The Ledger · Span Nine
Half of every lap rakes starlight and your hull cooks in it. The other half is inside the planet's shadow, and shadow is the only place heat leaves you. Boost, guns and shields all draw on the same rising number.
There is no charge pool and no energy bar. Boost is heat. Every one of eight weapons is heat. The shield is heat. And the only place heat goes down is the dark side of the planet you are racing over.
HULL and HEAT. Heat only leaves by radiating, and radiating only works in shadow. Hull only comes back in the Induction Lane — a 90-metre corridor bolted to the outside of the last complex — which makes repairing a strategic surrender rather than a free top-up.
The lane restores 14 hull/second, but only while you hold within ±1.2 m of its centre at 120 m/s. It costs 1.4–1.9 s and, usually, two places.
The star is fixed in world space. Day and night come from the planet occluding it, and Span Nine straddles the boundary. Twenty-two seconds of sunlit deck loading heat in, eight seconds of true night pulling it back out, and one frame in between where six ships ahead of you go pure black.
Eclipse arc t 0.4694–0.7414 — 27.2% of the lap. Passive heat is +5.0/s sunlit against −7.5/s in eclipse.
Every discharge is a thermal decision as much as a tactical one. QUENCH cools everyone caught inside it, including whoever dropped it. SUNDER announces itself for a full 2.4 seconds before it fires, so it is enormous and completely fair.
Every shot costs +7 heat. RIME does 8 damage and disables the victim's radiators for 4.0 s — harmless in the eclipse, ruinous fired into the sunrise.
The Shear is 165 metres of nothing, and with 0.31 m/s² of residual gravity a jump is not an arc — it is a dead-flat precision test. The Inversion corkscrews 360° and runs you along the deck's underside. The Gauntlet splits into two 4.9-metre lanes around a cable trunk, and only one of them exits on line.
At 150 m/s the Shear crossing is 1.10 s and 0.19 m of fall. A 2.0° yaw error at the lip puts you 5.8 m off line at the far side. Ten landing lights fire toward you in a 120 ms sequence — that is the only aiming aid you get.
A converted cargo tug. A shipyard crew's bare structural keel. A research blade that has no business being here. Every silhouette reads as a 40-pixel black shape against the star, which is how you will mostly see them.
| Class | Top | Accel |
|---|---|---|
| Tender | 0.83× | 1.12× |
| Lighter | 1.00× | 1.00× |
| Clipper | 1.18× | 0.92× |
Clipper peaks at 214 m/s under boost. That is 770 km/h, on a plate ramp, 340 km above the cloud tops.
The Ledger is an orbital ring under construction: 1,100 km of triangulated spine, of which Span Nine is a 340 km arc, roughly 40 percent clad. Racing happens on the construction service deck — a 24 m ferrous plate ramp the rigs used to shift material along the span.
It climbs over completed pressure bays, dives under the spine, threads a smelting foundry that blows its crucible down every 14 seconds, and crosses a 165 m gap where a hull section was cut out and never replaced. No grandstands, no hoardings, no start-finish arch. Induction lighting and hazard chevrons, bolted on by somebody in a hurry.
Below it hangs Kesh, a hydrogen-ammonia giant at 118 K, blue-cyan and desaturated, filling 46 degrees of sky.
The umbra is the shadow. Nine is the span. The title is the lap.
Kesh does not rise or set. The deck runs round it, and the shadow it throws is the only cooling you will ever get. Where the plate gives way to open grating you can see straight through the floor to the cloud tops, 340 kilometres down, scrolling past at 162 metres a second.
Hydrogen-ammonia at 118 K. Blue-cyan, desaturated, and never lit brightly enough to compete with the deck: the mag strip under your skirt is the brightest thing in most frames, and that is deliberate.
The moment
Eight seconds of eclipse end in a single frame. The star crests the spine dead ahead at 6.5°, the deck goes from mag-strip cyan to one hard rake of white, and the anamorphic streak stretches the full width of the screen for about 0.8 seconds. Exposure is nailed at 0.85, so the blowout is real.
Sunlight puts 5.0 heat a second into the hull and there is nothing you can do about it. Eclipse takes 7.5 a second back out, and eclipse is 27.2% of the lap. Do that arithmetic once and you get a net gain of 48.2 every time you come round. Do it three times and you are over the cap.
Which is why the interesting question in this game is never can I get past him. It is can I afford to.
There are zero binary assets under src/, and the production
build contains one JavaScript bundle and one stylesheet. Every mesh,
texture, material and sound is written in code and generated the moment
the page loads.
It runs in a browser tab. There is no install and no launcher, and the numbers below are what it costs.
Open in the log. A controller session on 2026-08-07 left three things unresolved: mag-lock sheds too easily and the respawn re-stages you divergently, the Foundry bore does not line up with the deck, and the Shear is not reliably makeable first time. None of them are fixed. The design above is what the build is aiming at.
src/fx/Effects.ts at 7,609 lines.
src/. dist/assets contains one JS bundle and one stylesheet, and nothing else.
src/render/Renderer.ts. Auto-exposure is banned outright — an adapting exposure would erase the terminator blowout, which is the best frame in the game.
It runs in the tab you already have open. No install, no launcher, nothing to download.