Top, High, Med, Low: four heights instead of free flight
Published · Updated
Orders in Hostile Flagship stay on a flat plane. Near the ground, height is one of four bands: Top at 25 km, High at 15 km, Med at 5 km, and Low, 300 m over the terrain.
Why bands, not free height
Free height means a lift step on every order. Bands are precise enough for what matters near the ground, hiding behind terrain and staying under or over a threat, without that extra step. Each band down trades safety for being close: Low is close support, Top is the safest place to be.
Space keeps one flat plane. Bands apply only in the surface zone, 25 km and below.
How each band flies
- Top, High and Med are flat heights above sea level, level over hills.
- Low follows the ground. It samples the terrain under the ship and ahead of it, out to 6 seconds at its speed, and holds 300 m over the highest of those points, so it climbs early for a ridge.
- A fighter in a fight flies in 3D on its own, but never below 100 m over the ground.
- Every ship can fly bands, the carrier included.
Shift+1 to Shift+4 pick a band; Shift+5 lands. The Height row on the command card does the same.
A band change is an order
Changing band is a movement order and a commitment. The ship’s course on the plane doesn’t change; it climbs or dives toward the new band, and the status line says so, for example “diving to Med”. Hold (H) mid-climb takes it back to the band it last held. A Striker drops its fight to change band.
- Climb rate: half the ship’s top speed. The carrier climbs at 50 m/s; a Mk3 Striker at 250 m/s, so Top to Low over flat ground takes it about 100 seconds.
- Groups climb at their slowest member’s rate.
- Followers take their leader’s band and climb no faster than it. Give one its own band and it stops copying.
For fighters and scouts, a climb comes out of the same 10 g budget as speeding up, braking and turning: the three are added together, and if the total is over the limit, all three are scaled down alike. A U-turn at full speed brakes and turns at about 7 g each. Climbing also counts against top speed.
Ships in different bands don’t steer round each other, and combat ranges are in 3D, so a fight at Low is out of reach of Strikers at Top until they are sent down.
Ground everywhere
Low has to know where the ground is, in every area, watched or not. Each area’s ground comes from its own terrain, the same triangles it is drawn with, so a ship at Low in an area nobody is looking at still holds 300 m over the right hills. The story of that fix is in One world, watched or not.
Arriving and leaving
A jump into a planet’s air arrives about 1 km over Top and settles onto it. The way out of a planet’s air is only from Top: going down to the surface is a commitment. The fast way between bands is the hot drop.
Each craft in view gets a line down to the ground with a cross where it touches, and the play area’s edge is drawn at High, Med and Low. While the camera is under about 4.5 km over the ground, the cloud sheet fades out.
Why each height is what it is: height bands, hot drops and burns.