on a dead booster's return poll still does.
• 🔧 Ship engine failure, canonical. The correct Raptor vacuum engine (bottom of the diagram) now fails at T+3:04, mid-burn, instead of the wrong engine at staging.
• 🛰️ Deorbit burns, smoother. Ten seconds on one engine, with a slow, graceful pitch-over that starts well before ignition.
• 📱 Mobile, tightened. The countdown block lost its redundant warp row (the touch bar owns time-warp), the bottom stack takes a quarter of the screen instead of a third, and the camera row now drag-scrolls reliably.

Update — V1.1, part 2. A mobile polish follow-up:

• 📱 Tighter phone HUD — smaller countdown clock, the poll/telemetry/abort panel rides at the top and only drops down when a poll is live, and the bottom controls no longer overlap the vehicle gauges.
• 🎥 The camera row scrolls through every view, and there's only one settings button now.
• 💡 Fixed the vehicle and tower rendering as dark silhouettes on mobile — steel catches the light again.

Update — V1.1, part 1. A fixes-and-feel pass, mostly mobile and mission accuracy:

• 📱 Mobile HUD, repackaged. The GO/NO-GO poll shrank to a compact card, alerts and the tutorial now wrap to fit instead of running off the screen, and the engine diagram no longer clips on either vehicle. The camera row scrolls to reach every view and no longer sits under the title.
• 👆 Touch camera control. Drag with one finger to swing the moveable cameras — and an accidental double-tap can't zoom-trap you anymore.
• 🚀 Flight 12 booster, corrected. The right five inner engines light for the boostback and then abort, a cluster lets go, and a single engine flickers back at the water — far too little to stop a >1000 km/h fall, so the booster hits the gulf and explodes. No more quiet "landing."
• 🌊 Orbital vs suborbital, done right. Catch missions now fly an orbital profile with a retrograde deorbit burn before entry; suborbital flights (like Flight 12) fly the same descent and bellyflop to a water landing — so calling NO-GO on the Flight 12 ship catch is now scored as the correct call it always was.
• 🗺️ Campaign flow fixed. You can continue past Starship Flight 13 Attempt 1's ignition abort, and adding the new mission no longer resets veterans — finishers keep their progress and simply gain the new flight.

Update — V1.1. The first big pass after launch:

• 📱 Mobile support — on-screen GO/NO-GO controls and a HUD repackaged to fit a phone.
• 🆕 New mission Starship Flight 13 Attempt 1 — a clean count that aborts at ignition (29 of 33 engines light, below the commit), just like the real attempt.
• 💥 Flight 12: Historical now shows the real failure — an engine lets go, the boostback relight cascades apart, and a lone engine flickers back before the booster hits the water and explodes. (No more quiet cutoff.)
• 🏷️ Flight 13: Full Return is now Flight 14: Full Return (the double-catch flight), and the campaign screen lets you browse the whole mission chain.
• 🔧 Ship engine gauge corrected to match the real aft layout; failed engines show red and stay red.
• 🔗 Link previews & tab icons on every page, and a banner on the homepage.
• 🔑 Lost-key recovery — email support with your checkout address and we'll send it back.
• 💲 Mission Control Pass at $4.20.
• 🛠️ Fixes: an uncontrolled in-flight loss now reads as loss of vehicle (not loss of pad); the transonic vapour cone forms at the ship's nose.

Release. Starbase Simulator: V3 went live. Around the game there's now a full content site — this page, the Flight Manual and the FAQ — and the Mission Control Pass at $4.20, with on-device restore and email-based key recovery for support. The first pass at mobile support landed too: on-screen touch controls for the polls, cameras and time-warp, and a responsive HUD. Under the hood, the transonic vapor cone now forms at the ship's nose, and an in-flight control loss with no FTS is scored correctly as a loss of vehicle rather than a loss of pad.

Launch plume & pad. The ascent plume was retuned to the real methalox look — a white-hot throat fading through pink to a red-orange tail — and the ignition overpressure cloud made denser and lower, hugging the pad the way it does in the launch footage, with the dust kept out of the shot.

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.