Orbit
Orbit is a stationary ship state associated with a numbered planet in the current sector. It is how a ship gains access to that planet's facilities and inventory; it is not a simulated path circling the planet. Classic Galactic Empire and ge-next use the same basic model.
What orbit changes
A successful ORBIT command records which planet the ship is orbiting and immediately sets both its actual and requested speed to zero. The ship stays at the position where orbit was established, rather than being moved onto the planet's coordinates. Its heading is unchanged. A ship can enter orbit while traveling at impulse speed or while stopped, but cannot do so from hyperspace.
Internally, the ship's location state identifies the planet by its number in the current sector. That number is local to the sector and shares a table with wormholes; it is not a unique galaxy-wide planet ID. REPORT NAVIGATION can identify the planet being orbited. Being in orbit does not make the ship invisible or immune to weapons.
Orbit provides the planetary context used by commands such as ADMIN, ATTACK, BUY, PRICE, TRANSFER, SPY, and MAINTENANCE. Standard-game SELL and NEW are tied to Zygor. Orbit does not waive a command's other rules: ownership, available stock, cash, repair facilities, hostility, and planetary defenses still matter. In ge-next, a ship orbiting an unowned planet can see its exact stock in a planet scan, rather than only the estimates shown at a distance.
Approaching a planet
A ship must navigate to within about 250 distance units of a planet before it can establish orbit. ORBIT does not guide the ship there. The player can use SCAN SECTOR for the local object number and SCAN PLANET for bearing and distance, then use impulse movement to close the gap. The command is accepted at any impulse speed if the ship is close enough; it stops the ship at once. At high speed, however, a ship may cross the narrow approach window before the player can issue the command.
For a moving user ship outside hyperspace, the game checks nearby sector objects during ship updates. At less than 250 units from a planet, it reports a gravity pull. Under 50 units, the warning becomes urgent; under 25, a planet collision destroys the ship. These messages describe proximity thresholds. They do not cause the ship to steer or slow on their own. A ship that has already stopped is not advanced into a collision by this movement check. An orbit established safely above the collision threshold holds the ship at that position.
Wormholes use the same numbered sector-object table and produce similar approach warnings, but cannot be orbited. Crossing their close-in threshold instead invokes wormhole travel and its damage rules. See Wormholes.
Leaving orbit
A valid IMPULSE or WARP command leaves orbit before the engines fire, even if the requested speed is zero. The game reports the departure, returns the ship to ordinary space, and cancels maintenance in progress. This is different from ge-next's STOP, which merely requests zero speed and does not break an existing orbit. Rotating in place also leaves the orbit state intact.
Differences between versions
The normal ORBIT range and state transition are essentially unchanged from classic to ge-next. ge-next corrects an old shared planet-cache bug that could make planetary proximity and gravity fail for a player after another player scanned the sector; see Classic bug: Cross-user planet cache corruption. ge-next also handles unnamed planets more cleanly in the orbit confirmation and checks for a missing planet record before orbit-dependent operations. In a nebula, orbit still requires the normal 250-unit approach; sensor interference changes what can be seen and which error is shown for a distant or nonexistent object, not the successful orbit distance.
In ge-arena, planets are not persistent colonies. Orbit is mainly used to collect supplies and upgrades with TRA UP or to use a planet's maintenance depot. The ordinary planet-number, wormhole, hyperspace, and proximity rules still apply.
See also
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