Backsight

The five hulls of Frantumi

Frantumi keeps the rules of 1979, where a ship turns and thrusts and nothing takes its momentum away, and changes one thing: the ship is a vehicle rather than an outline, so each of the five hulls obeys its own numbers. Mass, propellant, delta-v, acceleration, rate of fire and heat are printed at the bottom left of the screen while a match runs, because a player who picks a hull is picking a physics and should be able to read it.

The readout Frantumi prints in the bottom left corner while a match runs, five lines of pale monospaced capitals on black: mass 0.99 and propellant 96 per cent, delta-v 1940, speed 6 and acceleration 10, hull 60 of 60, damage 8, rate of fire 6.0 and heat 0 per cent, and the name of the hull they belong to, Cobra MK2. An orange outlined rock drifts across the fourth line and two pale trajectory arcs cross the block, because the picture is taken from a match in progress rather than staged.

Two of the five are settled enough to describe. The Behemoth carries four times the mass of the next ship and a shot heavier than five of the Cobra MK2's, which makes it a gun platform that takes its time to get moving and spends that time being hit. The Wasp sits at the other end, firing two barrels in a fan at a higher rate behind the thinnest hull of the five, so it wins the exchange it starts and loses the one it does not. The Cobra MK2 is the middle the other four are measured against. The Lancer and the Trident are the remaining two trades between those ends, and what exactly they trade is still moving week by week, so there is nothing honest to write down about them yet.

What makes the choice cost something is that the hull can run out. Propellant is finite, and a ship that burns it all can still turn but no longer go anywhere; the nozzles that brake are the same ones that are spent doing it; the gun heats until it jams; and seven subsystems can be broken by a hit, each in its own way. The card chosen out of three between waves then improves one number by spending another, which means a run is a sequence of decisions about which weakness to accept rather than a climb toward a better ship.

Underneath is a deterministic core written in Rust, with the Newtonian physics done by hand and held to conservation tests. That is the part none of the above would be worth without, because the same duel has to run identically on two machines before a match against a friend over Steam, or a ranked match arbitrated by a server of its own, can mean anything. The server is being built; the solo run and the duel against the machine already play.

The numbers themselves stay out of this note on purpose. They live in the game's own repository, where the balance changes, and a table copied onto this site would be wrong within a month while looking authoritative. When the balance is frozen at release, a table here can be generated from that source rather than typed next to it.