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Best
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Catch a space station in orbit. The trick is that speeding up makes you fall behind — you have to slow down to catch up.
You and the station share the same circular orbit, but you are a little ahead of it or a little behind. You have exactly two controls: hold one pad to burn forward along your path, hold the other to burn backward against it. There is no sideways steering and no brake.
Burning forward raises the far side of your orbit, and a higher orbit takes longer to go round, so you lose ground on every lap. Burning backward drops you into a lower, faster orbit that gains on the station. The manoeuvre is therefore two burns: one to leave the circle, one to rejoin it when the gap has closed.
Four readouts tell you everything. Period is your lap time minus the station's — negative is gaining, positive is losing, zero holds the gap forever. Range and Rel are the distance and relative speed you have to get inside to dock. Closest shows how near you will pass and in how many seconds if you touch nothing.
Fuel and the clock both shrink as the rounds go by, and the gap you start with grows. Docking scores a point; running out of time or fuel, or dipping into the atmosphere, costs a heart. Three lost hearts ends the run.
The whole game rests on one line of Kepler: the time an orbit takes to go round depends only on its size. Push your ship forward and you are not moving along your circle faster for long — you are stretching the circle into a bigger ellipse, and a bigger orbit is a slower one in the only sense that matters here, angle per second. That is why thrusting at a station ahead of you pushes it further away every lap, and why the fix is the one nobody guesses: slow down, fall into a smaller and quicker orbit, and let geometry hand you the angle you were missing.
The manoeuvre has a name — a phasing orbit — and a shape you can feel after a few rounds. Burn once to leave the circle, coast until the gap has closed, burn the same amount back to rejoin the circle exactly where the station now is. The instrument that tells you it is working is Period: your lap time minus the station's. Negative means you are catching it, positive means it is escaping, and zero means whatever gap you are looking at is the gap you will have forever, no matter how long you wait.
The second decision is how many laps to spend, and it is a genuine trade. Closing the same gap in one lap means a large burn, a deep dive toward the planet and a lot of fuel; spreading it over two or three laps costs a fraction of the fuel but hands the clock most of your round. Early rounds give you enough of both that it hardly matters. Later ones do not: the one-lap burn stops fitting in the tank, and the three-lap version stops fitting in the clock.
The measurements are blunt about all of this. Flying the exact manoeuvre docks essentially every time. Being off by a couple of burns in either direction drops that to a little over half, which is roughly where a good human lands. Always insisting on the one-lap version starts at a perfect record and falls to about seven in ten once the fuel tightens. And burning toward the station, the thing instinct screams at you to do, docked in zero rounds out of thousands — not a single one.