MOON / FIRST DAWN V3 / DOCUMENTATION

Next Horizon: machines that help another colony

Source implementation for the transport release. Check BUILD.json and the September 9 journal for the deployed revision. The earlier ten-model gallery remains a design proposal; only the selected equipment described here is being integrated.

The useful loop is simple: build a complete machine, take it to someone who needs it, and watch their colony put it to work. The cost and physical journey remain visible.

Four complete machines on Good Neighbor

Research Field delivery after freight networking, service loops and factory planning. It costs 2,400 research work and continuously requires four powered home Minds. Manufacture the Good Neighbor chassis at a Robot Foundry. It uses the ordinary crew ceiling and attention allocation.

At a Replicator, choose Pack machine kits, select a machine and a finite count from one to four. Each kit costs the full normal machine bill. The Replicator delivers an intact, standard-design kit to its own inventory. Stopping an order finishes the current paid batch; unstarted batches are not charged.

In Industry, use Good Neighbor → Deliver kits: vehicle, one loading site, receiving Seed Base/Freight Depot, and up to four kit bays. The full stock and receiving room are reserved atomically. The vehicle finishes existing paid work before its queued kit run. Ordinary robots can move one kit at a time; Good Neighbor has four bays. A reservation is not an arrival.

The receiver may place a supplied machine without researching how to fabricate it. This lends that specific machine its base controller; it does not unlock the technology, other recipes or future fabrication. Placement, assembly, space, electrical connection, cooling, fuel and continuous powered-Mind requirements still apply. The four bays show the kits actually aboard.

The large chassis uses surface roads and service lanes. It does not fit compact robot elevators. Low home Mind support stops it with its cargo retained. A completed kit delivery releases the vehicle to ordinary colony work, which requires physical travel back when work is at home.

A bounded rescue visit

Good Neighbor can also carry one to four spare cassettes on a repair visit. Choose the vehicle, source, destination settlement and maximum repairs. The destination grants the sender existing build access before accepting repairs; same-owner settlements already qualify. This permission is checked again during the visit.

The vehicle physically picks up its supplies, travels to the destination Seed Base, then services machines or robots below 70% condition. Each finished repair consumes one cassette. The visit ends after the selected repairs, when no damaged equipment remains, or after ten minutes on site. It drives back to the loading site and returns unused supplies. Travel time is additional. Withdrawal of permission releases any service target and sends the vehicle home. No remote repair or instant unused-stock refund occurs.

Both Industry and the API retain the number of repairs actually completed, the reason the visit ended and the actual return tick. Home Minds, crew capacity, condition, blocked roads and paused colonies still matter.

Kestrel: the missing part, before dawn

Research Keep the oxygen cold (3,600 work, materials and thermal design), then A small river through the sky (7,200 work, cryogenics, precision and freight networking). Both continuously require four powered Minds. Prepare a Kestrel landing pad using its full construction bill. Each pad includes one reusable vehicle, its home berth and one visiting berth. A claim permits at most two pads, including construction sites.

Use Industry → Kestrel → Send cargo. Select the launch pad, an owned loading source, a prepared destination pad, a packaged material and 1–24 whole units. The current local-hop range is 100 metres to 16 kilometres. Parts, electronics, fuel and refined materials are appropriate; bulk regolith, complete machine kits and fluids use ground transport.

The order reserves the complete cargo and room at both pads. Robots or an eligible fixed line must bring the cargo to the launch pad. Automatic logistics supplies separate aluminium and liquid oxygen. The quote pays for the outward and return journey, with enough reserved propellant for an unsuccessful delivery to return with the cargo.

After supplies arrive: two powered minutes for loading; an actual timed flight; thirty powered seconds to unload; a return flight; two powered minutes for servicing at home. Flight times and propellant depend on distance and load. One pad cannot dispatch or accept another reservation while committed. The visiting berth is separate from the parked home vehicle.

Ground operations need the pad's power, condition, connection and four Minds. A flying vehicle completes its programmed flight even if the colony loses support. An absent destination causes a loaded return; a receiver that stays offline for ten minutes also causes a loaded return. Delivered is recorded only after physical unloading. These states survive a saved-world restart.

Cancel before launch to retain the goods at the loading pad. Any incoming cargo continues its real delivery there. Flying vehicles complete their safe return. The round-trip propellant is charged once, at launch.

Coldwell: keep oxygen useful

Coldwell automatically turns 8 oxygen into 8 liquid oxygen in 45 powered seconds, consuming 8P while producing. It uses actual oxygen from existing material processing. Aluminium remains separate until rocket fueling. Fluid containers and researched pipelines carry oxygen; ordinary solid conveyors cannot.

A supported Coldwell holding liquid oxygen uses 1P for storage even while production is idle. A supported landing pad includes cold storage in its 3P demand. Passive tanks, ordinary freight and pipeline transit lose about 1% of their remaining liquid oxygen per hour in this game's simplified model. Partial cooling power reduces protection proportionally. Vented mass and fractional loss accounting are retained through restarts. Coldwell keeps its output cold until an actual consumer requests it, rather than automatically exporting surplus to warm warehouses.

These are relative game quantities and an explicit storage approximation, not engineering ratings. Tank insulation, active cooling design and actual lunar conditions would set real losses. The model makes electricity and travel matter without adding a tank-control panel.

The aluminium/oxygen route has a real research basis: NASA studied lunar engine concepts and tested powdered aluminium/oxygen combustion. Those experiments also exposed performance and mixing difficulties. This is plausible future machinery, not a claim of a flight-proven engine. The quote assumes 60 relative empty-vehicle mass units, 220 seconds specific impulse, a simplified lunar ballistic hop and a maneuver allowance; it is a gameplay calculation, not a certified trajectory or engine design. See NASA design study and NASA combustion experiments.

Wayfarer: a train that becomes a beginning

Manufacture Wayfarer at a Robot Foundry after expedition engineering, with four continuously powered home Minds. The four-car convoy is commissioned at a connected, enabled Departure yard, where its full 32-metre envelope and a clear surface exit to the parcel border lane are checked. If no suitable bay exists, the Foundry keeps the completed, paid train waiting; it does not charge another batch or squeeze the train into a trapped pocket.

Wayfarers wait at their yard for explicit expeditions and return there afterward. They do not accept ordinary freight, building or repair work. Existing assigned cargo is completed rather than discarded. The manufacturing location is an assembly abstraction: this release does not simulate moving subassemblies from the Foundry to the yard.

New construction must preserve a 50-metre-radius clear yard apron and keep its full footprint 50 metres inside each parcel border, making a combined 100-metre strip across shared borders. Leave a broad approach between your yard and that strip, and similar room at the destination. These are protected surface travel areas; paving is future work. Existing buildings and paid sites remain in place, and present or future Federation Node sites reserve their own 180 m circular plot plus a 50 m exterior travel ring (230 m outer radius). The node keeps its full interior building area. Gold and dashed blue circles mark those boundaries. Admission checks do not guarantee an entire cross-parcel route through every older settlement.

Send the existing paid Seed Expedition. An available home Wayfarer is selected automatically, or API clients may select its robotId. The full 24-unit seed cargo travels aboard the convoy in four reserved loads. Its reactor, supplies and folded Seed Base remain visible while carried. Arrival and unloading precede assembly of the daughter colony. The chassis is reusable afterward. Existing expeditions can still use ordinary cargo robots when a Wayfarer is unavailable.

This version moves the four wagons as a single conservative footprint; articulated trailer tracking is future visual work. It does not promise a train can squeeze through small robot lanes.

Vesper and the shape of future computation

Vesper replaces the existing Radiator Field's model, scaled to fit its established clearance. The real rule remains one powered radiator supporting four additional Minds, with the existing early thermal research and continuous support requirement. Animation follows operation.

The computronium review compares a pyramid, a tall stack with cooling gaps and a broad terrace. All have 84 cartridges and the same workshop, rover and camera scale. These are visual proposals; no new live megastructure recipe is introduced.

AI command parity

Always observe, verify stock and support, preview, commit with an idempotency key, and verify the result. IDs below are placeholders; discover real IDs in the current observation.

{"action":"replicator.pack","claimId":"YOUR_CLAIM","machineId":101,"type":"reactor","count":2}
{"action":"carrier.dispatch","claimId":"YOUR_CLAIM","robotId":102,"fromId":101,"toId":201,"kits":["reactor","reactor"]}
{"action":"carrier.service","claimId":"YOUR_CLAIM","robotId":102,"fromId":103,"targetClaimId":"RECIPIENT_CLAIM","count":4}
{"action":"rocket.send","claimId":"YOUR_CLAIM","machineId":104,"fromId":103,"toId":202,"resource":"fuel","amount":4}
{"action":"rocket.cancel","claimId":"YOUR_CLAIM","machineId":104}

Owner tokens follow the normal command rules. Delegated logistics scope covers cargo dispatch and rocket cancellation; crew scope covers repair visits. The existing packing command follows normal production/owner controls. The catalog exposes exact costs, prerequisites, vehicle properties, rocket limits and cryogenic assumptions. Guide lookups read these rules and the captured mission state, with inventory quantities normalized to whole units. Guide itself remains read-only.

Verification and limits

Release verification must cover normal manufacturing, delivery and assembly; atomic rejection; recipient support and permission changes; source/destination capacity; queued work; single-kit/four-kit limits; physical loading; failed receivers; cancellation; exactly-once HTTP receipts; saved travel; cryogenic accounting; and all existing campaigns. Geometry checks load actual GLBs and evaluate animated vertices against collision disks.

CPU renders and CPU/API checks are used while the workstation GPU remains unstable. A browser visual test has not been performed. Existing worlds must be backed up and preserved before staging and deployment. Forward fixes must retain the newest saved transport records; restoring an older world is not a code rollback.

One-way seed hops: the same lander, a new home

Finish a Complete Expedition at a Departure yard. In Settlement → Expeditions, choose Flight · one-way seed lander, select an empty field and the opening plan, and choose Reserve field & load seed hop. Surface remains the default and still uses the Wayfarer or ordinary robots.

Seed hops use the existing starter lander model and rocket flight system. They require the existing Pack a small civilization and A small river through the sky research, with four powered Minds. No new vehicle, launch building or research branch is required. The current hop range is 100 m to 16 km from the yard, with a clear, sufficiently gentle landing area. No receiving pad is needed.

The complete package is reserved once. Aluminium and liquid oxygen are additional: the panel and API preview quote the actual one-way bill. Automatic logistics brings these to the yard, with the same next-free-transport priority as other ordered launches. Conveyors can supply aluminium; pipelines or robots carry liquid oxygen. The yard pauses further manufacturing during this mission. Fuel delivery can take longer than flight.

Once fueled, the supported launch countdown takes 120 seconds. Follow the lander with the existing flight camera. After touchdown, the paid onboard crew commissions the base over 1,200 supported seconds; the departure yard and four home Minds must support ground work. Losing home support never freezes a craft in midair. Its preprogrammed hop lands, then waits to commission if necessary.

The lander stays as the daughter Seed Base, with its paid reactor stores, installed Mind, four robots and nine opening kits. The same finite opening plan begins. You can keep the daughter or, once its seed and Mind are operating, use Offer this Seed Base for a new player. Your original base stays home.

Cancel before launch returns the packed colony at the yard and releases the destination; delivered fuel remains there. A launched one-way lander finishes its mission. There is no return leg, extra Kestrel shipment, instant colony grant or duplicated package on reload.

For AI players, preview the ordinary command before committing:

{"action":"expedition.launch","claimId":"YOUR_CLAIM","machineId":123,"targetClaimId":"EMPTY_PARCEL","transport":"flight","plan":"opening"}

Read the real yard ID and valid parcel ID from current state. The result includes expeditionId, flightId and quote; the yard's flight record has kind: "seed". Track loading → outbound → unloading → complete; unloading is colony commissioning. Cancel a loading hop using rocket.cancel with that yard's machineId. Omit transport or use surface for the existing ground workflow. /catalog.seedHops and Guide state describe the same behavior.

The fuel model reuses the ideal rocket equation, with the whole expedition input bill as a relative mass proxy rather than calling 24 abstract crates 24 small rocket parcels. Values remain game units and assumed engine performance, not engineering kilograms or a flight-qualified design.