An enemy gunship holds this system. Its guns are faster and better than yours — if it gets a clear line of sight on you for two seconds, you are dead. You cannot win a straight fight, so do not have one.

Launch power is the whole weapon. Your shell is slow and gravity owns it from the moment it leaves the tube. Fire it soft and a planet will capture it into an orbit; fire it hard and it barely bends. Everything in between is a slingshot — and a slingshot is how you hit something you cannot see straight to.

You are paid for the flight, not the kill. A shell scores on how far it tracked and how hard gravity bent it on the way, so the long way round is worth several times the short one. A shot that loops a planet and comes back in is worth more than anything else you can do. The rack is a magazine, not a supply: missiles rebuild themselves every few seconds up to a cap, so running dry is a wait behind cover rather than a loss. Clearing a field returns two immediately, and every missile still on the rack pays a bonus. Only being destroyed ends a run.

• Stay behind the rocks — and near them. A body between you and the enemy blocks it outright. But mass also degrades its sensors: every planet carries a halo of interference that scales with its size, and a black hole's bite is far worse than its width suggests. Skimming a big planet's edge can leave you painted but unreadable, and a weak signal takes much longer to become a firing solution. The SIGNAL readout is the number that matters — the faint red wash on the map is the same information, drawn.
• It is hunting you the whole time. With no contact it crawls a slow patrol, pausing for several seconds at each waypoint — those pauses are your firing windows, and the CONTACT readout tells you when it is PARKED. Pick you up and it drops into PURSUIT, closing fast and shooting on the move. Break the contact and it runs to the last place it saw you, searches, and only then goes back to patrol. Hiding is temporary: sooner or later a patrol wanders into you.
• Mouse — your ship always looks at the cursor. Click anywhere to fly there. Space fires. The wheel or ↑↓ trims power.
• Touch — tap to fly to that spot. Press and hold, or drag, to aim: the ship follows your finger and stays pointed where you let go. Double-tap in one place to fire along the heading you already have — it calls back the burn the first tap ordered. Drag the power slider up and down.
• Watch the two lines. The dashed straight one is where a click would fly you. The solid curved one off the nose is the true first half-second of the shell's flight — the gap between them is gravity. Your last three misses stay on screen as faint ghosts.

Flying into a stellar body destroys you, and an unsafe route is drawn in red before you commit — the destination marker also warns you when the enemy would be able to see you standing there. You cannot fire while under thrust.

Every field is guaranteed winnable from where you start, with a shot that curves. There is always a line. Finding it is the game.

KEYS   SPACE fire   ↑↓ power   SHIFT+↑↓ coarse   S sensor   N new field   R retry