Video Game / ΔV: Rings of Saturn

Launch Ring Dive

What gives a spaceship its traction?
Fission turns water to flame
Equal and opposite reaction
For every action we claim

— Unknown Ringdiver

ΔV: Rings of Saturn is a hard sci-fi physics-based mining sim, where you command a spaceship from a top-down perspective as it navigates and mines the eponymous rings. The game features realistic laws of motion (an object in motion stays in motion), which can quickly lead to disaster in the iceteroid-filled environment of Saturn's rings.

Has also been described as "Asteroids, but realistic".

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Tropes present in this game:

#-M

• Ace Custom: The Bald Eagle, a dedicated ring-racing ship based off the the Eagle-class prospector
• Anti-Frustration Features: The autopilot. If maneuvering and matching trajectories by hand is too difficult (or too tiresome), the autopilot can take some of that burden off of you. How much, though, depends on what model you're using - you get what you pay for, and cheaper autopilots are not only less sophisticated, but fully incapable of properly using more advanced maneuvering systems.
• Asteroid Miners: That's your job, and most of what you in the game.
• Asteroid Thicket: The rings can be quite dense, which makes for a stressful environment to navigate in.
• Awesome, but Impractical: The EIME. The first commercially viable fusion-reactor equipped spaceship. Works great, until you see the repair bills. Repairing a busted EIME reactor can cost as much as a whole other ship.
• Bland-Name Product: Some of the equipment manufacturers have names obviously based on real companies. Rusatom-Antonoff is based on the Russian state-owned nuclear energy company Rosatom and Ukrainian aircraft manufacturer Antonov, Mitsudaya-Starbus is based on Mitsubishi and Airbus, and Boltzmann Wärmekraftmaschinen (BWM) is based on car manufacturer BMW.
• Bullet Time: Can be momentarily enabled at the press of a button thanks to an "Adrenaline Booster" on your ship. A skilled pilot will activate it automatically when you're about to collide with something.
• Casual Interplanetary Travel: The Cothon is a repurposed interplanetary shuttle, and humanity seems to have robust technology for interplanetary travel.
• Charged Attack: The Gungnir is a stripped-down small proton collider that unleashes a deadly mix of microwave and kinetic damage - after a generous charge-up time. Illegal in the inner solar system.
• Colonized Solar System: The transponders of ships indicate that, in addition to the base of operations around Saturn's moon Enceladus (SE1-####), Mars (MRS-####), the asteroid Belt (BLT-####) and Jupiter's moon Ganymede (JG4-####) have a human presence.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: The various minerals all have their associated colour. In addition, contacts on the LIDAR are coloured blue if coming towards you, and orange-red if moving away.
• Critical Existence Failure: No ship can survive its reactor exploding. This makes it the primary target in combat situations.
• Energy Weapons: Microwave beams and lasers of both the pulsed and continuous variety are available, and have great utility for mining: They are not limited by ammunition consumption, and break up ringroids more gently, leading to less dispersal of valuable ore chunks. As a downside, they consume a large amount of power, likely requiring upgrades to your power generation to make full use of them.
• Fixed Forward-Facing Weapon: Almost all equipment is mounted facing forwards, which makes it very important to have a high-performing RCS system for quick pivots.
• Interface Screw: Damage to your ship's computer can cause the visual feed to become blurry and pixelated.

M-Z

• Magnetic Weapons: The starting weapon/mining tool is coilgun, using a heavy iron slug to shatter ice. A railgun, that fires lighter ammunition at a higher velocity and rate of fire and is better for damaging other ships, is also available.
• Mobile Factory: With a Mineral Processing Unit (MPU) installed in your cargo hold, you can fabricate ammunition, drones and even fuel on the fly from your mined minerals.
• The Paralyzer: Hitting a ship with a microwave beam rapidly drains that ship's capacitor and damages its computer, incapacitating it at least temporarily
• Sapient Ship: You can encounter AI-commandeered ships. Blowing them up rewards you with very valuable cores.
• Shout-Out: Many equipment names are references.
  • The NanoParticle Activated Nuclear Incinerator, or NANI by Omaewamou-Shindeiru company.
  • The Elon Interstellar company is a reference to Elon Musk's companies.
    • You can stumble across Elon's ride drifting through the rings.
  • The Heavily Armored Lifepod 9000 - HAL 9000.
  • EINAT Kzinti Lession MkII references the Larry Niven short story "The Warriors".
• Shown Their Work: And how.
  • Component flavor text describes technologies fully within the range of possibility
  • One computer specialist crewmember will actually try to hack the enemy using Actual Linux commands. First using Nmap to probe the enemy's network and then using an open port (if they have one) to attack their computers, sometimes even shutting the enemy down.
• Space Pirates: The ring is full of them. Ships running without active transponders are usually pirates. You can also recruit an ex-pirate, who will help not getting attacked by them.
• Space Station: Your home base is Enceladus Prime, an industrial station in the orbit of the eponymous Saturn moon. You can also find smaller stations, offering a place to either buy propellant or sell some of your cargo, scattered through the rings.
• Subsystem Damage: Various parts of a ship can be damaged, (often being capable of sustaining different types of damage) including thrusters, the computer, and reactor.
• Variable Mix: The music changes when you are near certain encounters, or when you are in combat.
• Weaponized Exhaust: Using your main torch as a weapon against attackers is quite powerful, as it tends to overload their reactors in short order. Can also be used to break up rocks.
• The Workhorse: The Rusatom-Antonoff K37 TNTRL is the reliable choice of ship in the rings. It's quite good at doing almost everything you may want to do, from mining to bounty hunting to salvaging, and it's economical to boot. It's also the first ship players get.

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Approaching dangerous velocity. Preparing emergency autopilot...