I have been working on a bunch of stuff on the the hood, but the main thing is a small tweak to controls.
Boost is no longer a button. Just hold full throttle — after ~1.4 seconds of sustained full gas (or during takeoff) boost engages automatically. Boost thrust and fuel consumption now scale with throttle strength instead of being all-or-nothing, so partial gas gives partial boost.
Beyond that, A lot of polish has reached the landing UI, with fonts and more markets buttons falling into place. Some fun experiments, allowing me to scale orbital time with player velocity, essentially creating a virtual C.
Data-driven ship stats — ship tuning moved out of the ship config into a ScriptableObject, so stats are authorable per ship asset.
UI rework — working market/trade buttons, reworked cargo-item UI, and refreshed HUD / Landed / Persistent-HUD prefabs.
Shipyard groundwork — added a "Kestrel" and a starter ship; began the separated ship model used by the shop.
Orbits & time controls — elliptical orbits, time-scaling / time-zoom, and scroll-to-zoom.
Mission rework foundation — scaffolded a markdown-based mission architecture and simplified MissionTask to a pure gate.
Narrative & presentation — rewritten intro story, reworked splash scene, new game-over screen, completed demo narrative, updated explosion VFX.
Menu & visual polish — menu restyling, toned-down engine/laser visuals, updated materials and ship prefabs.
The next version will be a content push, expanding the narrative across Mercury and Venus. More encounters, AI behaviour and types of cheese will be added, and I hope I'll figure out a pipeline.
I hope you enjoy the rescaled difficulty, with the original challenge of takeoff reintroduced.