Apogee — Program Update
Your buildings now do what their upgrade screens promised, communications ranges
are real distances, and the Program screen has been rebuilt. Plus a long list of
fixes to contracts, transfers, life support, and the maneuver planner.
Heads up before you load a save: facility limits are now enforced. A vehicle
already in your assembly building that exceeds your pad's mass cap or your
building's size caps will not roll out until you upgrade the facility or build it
smaller. The FLY button tells you exactly which limit and by how much.
Facilities Actually Do Something Now
Nine capabilities have been sitting on the upgrade screens, priced in funds, doing
absolutely nothing. Four of them now decide whether you can fly at all.
- Launch Pad — mass cap. The pad's tonnage limit was only ever used to size
contract payloads. Nothing stopped you launching over it. It does now — this is
the early difficulty dial, and it's finally connected. - Assembly Building — part count, height, and width. Never read anywhere.
Your building now has a door, and a strapped-on booster counts against the width
even though nothing sits on the axis out there. - Every limit you break, not just the first. Over on mass and height? You
get both lines. Fixing one and being refused again for the other wastes your
afternoon a reason at a time. - R&D Complex — science rate and sample re-analysis. A maxed lab earned
exactly what no lab earned. Science rate now multiplies every reading, and the
debrief tells you what the building was worth. Re-analysis slows the value decay
on repeat samples you physically bring home — a transmission is a number
that already arrived, and looking at it again produces the same number. - Astronaut Complex — training tiers. Every program could hire all three
specializations on day one at the cheapest building. Tier 0 trains Pilots, tier 1
adds Engineers, tier 2 adds Scientists. Pilots are always available — the first
thing a program does is fly somebody.
Crew
- The career radiation dose is now a career. That percentage next to every
name counted past 100% and the program kept assigning them. Crew who reach their
limit are grounded — alive, on the roster, done flying. The debrief names them on
the flight that crossed the line. - Standing a crew member down is never blocked. If a save has someone
already assigned over the limit, you can always take them off the flight. - Crew proficiency finally pays. It accumulated on every mission, saved,
and was read by nothing. A veteran crew now returns up to 25% more science, and
the debrief credits them by name. - Fixed: crew survived life support running out. A capsule that came down
intact reported a living crew whatever had happened inside it. The vehicle was
never the thing that had to survive. - Fixed: life support read 0.0 days on the pad regardless of what was
loaded aboard.
Communications
- Range is a real distance now. A link used to be rated by the geometric
mean of both ends; the better antenna now carries it, and the numbers are in
meters you can reason about. - Relays are rated to their actual job, so an early repeater is no longer
priced like an antenna tier. - New antennas in the research tree — enough to hear the Moon, then the
planets. - Fixed: the fleet panel queried the network below the level you paid for.
The Program Screen, Rebuilt
- Three tiled columns — Program, Facilities and Crew, Fleet Tracking —
each filling the window height. Resizing one shifts its neighbor instead of
overlapping it. - Date, funds, science and reputation moved into the top bar, where you
can see them while you're pricing a part or a research node instead of only on
the one screen where you're least likely to be spending them. - Save and Return to Main Menu are now inline with the program name.
- Fleet rows align their buttons whether or not the description text
matches. - Facility numbers read as quantities — "launch mass 140,000 kg", not a
raw save-file field. Science rate shows as a multiplier, because rounding x1.25
to "1" made the R&D Complex look like an upgrade that bought nothing.
Flight and Planning
- Orbit Info reports an upcoming intercept. When you're on a course for
another body it now says when you arrive, what periapsis you arrive at, what a
capture burn there would cost, and that cost against the delta-v you actually
have aboard. An impact is called an impact rather than left as a negative
altitude to work out. - ...and what the flyby leaves if you burn nothing. An arrival is a flyby
until a burn makes it something else, and the orbit it leaves on is not the one
it arrived on. That's the entire mechanism a free return runs on, and it was
invisible. - Free return is a checkbox on the transfer, not a rival button beside it.
- The map shows the orbit; the planner plans the burn. The transfer
planner was duplicated inside the orbital map. Manual burn planning moved to its
own tab in the Maneuver Planner. - Fixed: a planned free return put craft into a 350,000 x 3,000,000 km orbit.
Plans now mean the moment they named. - Fixed: the rendezvous tab had no way to load its solution into the node.
- Fixed: the pad banner asked for a throttle setting when guidance owned it.
Contracts and Craft Files
- Fixed: the lunar orbit contract could be completed in Earth orbit. Its
two criteria didn't have to be met together, so "orbit >= 20 km" closed in a
parking orbit while "reach the Moon" closed on a flyby. Orbiting the Moon now has
to be an orbit, and around the Moon. - Fixed: hydrolox engines reloading as kerolox. Craft files only recorded
propellant for parts that carried fuel mass, so an engine's choice was lost on
save.
Presentation
- The window opens at the full size of your available screen — not
fullscreen, and your taskbar stays visible. - The tutorial no longer tells new players things that aren't true. All
seventeen steps reviewed and rewritten. - American English throughout.