Missiles: what to draw

The Seeker launcher fires homing missiles. A missile is ejected slowly from one of the launcher's four cells, lights its motor, speeds up, turns toward the raider it has locked and, near its hull, goes off: the blast is a wave that runs out and hurts what its front reaches, and sets off the missiles it meets. It can overshoot a nimble raider, and when its fuel runs out it coasts and bursts in a small harmless wave. Raiders on Dustfall and Nova Forge, and Haven's elite commanders, fire missiles of three kinds at you: darts, seekers and torpedoes.

Three modules change the missile: Seeker head (turns harder, locks farther), Rocket motor (faster, a new engine and exhaust each level) and Shaped warhead (a bigger blast). The game already plays all of this with today's drawings and code-drawn stand-ins; this brief lists what to draw so it looks finished.

Screenshots from the game (2026-10-04, in docs/designer/missiles/):

Frame sequences 0.1 s apart are in data/missiles/ (fizzle-1..7, fuse-1..6, chain-1..6), kept out of git.

What to draw

Eight new files and two refinements. Every file goes in src/sprites/, under the name given; the game picks it up on the next build, and until a file is there it keeps drawing what it draws now.

1-4. The missile, one body per engine

Four variants, one per Rocket motor level. The player sees theirs change when they buy a level, so the four should read as one missile family whose tail section grows: same canvas, same nose-up pose, same band position, a different engine.

• Canvas viewBox="0 0 32 32", nose up (the game turns it to fly along its course). Today's body runs from y 2 to 28, 6 wide (x 13-19), fins out to x 8 and 24. Keep a variant within y 1-30 and x 6-26.
• Drawn 18 game units across the canvas: about 15 units of body, a third of the Wisp scout (46 long), half a raider fighter. On screen that is 18 px at 100% and 36 px at 200%: the silhouette and the band have to read at 18 px.
• Mk I, solid rocket: today's drawing. Mk II, hot-fuel: a bigger bell nozzle, a fuel line. Mk III, ion sustainer: slimmer, a grid ring at the tail that glows blue (#6fd0ff). Mk IV, fusion torch: a magnetic nozzle ring, violet emitter (#b98cff). These are suggestions; the rule is that the tail tells the tier.
• Raiders fire three kinds, each painted in their faction colour: the seeker is Mk I at 14 units, so Mk I must also look right as an enemy weapon; the dart (11 units: slim, a needle nose, small fins, a short yellow trail) and the torpedo (22 units: fat, blunt, a big warhead, thick smoke) have their own files and use Mk I until drawn. Each must read at a glance by size and trail: a dart has to come close to go off, a torpedo goes off 40 units out with a wide wave.

Layers, as in today's file (the game reads them by id):

• <g id="base">: metal body and fins, outline #0b1722 1.4 wide, the greys of the other weapon drawings (#e0e4e9-#6c6e72 body, #9ea4ac-#2e343a fins).
• <g id="accent">: the band. Fill it with the gradient accent-fill whose stops have the ids accent-light, accent-base, accent-dark; the game repaints the stops in the shooter's colour: yours #ff9a68 (the launcher's colour), a raider's its faction colour. Only the band goes here; a glow that should not change colour stays in base.
• <g id="anchors">: one <line id="flame-main-1"> per nozzle, from the nozzle backwards. Its length is a full flame (the game draws 0.85-1.7 times it, longer while the missile accelerates and for higher motors); its stroke-width is the nozzle's width. Two nozzles: flame-main-1, flame-main-2. The layer is removed when the drawing loads; colour it anything (today red).

Exhaust and trail (code, colours from you)

The game draws the flame and the trail itself, so they can stretch and fade. What is wanted from you is the colours and a mock of each look; today they are:

Smoke puffs swell from 1.6 to 7.6 units and fade over the trail's life (0.4, 0.5, 0.6, 0.75 s by level). A raider's missile has the solid-rocket look with a 0.3 s trail.

5. The launcher on the hardpoint

weapons/turret-missile.svg exists: a square pod of four cells on the round turret base. The launcher is now a medium gun, so it is drawn 14 units across on a medium mount and 21 on a heavy one; in the arcade the scout carries it at 10.5. It is also the launcher's card icon (about 55 px on the arsenal card, 22 px in a mount row, 40 px on the arcade depot card, and on the depot's ship preview), so no separate card icon is needed.

• Keep the base disc the size of the other turrets (about 31 of the 64, so the mount's ring shows round it) and the pod on top.
• Keep the four muzzle-1 to muzzle-4 circles in <g id="anchors">, one in each cell, r = the cell's bore: missiles leave from the cells in turn, splayed alternately left and right.
• Worth adding: missile noses in the cells, in the accent band colour, so a loaded pod reads as missiles at 22 px.

6-8. Module icons

Three icons in the family of modules/guided-plasma.svg: 64 × 64, base #5d6874 with #070b14 outlines 3-4 wide, the accent gradient accent-fill (accent-light, accent-base, accent-dark). The file name is the module's title in lower case with dashes; until it is there the game shows the module's glyph on a tile (see campaign-modules.png).

• seeker-head.svg: the missile's nose cone with a crosshair or lock brackets.
• rocket-motor.svg: a nozzle with a flame.
• shaped-warhead.svg: a warhead with a burst.

They show at about 55 px on station cards, 40 px on depot cards and 24 px in the depot's Installed strip.

Explosion and lock (code, reference only)

• The blast is drawn by code: a fireball (explode()) and a travelling wave, a band in the missile's colour behind a bright front, running out to the blast radius (yours 100, 125, 150 or 175 m; a dart's 45, a seeker's 70, a torpedo's 120) and fading; the front does the damage as it reaches each hull (fuse-3, chain-1). No file is loaded for it; a reference sheet of the wave and of how a missile blast should differ from a ship exploding is welcome, and the code will follow it.
• A missile that runs out of flight without going off bursts: a small dim fireball in its colour, a grey spark and a small wave of 45 that hurts nothing (fizzle-3).
• A raider a missile of yours has locked wears four turning corner ticks in #ff9a68 (flight-stock.jpg). A restyle is welcome as a reference.

What already exists and stays

• weapons/projectile-missile.svg is today's missile; raiders use it. Its canvas, scale and band are the pattern for the other three.
• weapons/turret-missile.svg is the launcher; its cells and muzzle marks decide where missiles come from.
• The other turrets (weapons/turret-*.svg) and module icons (modules/*.svg) are the families the new art joins.
• Weapons and drones point their nose up on their canvas; everything in weapons/ follows that.

Reference

How the code uses the files

• src/js/missiles.js: missile_sprite(engine) loads weapons/projectile-missile-<level + 1> for levels 1-3, falls back to weapons/projectile-missile, and draws a rocket of lines when neither exists; missile_draw puts it at 18 units (yours) or 14 (a raider's), band painted, flame from the flame-main marks; missile_trail_draw and missile_engines hold the trail looks.
• src/js/upgrades.js: module_icon(option) loads modules/<title-with-dashes>.svg, else the glyph tile.
• src/js/turrets.js and src/js/hardpoints.js: turret_draw and gun_muzzles read weapons/turret-missile.svg and its muzzle marks; gun_boxes sets 10.5 / 14 / 21 units by mount.

Flight, by the numbers

• Ejected at 260 plus the ship's forward speed, splayed 0.3 rad from the aim; the motor lights 0.12 s later and pushes to top speed. A world's projectile speed (Ion Reach 1.35, Obsidian 0.82) scales speed and thrust.
• The seeker sees 100° either side of the nose. It locks the raider that is nearest and most ahead within its lock range, keeps it while it lives and stays in view, and otherwise takes the next one ahead while the motor burns. Turn rate is limited, so a faster motor turns wider.
• The Radar module guides it too (src/js/radar.js): each level turns it 0.5 rad/s harder; it locks from as far as the radar sees (2.5, 4, 6 km) when that is farther than its own lock range; a raider the radar sees keeps its lock out of the seeker's view and reach; a lost lock is taken again from all the radar sees, behind the missile too.
• It goes off 18 units from a raider's hull (its fuse), or on a rock or debris. The blast is a wave running out at 650 a second: a hull within the fuse distance takes the full damage, one farther out less, down to the rim where the falloff leaves 40% (Shaped warhead 0: 55%, 70%, 85% at levels 1-3), so the raiders round the one it went off at take the warhead's share on average. The wave sets off any missile, either side's, whose toughness its damage there beats (yours 30), three deep at most.
• Burnt out, the missile coasts 0.9 s, slowing, then bursts in a small harmless wave.

Module prices follow the other modules (cost × (1 + 0.48 × level)): Seeker head 55 / 81 / 108, Rocket motor 50 / 74 / 98, Shaped warhead 60 / 89 / 118; 733 for all nine levels. They wait until you own the launcher.

Balance: a choice, not an upgrade

The Seeker launcher: medium mount (was heavy), rank Vanguard, 1400 salvage in the campaign, 390 in the arcade (120 + rating 6 × 45); damage 60 every 1.05 s, tier +22% per level like every gun.

• Against one raider it is the weakest gun: 57 a second, less what misses (in a stepped test, 60 s against two raiders, about 80% of stock missiles hit circling fighters; all hit tanks and lancers). Against a squadron of three in its blast it does 57 + 2 × 36 = 129, past the railgun's 115.
• The fuse and the wave kept that: into the same squadron of five (stepped, 60 s, 116 missiles) a stock missile dealt 62 before and 65 after, all modules 75 before and 81 after. Darts and seekers that fly into your wave go off with it.
• It hits without the turret having to lead the target, and with the Seeker head it fires from 1.35 km while guns stop at 0.9 km; a missile still takes about 1.3 s to get there, and the target can turn away.
• Hotter plasma adds 5 a shot to every gun: 26 a second on the pulse cannon, 5 on the launcher. The launcher grows through its own warhead instead.
• Medium, it shares a mount with the ion disruptor and the flux beam, so a medium mount is a choice of shields, burst or crowds; on a gunship or cruiser the heavy mount stays for the railgun.
• Arcade income per world is about 270 (Haven: 45 raiders × 76% × 2, + 80 bonus, + 120 flagship), 400 by Dustfall, 545 by Obsidian. The launcher is bought after the first world; all three modules take about two more worlds, as five levels of Hotter plasma (372) plus Prism (186) do for the pulse cannon.