#219: fleet capacity is a built, supplied thing rather than a researched
one. The eight fleet-size doctrines are gone; capacity is one berth free
plus one per Fleet Office standing. An office charges every 25s for the
vessel in its berth, priced off that vessel's own build cost so an expensive
hull is expensive to keep, and drawn from its own store the way a gas burner
draws gas. An office that cannot pay goes dark, its vessel is scuttled, and
the player is told through the same queue quest lines use - which reaches
them on a planet surface too.
An empty berth is idle rather than starved: an office is only failing while
there is something in it to fail, and holding it disabled would leave a
berth that could never be crewed and so could never be paid for again.
Ships have no hit points and a shield absorbs a hit wholesale, so the lost
vessel is scuttled rather than damaged - otherwise a shielded hull would
survive its own eviction.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_019AJMdB7iuHuLFZM1aBu3GD
#130 asked for the hull to break away from the fleet, drift a few metres,
and go up further off with something more explosive than a light animation.
The wreck is a separate node rather than the Ship staying alive to animate,
and that is the load-bearing part. A dying Ship still in the tree is still
an Area2D in the player_ships group with live weapon components - it would
keep firing, keep being fired at, keep counting as a target, and keep
colliding on the way out. So the ship's own lifecycle is untouched: it
leaves the fleet, emits destroyed, and is freed on exactly the frame it
always was. What is left behind is scenery, and the test pins that.
The explosion at the end was also the quieter of the two the game has.
Killing an enemy was made deliberately loud by #87 while losing one of your
own kept the base class's twelve-particle default - the reward louder than
the loss. It is now the bigger of the two.
#135 is the same scene from the other end: the prologue's convoy flies its
escorts on the corners of the box, which is the exposed part of it, and the
debris belt can take all four. With no interceptor left, the only hulls the
vortex could spare were holds, and the player flew out of the prologue in a
carrier. Two guards now: one interceptor is put back into the convoy at the
top of the vortex, where a vessel appearing among ten being thrown around a
black hole is not something anyone will catch; and the handover checks the
TYPES it hands over rather than only the count - one surviving carrier is
also a fleet of one, and it is not the fleet a new game starts with.
