How it's built
100% procedural assets
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.
A deterministic 60 Hz simulation
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 pad as a system, not scenery
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.
Honest limits
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.