Appendix

2,341 words

The decisions taken, the spikes still open, the known gaps, the glossary, and revision history.

Decisions taken

All twenty-eight open design questions from v0.1 and v0.2 were resolved on 2026-08-19. They are recorded here as decisions, with the reasoning, so that reopening one is a deliberate act rather than a drift.

Flight and travel

Decision Resolution
Ballistic transfers Cut. One travel verb is the strength. They only earn a place if in-system fuel is ever tight, and it is not.
Burn assist and the flip Assist never flips. It holds the burn vector; the pilot flips every trip, with a cue.
Jump tunnel Hold-to-skip after the first dozen, with ~2 s retained for shader pre-warm.
Canopy view control Four presets plus hold-to-free-look. Persistent free-look lives in photo mode.

Exploration and reward

Decision Resolution
Probe placement Aimable, with a one-key auto-distribute at ~40% more probes. Skill optional and rewarded.
Remote banking The relay beacon — one-shot, full value, consumed. Manufactured from banked data, so the one-resource rule holds.
Session anomaly seeding None. Unfinished business happens naturally or not at all.
Global leaderboard No ranking. Personal statistics only; per-body attribution stays the social layer.
Commissions Generated targets, authored voice. Catalog queries wrapped in institutional correspondence with real personality.

Progression and economy

Decision Resolution
Cost of losing a ship Nothing beyond unbanked data. Unlocks are permanent; refit is minutes.
Faction standing Kept, minimal. Permanent institutional specialties, no decay, nothing exclusively gated.
Module damage Two scales — impact and thermal wear, tracked separately. A worn drive is a maintenance history.
Jump range spread ~7.7×, 7.5 → 58 ly (decided in v0.2).

Combat and threat

Decision Resolution
Hostile humanoids Environmental threats only through M5. The largest single scope saving available.
Matched-burn combat Deferred past M6. Opponents engage at rest or on maneuver thrust.
The Hunter through a jump Once, with a visible tell. Followed once is a story; followed forever is a punishment.
Rescue Self-scuttle in solo; distress beacon in the persistent universe. Degrades gracefully with population.

Visual and interface

Decision Resolution
Nebulae Narrowband composite, declared on the canopy, filter selectable. The license becomes a mechanic.
System map Two tiers of one overlay — compact for routine targeting (< 200 ms), planning for expeditions.
Pausing Solo modes pause; the persistent universe does not. Costs nothing architecturally — the host stops calling advance, and the clock is untouched.
Annunciator Synthesized speech, twelve fixed strings. Nobody is performing; an instrument is annunciating.

World and naming

Decision Resolution
Hull naming Astronomer class, maritime ship name. Survey lineage takes astronomers; independent lineage takes maritime working-vessel names, so the convention is information.
Wrecks Recurring motifs, no resolution. A mystery implies an answer; an answer implies an ending.
Player naming Filtered free text with a report path online; unfiltered in solo.
Catalog revision cadence Continuous ingest, event-shaped delivery — revisions arrive on sync as one accumulated notice.

Business and multiplayer

Decision Resolution
License Apache-2.0. Write the LICENSE file first; it is the most overdue item in the bible.
PvP consent Opt-in, off by default. Fragmentation accepted; there is no economy for PvP to distort.
Catalog version in the persistent universe One global version, advanced on an announced schedule. Solo is the bleeding edge; the shared world is stable and agreed.
If hosting becomes unaffordable Graceful degradation, published as a promise — and a self-hostable server. The game does not depend on this project's continued existence.

The five engineering spikes — run 2026-08-19

Not decisions; measurements. All five have been run, and the full write-ups with method and numbers are in docs/spikes.md.

# Spike Blocks Result
1 HDR display detection M2 ✅ Negative and useful. (dynamic-range: high) is true on a 2×-headroom laptop panel in Chrome and Safari and false in Firefox, on the same display. There is no headroom API. auto becomes a WebGPU capability probe; the tone curve must be headroom-agnostic; the three-state override is mandatory. Firefox cannot output extended range at all. → art
2 TSL and the atmosphere integral M2 ✅ Free. TSL-generated WGSL runs at 1.000× hand-written, pixel-identical, in an interleaved same-harness comparison. Take TSL everywhere. Sideways finding: 256 samples/pixel costs 7.27 ms at 1080p on an M5, 2.4× over budget, so Bruneton LUTs are a requirement rather than an optimization. → technical
3 Catalog bundle size M4 ✅ Cheap. 150 ly = 7,529 stars + 861 planets = 159 KB brotli, against a 260 KB client. Bundle everything; no streaming boundary needed. The real constraint is completeness — HYG holds ~52% of CNS5 within 25 pc. → galaxy
4 Gaia attribution terms M4 ⚠️ Reverses a decision. Gaia is CC BY-NC 3.0 IGO, not "open with attribution". Non-commercial is the exact clause this project refuses. Ship HYG + NASA; keep Gaia out of the bundle. The stated fallback was backwards. → sustainability
5 WebHID / Gamepad for HOTAS M3 🟡 Software yes, hardware outstanding. WebHID is Chromium-only (Mozilla: negative; WebKit: unshipped). Gamepad API caps at 16 axes / 32 buttons and silently drops buttons above HID usage 32. Promise HOTAS with the browser named. Dual-device and latency still need real hardware. → ux

Known gaps

Named because they are absent rather than decided.

Gap Note
Cargo and passenger hauling The brief asks for transportation and shipping, and the Kapteyn hull and cargo modules exist for it — but there is no hauling activity designed anywhere in the bible: no contracts, no routes, no reason. It is the most likely candidate for the first activity added after the MVP, and the planning tier of the system map was specified partly with it in mind.
Passenger comfort under burn If passengers are hauled, felt g becomes a service constraint as well as a physical one — a hard burn is a bad ride. That is a genuinely interesting mechanic and it is not designed.

Playtest values

Numbers written from reasoning, awaiting evidence. Each is tagged [PLAYTEST] at its source.

Value Written as What the test is
Burn plan legibility One bar, three numbers Can a new player read time-against-fuel off it without being told?
Camera mode clarity Enhanced by default; Automatic and Manual for photographic exposure Can players predict when stars disappear, explain the exposure readout and distinguish Enhanced from HDR Output?
Jump range spread 7.5 → 58 ly (~7.7×) Does the early curve leave the cage fast enough?
Time to leave the cage 6–10 hours to reach ~18 ly The number that actually matters in progression
Jump range mass exponent 0.6 Do players ever voluntarily fly empty?
Safe touchdown speed ≤ 3.0 m/s May be too tight without a radar altimeter
Time to "can go anywhere" 40–60 hours The core pacing target
Offline catalog cache, 150 ly ~~~2 MB~~ → 159 KB brotli ✅ Measured, spike 3. The estimate was 12× too high
Relay beacon cost 1,200 units High enough to be a decision, low enough to be carried

Glossary

Terms specific to this design. Engine and architecture terms are in docs/glossary.md.

Term Meaning
Almanac The player's permanent, local record of every body personally scanned. exploration
Ballistic transfer An impulse, a long coast on a conic, and a capture burn. Nearly free in fuel, measured in weeks of simulated time. ⬜
Brachistochrone The burn profile: accelerate half the distance, flip, decelerate the other half. The fastest transfer under a thrust limit.
Burn, the The micro loop: plot, burn, flip, burn, arrive, scan
Banking Uploading survey data at a station, converting it from provisional to real. Unbanked data is lost on death.
Catalog revision A published update to the astronomical dataset, delivered in-fiction as a Survey revision. galaxy
Canopy, the The cockpit view. An image composited from hull sensors with gain, integration and a selectable response — not a window. The fiction that grants artistic license without falsifying data.
Enhanced The default camera direction: an HDR composite that shows bright worlds and faint space together. The three camera modes are implemented; ADR-0037 owns their policy.
Commission An optional, generated directed goal issued by a research institution
Automatic / Manual The photographic camera modes. Automatic meters scene light; Manual uses the player’s aperture, shutter and ISO. Both share a photographic response.
Flip, the The mid-burn 180° rotation. ~4 s of freefall. The game's signature moment.
Detail scan Tier 2: the scan that converts a projection into a surveyed body
Discovery credit Permanent attribution of a body to the first player to survey and bank it
Discovery scan Tier 1: the system-wide reveal on arrival
Frontier, the The meta loop; also, informally, the edge of surveyed space
Ground truth Tier 4: sampling on foot. The highest-value data in the game.
Horizon of knowledge The shell in the galaxy map beyond which catalog completeness collapses and everything is projection
Issue ordinal A body's address index, assigned in the order bodies were issued rather than by orbit. galaxy
Inertial compensation The Reference Drive holding the crew near their original frame, so felt g is a fraction of the ship's proper acceleration. Why burns are minutes rather than days.
Jump Discrete re-anchoring between star systems
Maneuver The low-power band: ordinary Newtonian 6-DoF flight. Compensation is weak here, so it is where g is felt.
Observed A body backed by a published catalog. Drawn solid.
Pips The six units of reactor allocation across DRIVE, SYS and PAY
Projected A generated body, presented in-fiction as the ship's prediction. Drawn dashed.
Provenance Whether a body is observed, projected or surveyed. Visible everywhere the body appears.
Transit The high-power band: superluminal coordinate velocity, comfortable felt g, used to cross a system
Ratchet One of the three progression axes: capability, knowledge, standing
Reference Drive The ship's drive. Holds the ship near a chosen inertial frame while re-anchoring that frame. Provides maneuver thrust, transit acceleration, inertial compensation and the jump — all four.
Retired A projected body superseded by a confirmed one. Tombstoned, never deleted; its address stays valid forever.
Silent running Radiators off. Near-invisible, and heat has nowhere to go.
Survey, the The in-fiction institution that maintains the catalog and issues revisions
Surveyed A body the player has personally detail-scanned
Relay beacon A one-shot transmitter that banks carried data remotely at full value. Manufactured from banked data and consumed on use.
Surveyor The player's role. The hull the MVP is balanced around is the Cannon-class.
Thermal wear Slow module degradation from sustained heat. Recovers only partially, and only at refit. A ship's maintenance history.
Tombstone The record left by a retired body

Revision history

Version Date Author Changes
0.1 2026-08-19 Jon Jaques First edition. Written against milestone 1 (12/12 capability checks passing). Establishes the four pillars, the Reference Drive fiction, the three-layer body model and catalog revisions, discovery credit as the economy, the on-foot scoping decision, and The Explorer as the named MVP.
0.3 2026-08-19 Jon Jaques All twenty-eight open design questions resolved and recorded above as decisions. The consequential ones: ballistic transfers cut; burn assist never performs the flip; the relay beacon replaces a transmit module, manufactured from banked data so the one-resource rule holds; module damage split into two scales, impact and thermal wear; catalog revisions continuous in ingest, event-shaped in delivery, with the persistent universe pinned to one globally scheduled version; hulls renamed to an astronomer-class / maritime-name convention that encodes lineage; Apache-2.0; opt-in PvP; and hosting failure answered with graceful degradation plus a self-hostable server. Five engineering spikes remain, and two content gaps are named — cargo and passenger hauling has no design at all.
0.2 2026-08-19 Jon Jaques Three revisions, each reversing a v0.1 position. (1) Travel — the Elite-style cruise mode, in which a gravity gradient throttled top speed and the skill was a throttle correction, is replaced by The Expanse-style brachistochrone burns: plot, burn, flip, burn. The old fiction had to be told to produce its behavior; a burn produces it from Newton. (2) Visual direction — v0.1 treated beauty with suspicion. The Canopy is now established as a sensor rather than a window, which grants full artistic license over the image while keeping the data inviolable, and the game targets genuine HDR output. (3) Progression — jump range spread revised from 2.2× to ~7.7×, comparable to Elite, because a large spread changes the character of play rather than merely its speed. Knock-on edits in loops, ships, ux, onfoot, combat, progression, production, technical and risk.