# Space Trader: research and proposed direction

Working title: **The Meridian Reach**. Prepared November 7, 2026. This is a product and production proposal, supported by primary-source research and a playable HTML concept. Production scope, economics, costs, and success criteria below are design recommendations, not verified forecasts.

## The direction

**Become a memorable captain in a beautiful, living trading frontier.** Begin with a modest freighter, a useful crew member, a small loan, and a reason to make your first delivery. Profit buys freedom: better routes, new relationships, specialized ships, and eventually a company.

The confirmed priorities are wonder, adventure, and building a business first; Gazillionaire-like humor and colorful rivals belong in that journey. Optional, serious economic and political play should open up as the player's company grows. The intended main session is an immersive 45–90 minutes, with useful shorter actions and excellent eventual mobile play. Solo time advances through actions and can be paused. Bounded background processes are welcome, including offline progress.

Commerce is the primary activity. Risk can shape routes, insurance, hired guards, and negotiations; an EVE-style combat system is outside the desired direction. The player wants several viable identities, photorealistic destinations and very fast travel, meaningful long-term goals and social potential, and substantial free ways to play. Their later MMO design note now favors fair monetization without pay-to-win; this supersedes the earlier exploration of paid progression acceleration. The detailed economy, technical implementation, and monetization balance below are **our proposals to prototype and validate**, rather than additional user requirements.

## Research: what to carry forward

| Primary source and observed evidence | Implication for Space Trader |
| --- | --- |
| [LavaMind's Gazillionaire page](https://www.lavamind.com/games/gazillionaire/) describes growing a tiny trading company through deals, market opportunities, and competition. | Preserve the personal business journey and rapid decisions. Keep humor and recognizable rivals central to the fiction. |
| [The publisher's Steam listing](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1169100/Gazillionaire/) positions the game around a small company becoming an empire and lists solo and local competitive play. | The solo experience should stand on its own; competition can begin with authored AI captains. |
| [Soren Johnson's Offworld design explanation](https://mohawkgames.com/2014/05/19/introducing-offworld-trading-company/) describes specialization, connected resources, and prices responding to purchases and sales. | Make the player's actions alter the opportunity. Saturating a route and responding to change create better repeat play than permanent, riskless arbitrage. |
| [Trese Brothers' studio and Star Traders description](https://www.tresebrothers.com/) combines captain identity, trade, configurable ships, and faction choices. | Relationships, crew, and ship identity can provide progression beyond a rising wallet. Choose a tighter initial activity set. |
| [EVE's September 2026 economic report](https://www.eveonline.com/news/view/monthly-economic-report-september-2026), published October 14, monitors mining, production, destruction, money movement, and price indices. | A future persistent economy needs measurable health and active economic operations. Visual dashboards alone cannot establish balance. |
| [RAID's official champion guide](https://raidshadowlegends.com/champions/) explains acquisition, character roles, and affinity relationships. | Borrow production polish, expressive characters, specialization, collection, and long-term goals. Keep purchases separate from functional power or progression shortcuts under the current fairness direction. |
| [OpenStax's supply-and-demand summary](https://openstax.org/books/principles-economics-3e/pages/3-key-concepts-and-summary) describes shortages, surpluses, equilibrium, and shifts from inputs, population, technology, and policy. | Give price changes understandable causes. A refinery outage changes outputs and input demand; each event should affect specific markets. |
| [NASA's ISRU overview](https://www.nasa.gov/overview-in-situ-resource-utilization/) discusses locally sourced consumables and propellant; [its propulsion chapter](https://www.nasa.gov/smallsat-institute/sst-soa/in-space_propulsion/) discusses water electrolysis propulsion. | Water, oxygen, structural metals, electronics, medicines, food, and industrial catalysts form a plausible vocabulary. The setting's future technologies remain fiction. |
| [Three.js responsive guidance](https://threejs.org/manual/pages/responsive.html) separates canvas display size from drawing resolution and explains high-resolution performance costs. | Budget render resolution, preserve responsive controls, and measure real devices. PC visuals cannot simply be scaled down and declared mobile-ready. |
| [EVE's historical TiDi design article](https://www.eveonline.com/news/view/introducing-time-dilation-tidi) discusses overloaded simulation work and slowing game time to manage it. | Distributed hosting does not remove contested-market or simulation bottlenecks. Treat MMO scale as a separate, measured engineering program. This article is historical context, not evidence of EVE's current implementation. |

These sources establish design precedents and technical constraints. They do not establish a market size, likely revenue, production budget, or willingness to pay. That requires player and commercial validation.


## MMO design note review (2026-11-08)

The supplied `what-makes-a-good-mmo.md` emphasizes an immersive living world, vertical and horizontal progression, multiple player archetypes, player-driven stories and cooperation, and fair no-pay-to-win monetization. It is a direction note, not evidence that each MMO convention will work in this commerce-first solo game.

Carry forward now: distinct destinations and atmosphere; a clear earned progression arc; room for traders, explorers, collectors, and eventual company builders; companions, a home base, research, and cosmetic expression as horizontal goals; risk that creates stories; and meaningful play without purchase pressure. Each of the seven destinations beyond the starter port should express a different economy and visual signature. First-arrival surveys and persistent cartography give exploration a modest playable reward.

Defer: forced group content, tank/heal/DPS roles, mandatory guilds, open PvP/territory wars, high-friction social obligations, and MMO loot treadmills. In a solo prototype, translate cooperation into authored NPC relationships and later believable rival logistics. Keep group play optional if it is eventually added. Resolve the monetization direction in favor of fair, no-pay-to-win progression: the earlier paid-acceleration experiment is no longer the working recommendation.

## The repeatable experience

A run has six beats: **read a place → spot an opportunity → commit cargo and capital → choose the passage → handle a surprise → arrive and realize the result**.

A first-session example:

1. Arrive at Meridian's orbital gardens. A short conversation establishes the captain's ship and debt.
2. See food and water listed as local surpluses. Accept a small fixed-price water delivery to Vesper.
3. Inspect a quote showing total price, fees, cargo use, and remaining cash. Buy a modest food cargo with enough reserve for passage.
4. Choose between a safer longer lane and a faster uncertain lane in the production slice. Hire guards, buy insurance, or negotiate passage when their costs and outcomes differ visibly; no mandatory risk fee. Watch a short orbital departure and arrival; skip or shorten repeat journeys.
5. Receive an encounter with visible stakes. Help a stranded medical courier, bargain for information, or keep the appointment.
6. Deliver water, sell food, and see **net voyage profit**, changed reputation, a rival's response, and a clear next goal.

The current concept implements one route per destination, not the proposed alternate lanes. First arrivals present a port-specific location description; repeat encounters still cycle deterministically for review. The guided charter is followed by pickup-port dispatches that rotate every seven action days, so the board offers renewable jobs after the first delivery.

Design the main session as a **45–90 minute expedition**: compare markets and contacts, make several voyages, resolve a story or research milestone, then decide how to reinvest. Buying or pricing a single order should take seconds; a route and encounter should fit a few minutes. Quick checks and progress reviews should also work on a phone. Solo solvency must not require a daily login.

## Economic depth without opaque busywork

Use explicit, integer-denominated money and physical inventory. Show both mass and volume constraints in production, simplifying them to tonnes in the prototype. Commodity specifications determine storage, certification, spoilage, and hazard requirements only when they create a worthwhile decision.

Start with six meaningful commodity families, expanding after validation:

| Commodity | Producers | Buyers | Useful strategic distinction |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Purified water | Ice mines, ocean worlds | Habitats, industrial ports, propellant plants | Reliable demand, bulky transport |
| Titanium alloys | Smelters and foundries | Shipyards and construction colonies | Industrial cycles and certification |
| Semiconductors | Advanced fabrication hubs | Shipyards and research outposts | Higher value, supply-chain fragility |
| Antibiotics | Pharmaceutical habitats | Clinics and remote settlements | Emergency demand and reputation choices |
| Algae protein | Farm habitats and ocean bioreactors | Mining and industrial colonies | Staple consumption, modest margins |
| Reactor catalysts | Specialist processing facilities | Fuel plants and industrial reactors | High working-capital requirements |

The prototype uses an inventory-sensitive price heuristic, not a claimed real-world equilibrium solver:

```text
midpoint = base_price × clamp(1.85 − local_stock / 100, 0.35, 2.6)
ask      = rounded(midpoint × 1.035 × (1 + exchange_fee))
bid      = rounded(midpoint × 0.965 × (1 − exchange_fee))
```

Quotes sum marginal unit prices as inventory changes, rather than multiplying the first unit's price by the order size. Production and consumption use bounded daily throughput of 3–6 tonnes toward a port and commodity target that shifts slowly with the day. The movement is deterministic and forecastable from the local save clock. A sufficiently large repeated shipment can saturate a destination before its demand recovers; this simple rule adds evolving trade windows without pretending to simulate factories or agents.

For production, replace that shortcut with a bounded physical-flow model:

```text
next_stock = current_stock
           + feasible_production(inputs, energy, capacity)
           + imports − exports − consumption − spoilage
```

Local demand curves, inventory coverage, trading depth, input costs, and NPC budgets then determine quotes. Cap rates of adjustment to avoid violent oscillations. Specialization creates trade; hauling and information costs bound arbitrage. Show the causal drivers in plain language, such as “two refinery deliveries are overdue.”

The journey ledger must distinguish cargo proceeds from actual profit:

```text
voyage_profit = sales + contract_payments − inventory_cost_sold
              − fuel − salaries − interest − port_charges − damage
```

Track unrealized cargo separately. A loan increases cash and liabilities equally; it does not create profit. A contract's payment replaces the sale proceeds for the delivered cargo. The prototype shows both a career-level realized operating ledger and route-leg results. A leg starts at departure and closes at the next departure; it records trade proceeds, contract payments, sold-goods cost basis, passage, arrival choices, and other operating costs. Remaining cargo is shown at book cost as unrealized and carries forward; its cost is counted only when sold or delivered. Old saves retain career totals but cannot reconstruct route legs before this feature. Versioned JSON backups can carry local careers manually between browsers; there is no cloud sync or Unity save converter yet. The current dispatch board is not evidence of 45–90 minute retention.

To prevent one dominant route, use finite depth, regional specialization, event recovery, route congestion, reputation access, changing production, and legible rival freight. The prototype now has one deterministic public Juno antibiotics run between Aurelia and Vesper: it draws from Aurelia's available stock, sells into Vesper's capacity, and is included in action-day arrival forecasts. It is a market actor rather than an autonomous trader simulation, and it does not enter the player's financial ledger. Let players build expertise in a region; avoid periodically erasing their knowledge with unexplained random prices. An economy should generate situations without requiring a spreadsheet to buy lunch.

### Proposed enterprise arc and technology trees

The career proposal is **captain → specialist trader → owner of one productive home base → research investor → multi-site company**. The prototype now tests the first ownership step at Nacre: an 8,000 cr lease, one pharmaceutical production slot, a bounded 12 t warehouse, one three-action-day antibiotics batch (1 t water + 1 t algae protein + processing fee), and a choice of one of two research upgrades. Travel or an explicit dockside workday advances it; workdays can be batched up to the next job milestone, and finished inventory can be collected while another job runs. This is a deliberately narrow vertical slice, not balanced final progression. The wider manufacturing branches and multi-site ownership remain proposals.

Three interlocking research branches would give that company choices:

| Branch | Example recipe or improvement | Strategic cost and advantage |
| --- | --- | --- |
| **Materials and manufacturing** | Ice + energy → purified water; ore + energy + catalysts → titanium alloys; alloys + chips → certified ship modules. Better presses lower waste or raise throughput. | Heavy plant, energy, and freight capital; strong volume margins where industrial demand exists. |
| **Biology and life support** | Water + algae cultures + nutrients + energy → algae protein; protein + sterile supplies + research → advanced medical packs. Better bioreactors improve yield and resilience. | Spoilage, certification, and specialist labor; valuable remote-colony contracts and humanitarian choices. |
| **Computation and logistics** | Silicon feedstock + rare gases + fabrication capacity → semiconductors; chips + research data → navigation or factory-control equipment. Routing software cuts delays or improves forecast accuracy. | Scarce inputs, high research spend, and fragile supply chains; higher-value products and better information. |

Research consumes money, materials, staff time, and facility capacity. A base cannot run every line at once; a ship cannot haul every input; a loan's interest competes with lab investment. Make recipes legible and use contracts to expose demand before asking players to build a facility. Let a player discover a distinctive catalyst process or proprietary navigation component, then earn a **temporary or contextual edge** through patents, licenses, reputation, or difficult inputs. Rivals can adapt, license alternatives, or serve different regions. Avoid a permanent, universal monopoly that ends strategic competition.

These branches should reward trade as well as ownership. A merchant can supply inputs and distribute finished goods; an industrialist can integrate the chain; an explorer can discover a feedstock or process lead; a diplomat can secure access and licensing. Each route needs meaningful capital limits, relationships, and opportunity costs.

### Proposed solo clocks and offline jobs

Use one serialized solo simulation clock. Player actions advance it explicitly. A player may also opt into a **bounded background queue** for production, research, cargo transfer, or delegated trade while away. Each queued job records its start time, reserved inputs and funds, capacity, deadline, and a unique completion ID. Record the simulation interval already consumed by active travel or actions; offline wall time may advance only the remaining, authorized interval. On resume, advance the clock once to a capped horizon, settle jobs in order, and journal each completion idempotently; reloads and device switches cannot complete a job twice.

Offer pause, cancel, and spending or loss limits before dispatch. Require insured or otherwise bounded exposure for delegated routes; do not allow an offline surprise to drain unlimited cash, destroy a career, or repeatedly compound debt. When a cap is reached, stop the queue and wait for the captain. Show an exact forecast and a concise results ledger on return. This is a design model to test, not an implemented timer. Solo saves and their offline wealth remain editable and **cannot enter a trusted shared economy**; online tradable assets must be earned and settled under server authority.

A future persistent economy additionally needs bounded currency faucets and drains, resource production and consumption, asset maintenance or loss, and data on wealth concentration. Money and items are distinct: destroying a ship removes an asset; a transfer between players does not by itself remove currency. Measure both. Do not tune the economy to force cash purchases.

## Travel, art, and mobile

The confirmed visual ambition is photorealistic space, planets, moons, and bases, with the adventurous breadth the player enjoys in Star Trek, Star Wars, Firefly, and The Expanse. Our proposed art treatment pairs believable, striking environments with warm, readable interfaces and distinct, humorous personalities. Art should communicate what a place does: orbital farms at Meridian, cargo cranes and industrial glow at Vesper, ice haulers below Nacre's rings, and research habitats above Aurelia. The HTML concept is a composition and interaction sketch, not a photorealism benchmark.

Benchmark one photorealistic destination and ship on target PC hardware before committing to content counts. Give every destination a recognizable silhouette, color story, arrival, musical motif, port contact, and economic role. Build a modular freighter and station kit, reusable lighting rigs, and a consistent character treatment. Production quality includes sound, animation, legible transaction feedback, and seamless save/resume.

Production travel should feel **incredibly fast**: a brief departure, an optional decision or discovery, and a destination reveal. Repeated trips become shorter; players can skip cinematics. In-world passage can still advance the solo clock and expose economic tradeoffs without making the player wait. An interruption occurs before an irreversible consequence, with a clear save point. Cockpit walking and manual atmospheric landings are outside the first release proposal.

Mobile is an eventual quality requirement to plan for from the start: large touch controls, tap-to-inspect information, no hover dependency, a bottom navigation bar, resilient resume, and readable totals before a trade. Use a task-specific order sheet on small screens. Portrait support is demonstrated by the HTML concept; production orientation and release timing should be validated with players.

Treat 60 FPS on a representative PC and sustained 30 FPS on a named midrange phone as proposed budgets, not achieved results. Profile draw calls, shaders, memory, thermal throttling, input latency, and battery on real hardware. Use lower resolution, compressed textures, instancing, level of detail, reduced particles, and static presentation fallbacks where appropriate. Preserve the striking composition at each quality level.

## Progression and replayability

Use three layers of satisfaction within the 45–90 minute main session and the longer career:

- **One run:** a good delivery, a choice, a useful piece of information, a reaction from a rival.
- **One chapter:** a ship module, a crew relationship, a faction license, a new port, a successful business specialization.
- **One career:** a trusted trading house, managed fleets, production partnerships, a discovered region, a political or community outcome.

Crew should grant situational tools as well as numerical bonuses: a negotiator opens a settlement option, an engineer can jury-rig a damaged cooler, a navigator reads a dangerous shortcut. Team composition can eventually create the planning depth the user associates with RAID. A visibly powerful character should still have a job, temperament, wages, and a reason to care about the captain.

Rivals should be recognizable people with bounded knowledge and budgets. One undercuts contracts, one favors fragile high-value cargo, one reliably supplies remote colonies. Their actions use the same market and leave readable evidence. The current rival encounter demonstrates personality and a stock change; it is not an autonomous competitor.

Make several career personas viable within the same progression system. A **merchant** thrives on market information, timing, and working capital but owns little production. An **industrialist** invests in facilities and reliable input flows but carries fixed costs and concentrated risk. An **explorer** finds routes, contacts, resources, and story leads but trades immediate revenue for uncertain discovery. A **diplomat** negotiates licenses and political access but depends on trust and faction obligations. Captains can blend or change these roles by changing investments and relationships, with reasonable switching costs rather than permanent content gates. Company building, story, and exploration advance together. Collectible crew or discoveries should serve those paths rather than become a separate mandatory grind.

Replayability should come from different starting economies, seeded events, rival agendas, faction consequences, and career goals. Offer a guided campaign, free career, and later finite challenge scenarios. Optional challenge seasons can have clean leaderboards, while a long-lived solo career continues without forced resets. Recovery contracts and a salvageable starter vessel can provide a way back after a bad bet.

Validate that new goals change decisions. A bigger hold alone merely repeats the early loop with larger numbers. Fleet delegation should allow planning, exceptions, and oversight; it must not require micromanaging twenty copies of the starter ship.

## Technical direction and the path to shared play

The delivered concept is static HTML/CSS and local JavaScript modules with **Three.js r170**, served over HTTP. Its browser save is deliberately editable and has no trust guarantees. The 3D scene and economic model are separate modules, which makes the concept easy to inspect and replace.

Keep this browser and Three.js build as the fastest design and commerce prototype. For a production PC game that must also reach phones, **Unity URP is the intended native PC and Android target after the solo web milestone.** Run a bounded URP render/device feasibility test to measure the art and hardware envelope before the gameplay port; Three.js remains the current playable baseline. The benchmark sets URP quality tiers and asset scope; it does not select an engine. A PWA improves installation and offline behavior, not 3D rendering quality. Unreal is worth a short desktop-fidelity review only if URP shows a material art blocker, because its strongest rendering features have meaningful mobile limits. Native plus PWA is sensible only if phone users need a distinct lightweight companion. The sourced tradeoffs and a one-to-two-week decision slice are in [3D rendering options](3d-rendering-options.md).

Keep the simulation independent of rendering. Use versioned content definitions, stable IDs, deterministic random seeds, validated commands, integer money, replayable transactions, save migrations, and simulation tests. Do not build a full microservice platform during solo validation.

A proposed staged architecture:

1. **Solo:** a local authoritative simulation, one action-driven clock, journaled bounded offline queues, versioned saves, optional cloud backup later. The player can pause or limit background work.
2. **Small-group trials:** a hosted authoritative simulation with accounts, idempotent commands, atomic cargo/currency settlement, server-validated contracts, reconnects, and time rules defined for the group.
3. **Shared economy:** regions or market partitions with a single write authority for each ledger, asynchronous route jobs, durable event delivery, audit tools, moderation, and observable operations. Cross-region cargo transfers reserve, move, and settle once; retries cannot duplicate assets.
4. **MMO exploration:** add meaningful corporations, specialization, shared projects, trade diplomacy, and coordinated economic goals once concurrency, fairness, operating cost, and player demand justify them. These social possibilities are a central part of the user's EVE/RAID inspiration; they do not require combat to be compelling.

Distributed here means distributing server work and data across infrastructure. It does not require blockchain, peer-hosted asset authority, or cash-convertible currencies. A financially meaningful shared economy cannot trust a client-hosted solo save. Import cosmetic achievements or verified account milestones if desired; start tradable online wealth under server rules. Solo progression and a persistent world's clock must remain explicitly different modes.

Define peak simultaneous users, trades per second per hot market, durable settlement latency, recovery objectives, moderation coverage, and cost per active user before designing a world-scale service. Test duplicate submissions, disconnections during settlement, crashes, malicious inventory claims, bots, and market concentration. Active economy operations are an ongoing cost.

## Revenue: preserve fair progression

The MMO design note sets a fair, no-pay-to-win direction. **The solo prototype will not use paid power, tradable production, or progression accelerators.** First validate satisfying earned progression and a substantial free game. If the product later needs revenue research, begin with noncompetitive cosmetics, substantial optional expansions, or supporter merchandise; treat each as a hypothesis and test perceived fairness. Do not create artificial timers or scarcity to sell relief. A future shared economy requires a separate fairness review before any paid convenience touches production, travel, prices, or competitive standing.

| Potential source | Player value | Tradeoff to test |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Cosmetics and identity items | Ship, base, cabin, crew presentation | Matter only after players care about identity; never hide functional advantage in cosmetics |
| Premium campaign or substantial expansion | New regions, stories, industries, and characters | Keep the free core substantial; do not split a necessary system into repeated purchases |
| Supporter bundle or merchandise | Art book, soundtrack, setting attachment | Optional, clearly cosmetic, with real fulfillment costs |
| Optional online membership | Service, community, or fresh goals | Only with recurring value, sustainable operations, and clear cancellation terms |
| Licensed educational edition or curated creator marketplace | Learning tools or player creations | Separate discovery; require school demand or creator tooling, moderation, licensing, and payout economics |

The user chose an **exploratory prototype before a production budget commitment**. The current eight-port concept is the starting artifact. Scope, staffing, platform order, fidelity cost, and funding remain open until prototype evidence exists. The stages below are gates, not quoted schedules or content commitments.

| Stage | Concrete output | Exit evidence |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Focused gameplay prototype | One 45–90 minute expedition, two or more viable routes, one meaningful crew choice, an enterprise decision with real opportunity cost, and a clear voyage ledger | New players understand the economics, voluntarily continue, and describe different strategies |
| Simulation prototype | A small manufacturing chain and one home base, three contrasting research options, action-driven clock, bounded offline queue, pause and resume | Jobs reserve inputs and cash, settle once after reload or interrupted travel, respect caps, and never count the same interval twice; losses stay within a displayed limit |
| Visual and device benchmark | One photorealistic destination, ship, arrival, readable exchange, and mobile interaction spike | Fidelity, art production time, PC frame budget, and phone usability are measured on named hardware before deciding content counts |
| Commercial and social experiments | Earned progression and optional noncompetitive cosmetic/expansion concepts; a small hosted trade trial only if core play warrants it | Free players reach meaningful goals; testers report fair pacing; retention and purchase interest are measured; server settlement and operating costs are understood |
| Production decision | Backlog, asset benchmark, team plan, platform sequence, support plan, and budget range based on actual quotes | Commit only if fun, visual quality, technical feasibility, and commercial evidence justify the scope |

The likely production disciplines are game/economy design, gameplay/UI engineering, technical art and 3D environments, art direction, audio, writing, QA, and production. The prototype should reveal which need dedicated staff or vendors. Only then estimate `staff-months × loaded cost + content outsourcing + software/hardware + service costs + contingency`. An MMO program would require its own evidence and budget.

Suggested playtest gates, treated as targets to validate rather than predictions:

- Eight of ten new testers independently complete a delivery and know why they made or lost money.
- At least six voluntarily choose another route after the guided task; collect reasons from everyone who stops.
- At least three route or persona strategies remain viable in accelerated simulation and observed human play; switching persona has a readable cost and remains possible.
- Players can complete buying, route selection, encounter resolution, and selling using touch without zooming or hover.
- A 45–90 minute PC session meets agreed frame-time and memory budgets. Short mobile actions and a sustained device benchmark meet agreed thermal, battery, and resume goals.
- Offline tests cover duplicate resume, clock rollback, interrupted travel, cancelled jobs, insufficient reserved inputs, maximum idle time, and cash or loss caps. The ledger shows exactly one settlement per job.
- Free and paid offer tests measure retention, time to meaningful career milestones, purchase interest, and perceived fairness without assuming a conversion rate.
- Qualitative reports identify a remembered place or character, not only a profitable price spread.

Scale later. First prove that one ship, a few worlds, and a handful of personalities can make the next departure irresistible.

## Deliverable boundary

The HTML concept now contains eight ports, six commodities, stock-sensitive buy/sell execution, all-in fees, three crew specialists with transfer cost, travel accounting, recurring inventory-pressure encounters, market forecasts, four one-time purchase-order charters followed by seven-day rotating location-bound dispatches with cargo, direct route, pickup reposition, and net estimates; surveys, financing, cargo upgrades, a journal with route-leg results, local saves, and a versioned manual backup/restore path. Its Company tab includes one persisted Nacre workshop, a job and research choice, alongside a clearly labeled **illustrative enterprise planning sandbox** for future company paths. A small, one-time courier story remembers whether the player helped Dr. Amara Sayegh. Its follow-up waits while another charter is active, then offers a timed 2 t antibiotics contract, a contribution, or a no-cost exit. The optional contract uses standard cargo cost basis, payout, route, deadline, and reputation accounting; its retention value remains unproven. After the first delivery, a one-time public tender lets the player accept a three-tonne Vesper clinic order at Aurelia, deliver within eight days, or let Juno receive it at the start of the next day. The player can buy market cargo or use an already leased Nacre workshop; Juno's tender award is a standing fallback offer, distinct from her physical freight shipment. The Three.js scene includes eight procedural planet looks, a ringed-world variant, an orbital station, a detailed surface settlement view, a passing freighter, and fast transit.

The workshop runs only on explicit action-driven days, through travel or bounded dockside work; there is no wall-clock/offline queue, multi-site ownership, or broader technology tree. Four one-time charters are followed by rotating pickup-port dispatches every seven action days. The current market targets and dispatch templates are deterministic heuristics, not evidence of production chains or lasting replayability. Human playtests should verify the dispatch estimates, charter-to-workshop pacing, ledger comprehension, and whether the two lower-cost research options feel distinct before adding another product or a second site. This is not a final graphics benchmark, balanced campaign, mobile-native app, autonomous AI competitor system, multiplayer service, or payments integration. External font loading is cosmetic; trading and the locally bundled graphics library work without a CDN. The included Earth texture is a visual stand-in for a fictional ocean world.

## Discovery status

All ten discovery questions were answered. The recommendations above still need prototype and player validation.

1. **Tone:** wonder, adventure, and business first; humor and colorful rivalry alongside; optional serious economic and political depth later.
2. **Session length:** immersive 45–90 minute strategy sessions, with shorter actions and excellent eventual mobile play.
3. **Time model:** solo action-driven, freely pausable time, plus optional bounded background or offline processes.
4. **Conflict:** commerce first; no EVE-style combat system. Guards, insurance, route choices, and negotiation may give risk flavor.
5. **Economic depth:** recommendation requested; test home-base ownership, research investment, manufacturing pipelines, process and equipment improvement, and novel products with opportunity costs.
6. **Visuals and travel:** photorealistic space, planets, moons, and bases; incredibly fast travel. Star Trek, Star Wars, Firefly, and The Expanse are admired references.
7. **Progression:** multiple viable paths and tradeoffs; captain-to-company journey, story and exploration; collecting supports those goals.
8. **EVE and RAID inspiration:** especially social play, production values, and long-term goals, not a request to copy their combat.
9. **Business model:** substantial free play and fair monetization without pay-to-win, following the latest MMO design note; noncompetitive offers remain hypotheses for later testing.
10. **Production scale:** explore a prototype before committing to a budget.