Gunships and spoils of conquest

Weapons

• Four weapons are taken, not bought. The Frozen Orb, the Static Ring, the Thermal Lance and the Gravity Well leave the Arsenal. Each is held by one kind of world on the chart: garden worlds hold the Frozen Orb, colony worlds the Static Ring, foundry worlds the Thermal Lance, fortress worlds the Gravity Well.
• Take the world, take the gun. Conquer a world of that kind and its weapon joins your arsenal for good, at no further cost. The chart says which weapon a world holds and whether you already have it, and a conquest that brings one home announces it and names it in the battle report.
• Anything you already bought stays yours. Everything else in the Arsenal still sells for flux.

Enemies

• The gunship. The first flyer that shoots. It flies onto a high station over the field, hangs there and fires bolts down at the array, and each bolt that lands costs integrity the way a leak does.
• Then it comes down. Its magazine is small. Once it is spent the gunship dives into the array like everything else, so a gunship left alone costs you its volleys and then its hull. Kill it on station and you pay nothing.
• Its fire cannot be shot down. The bolts are light, not bodies, so the only answer is the ship.
• From wave 11. Gunships arrive after the javelins, a few at a time, and their magazines grow deeper in the late waves.
• Tumblers fire a beam. A landed Tumbler fires the invaders' violet beam along the ground toward the cannon, and the array takes the hit where it grounds. The glowing pellet that sat fizzing between its legs is gone.

Bosses

• Boss flak mounts drop real shells that detonate on landing instead of fizzing first.

Economy

• Automated Defenses is retired. Orbital lasers are the passive scrap income now, and they keep growing with the constellation, so there was no reason to sell two ladders for one resource. Ranks already bought earn nothing from here on and are not refunded.
• The homecoming report lists scrap from the lasers only, and the story of the battery left running through a shift change now belongs to the Orbital Laser Program's archive entry.

Orbit

• The guns fire what the world holds. Over a garden world the guns loft frost orbs at your ships. Over a colony, static rings roll out. Over a foundry, a thermal lance burns. Over a fortress, a gravity well hauls a ship in and a rocket finishes it.
• Your ships fight the way they fight at home. Gnats, drones, tumblers, javelins and rams make kamikaze runs at the guns, strike, and climb back for another. Gunships and the bosses hold station and fire, and the warden holds station with its shields up.
• Gunships join the fleet. Like everything you shoot down, the gunship is on Orbital Command's fabrication list and flies with the fleet on invasions.