Until now this was built from memory — the reference site is blocked by this
environment's egress policy, so the resemblance was asserted rather than
checked. Five screenshots of the real thing arrived, and this is what
comparing against them changed.
Labels say what a thing is, not just what it is called. Every label is now
two lines: the name, then its type in smaller, wider-tracked, dimmer
capitals. This is the single most characteristic element of the reference
and it appears in every frame of it. It also settles a real ambiguity — in a
map that mixes scales, "Orion" is an arm, a nebula and a constellation, and
nothing about a bare name said which one a label pointed at.
For stars the type line distinguishes "System" from "Star", which is the one
thing it can say that the map could not otherwise show: which points are
somewhere you can actually go.
The system view had no body labels at all, where the reference labels every
planet. It does now, which turned out to need two supporting changes. The
overlay had only ever added and removed labels, never moved them, because
stars do not move; planets do, so an existing label is now repositioned
rather than left where the body used to be. And the inner four planets
printed on top of each other in exactly the clump the star labels were
already spread to avoid — so that logic is now shared rather than
duplicated, with system bodies ordered outermost-first. Closing in reverses
it by itself: the outer orbits leave the frame, their labels drop, and the
inner planets take the space.
The chrome follows the reference's layout. The scale ladder is a row of
chamfered tabs at the top left rather than a vertical list of diamonds at
the middle left, and a nameplate across the top centre says what the view is
holding. The centre reticle is a hexagon, which is how the reference locks
onto a body, and stays distinct from the rectangular panel chrome.
Not copied: the ARK/RSI logos, wordmarks, and the bottom-right tool tabs.
The first two are someone else's brand, and the third would be four tabs
opening features this app does not have.
Two e2e assertions moved off bare text matches onto the readout panel's own
title. The nameplate names the same thing the panel does, so "is 'Local
Stars' on screen" became ambiguous — the assertion, not the design, was what
had to give.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G
The map stopped at the catalogued 50 pc around the Sun — 0.33% of the
Galaxy's width — and looked like a point cloud with a search box.
Adds the galactic scale above it and the heads-up display the reference
map is built from.
The Galaxy is not a third coordinate space. It is the same parsec space
four orders of magnitude further out, so the model and the star field
crossfade against camera distance instead of switching, and the Sun stays
where it really is: 8.18 kpc out, on the Orion Spur, between the
Sagittarius and Perseus arms. The depth range scales with that distance —
one fixed near/far pair cannot both fly into a star and hold the Galaxy.
The structure in shared/astro/galaxy.ts is measured: the directions of the
centre and the north galactic pole, which fix the disc's 63 degree tilt
against the celestial equator; the Sun's galactocentric distance; and a
radius, azimuth and pitch angle per arm. The particles scattered around it
are not, and cannot be — dust hides the disc, so no catalogue holds the
Galaxy's stars. The view says so, and the model fades out before the
camera reaches the 50 pc where the real stars are.
The rest is the look: polar grids lying in the galactic plane with drop
lines from the Sun's neighbours, a scale ladder, a readout panel, range,
reticle and frame brackets. Two things had to give way for it. The
deep-sky shell is the sky as seen from here, so it dissolves rather than
letting the camera fly through a wall of nebulae, and so does the skybox,
which is a photograph taken from inside the thing now being viewed from
outside. Labels are picked by screen separation rather than distance
alone: the Sun's fifteen nearest neighbours are all inside four parsecs
and printed as one unreadable clump.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G
Claude