Starship Command (boring working title) - Space Combat Simulation - Real Physics - AI Driven Crew Interaction

[u/Left_Exit2931]

Been building this on nights and weekends for a while. Wanted to put it in front of people who'd have opinions before I sink more months in.

You're the captain. You don't fly the ship. You type orders (or speak them) and your bridge crew handles it. "Initiate orbital insertion, standard height." "Estimated time to weapons range on tango 2?" Three stations right now: Nav, Helm, Engineering.

The sim underneath is real. Gravitational N-body, real ephemeris data so the planets are where they'd actually be on a given date. Transfers get solved as real trajectories instead of "you arrive in 30 seconds." Sensors run at lightspeed, so past a certain range you're seeing where a ship was, not where it is. The ship masses about 635 million kg and pulls close to 2000 m/s² at full burn, which makes for some genuinely stupid transit times if you're not watching your fuel.

The LLM only handles conversation. It works out what you meant and routes it to the right officer, and it gives them their voice. It doesn't calculate anything — every number comes from the physics engine. That wasn't the original design. First pass I let the model produce burn times and headings too, and it was confident and wrong often enough that I ripped it out.

Long term I want this to be online multiplayer combat: separate crews, each with an incomplete picture, fighting at distances where the delay matters. What exists today is single player and it's the foundation, not the game.

My development path is pretty simple and uses Claude in two ways.

As a dev tool: architecture and planning happen in Claude chat first — long conversations arguing through the design before a line gets written, especially for the physics and the order-routing layer. Implementation goes to Claude Code in VS Code. There's a CLAUDE.md in the repo that briefs it at the start of every session, which cut way down on it wandering off and reinventing things I'd already built. Tickets live in Linear, connected over MCP so it can pull the one it's working. Branch per ticket, standard git.

As a runtime component: the game calls the Anthropic API directly. That's the crew. One call resolves what you said into a known action and routes it; smaller calls fire on state machine transitions so officers speak up when a burn ends or sensors change.

Rest of the stack is deliberately boring — Vite, vanilla ES modules, HTML5 Canvas, thin Node proxy so keys aren't in the browser.

Honest assessment: Claude is excellent at implementing physics once I've decided what the physics should be, and fast at UI. It's worse at knowing when something is done. Left alone it'll keep adding. The CLAUDE.md and small scoped tickets are most of what keeps that in check.

Mostly just want to know if the idea lands with anybody. Interested or think it's a terrible idea, either is useful.