Everything you have built in Orbital so far has been on or of a world. The space between them has been empty: somewhere fleets cross on the way to a fight, nothing more.
That changes here. You can now build in open space, and what you build stays there. It holds an orbit, it shows up on sensors, and it can be found, besieged, boarded, and taken from you. It outlives the fleet that built it.
Megastructures
A megastructure starts as a framework, laid down by a colony ship fitted with a Construction Module. Placing one destroys the colony ship, the same way founding a settlement does. From there it is a construction site with a meter you fill by flying freight to it.
Seven structures, spread across three research tracks, so no single empire gets all of them:
- Warp Gate (Propulsion 6). 5,000 metal, 7,000 credits. Two-way, paired to exactly one other gate.
- Weapons Station (Weapons 6). 7,000 metal, 5,000 credits. Reaches 700 units into a transit lane, three gun mounts.
- Gravity Sink (Propulsion 8). 4,000 metal, 4,000 credits. Catches crossing ships and holds them for eight ticks. You choose who is caught and who passes.
- Null Field (Armor 7). 4,000 metal, 4,000 credits. Blinds rival sensors within 700 units.
- Deep Space Array (Armor 9). 3,500 metal, 4,500 credits. An 1,100-unit sensor bubble anywhere you can afford to put one.
- Mobile Foundry (Propulsion 10). 9,000 metal, 11,000 credits. A shipyard that moves.
- Mega Destroyer (Weapons 9). 12,000 metal, 8,000 credits. A capital warship.
The last two are not emplacements. They finish, then they launch as massive ships.
Two capital ships
The Mobile Foundry builds four ships at once, wherever you park it, stacked on top of any yard already there. Move it and the slipway moves with it. Anything still on the ways finishes where it was laid down.
The Mega Destroyer has 4,000 hull points, does 350 damage a tick, and moves at a tenth the speed of a corvette. It cannot use gates. It is the slowest thing in the game and the hardest hitting, so it takes a long time to say what it says.
Its real weapon is the strike. Park it over a terraformed world and it charges for 24 ticks, then strips the biosphere off the planet. A terraformed world is the only place cargo can land, so this does not kill anyone. It takes away the loading dock.
The target can see it coming. The world under threat wears a filling ring, there is a countdown, the Situation log warns the owner, and the Herald runs it as a headline. A 24-tick fuse nobody can see is not a threat. It is an ambush.
Taking one costs you
Structures have 3,000 hull points and repair 12 a tick. Both numbers moved a long way in testing. The first pass priced them off a bare hull's damage, no weapon mounts fitted. Real ships carry mounts. A six-mount destroyer at Weapons 10 fires for 130 a tick, not 22.5, and at that rate the original 200 hull points was one volley for a squadron.
At 3,000, a lone destroyer needs twenty-odd ticks and has to stay there the whole time. Three destroyers do it in six to eight. A corvette screen cannot manage it at all, which is what the repair rate is there to guarantee.
Break a structure below 20% health and it is breached. Then you choose: capture it, and whatever construction stores were inside it are lost, or destroy it, and nobody gets it. Either way you need an armed hull holding the orbit. A freighter parked at a gate is not a siege.
Derelicts
When a faction is eliminated, its structures do not vanish and they do not stay flagged to a dead empire. They go abandoned: ownerless, still in orbit, still working. The first faction to park any ship in the orbit claims it. No breach, no warship, because there is nobody left to fight. It costs you the trip, nothing more.
Gates fling, they do not teleport
A gate takes a crossing that would burn ten ticks under your own engines and does it in three: a quarter of the flight time, not an instant hop. A ship in that compressed burn is still in flight. It can be seen, chased, and caught by a Gravity Sink, the same as any other transfer.
Gates can be paired across empires too, through a construction pact.
Pacts and sales
A construction pact lets two factions fund each other's sites and wire each other's gates. That is all it grants. Not a ceasefire, not an alliance. Two factions can co-fund a gate and still be shooting at each other over it. The Senate can also set a price on megaprojects, so the chamber decides whether this is an era of great works or an era of fleets.
You can also sell things that are not resources. An asset deal trades a hull or a settled world for freight. The seller names a price, the buyer hauls payment to wherever the asset actually is, and it changes hands when the meter fills. Payment sits in escrow rather than paying out per run, so a seller who walks away from a half-paid deal keeps nothing.
A sold hull arrives clean. Every standing order is stripped, the captain stays with the seller, and every armed charge is cleared. Selling someone a corvette with a live self-destruct aboard is not a trade.
New Ship Parts
The Flak Battery may not do any damage, but every one you fit slows every enemy hull in the battle by 5%, compounding, floored at half speed. Speed is survivability in this game, and a slower ship is easier for your whole fleet to hit. Flak is a force multiplier for everyone shooting next to it, and it costs almost nothing. It fits corvettes, frigates, and destroyers.
Colony ships now can also be fit with Construction pieces to build mega-structures.
Captain Updates
Experience now lives in exactly one place: the captain. Ships used to carry a vestigial rank and kill count of their own, left over from before veterancy moved to officers. Those columns were zeroed and unread, but the shipyard kept writing to them anyway, because the column was there. They are gone now.
Rank still climbs the same way: a confirmed kill adds one rank, worth 1% more damage and 1% more hull. The tiers are Rookie, Regular, Veteran, Elite, and Ace at rank 10. A fleet still runs on one commanding officer. Members surrender their captain to the bank when they join, and the flagship's captain becomes the fleet's admiral.
Veteran Yards used to launch new hulls carrying a share of the fleet's average rank, which was hull veterancy under another name and stopped doing anything the day rank moved to captains. It now does the same job in the place experience actually lives: your new captains start at rank 1, already blooded.
Pacing Updates
Games were resolving too fast, and three changes slow them down.
Travel time follows distance correctly now. A torch transfer accelerates for half the trip and brakes for the other half, so travel time scales with the square root of distance, not distance itself. Four times the distance buys twice the time. The old help text claimed a setting of 2 roughly doubled travel time; it actually bought 1.4 times. That is now fixed, so the dial does what it says.
Moons are further apart. Most fights happen inside a planet's system, and a moon hop used to take under four ticks: barely a fight at all. Moons now sit further from their parent planet, with orbital periods scaled to match, so a moon hop takes real time without breaking the physics that hold everything else together.
Structure combat is calibrated against real ships, not bare hulls. The 200 to 3,000 hull point change above came from the same fix: every number that touches combat is now priced off a fitted ship, mounts and all, not the hull a ship starts with before you put anything on it.
None of this changes what you can do. It changes how long each fight and each crossing takes to matter.
Bug Fixes
Two bugs came out of a full regression pass, and both were the same shape: the game accepted an order and then quietly did nothing.
- You could arm a dead man's switch on a ship with no detonator fitted. The order took, the panel showed it, and nothing ever happened. It now refuses at the moment you set it and tells you why.
- An eliminated faction could still capture a structure, only for the abandonment rule to take it back one tick later with no warning. Both actions are blocked for eliminated factions now.
A separate player report on detonator damage turned out to be right on both counts raised. The tooltip promised one number, the blast dealt another, and the description still quoted a percentage we had already lowered. All three now read the same number: the one on the health bar.
Go build something that is still there next game.