Long Haul: The Playable Prologue to Asterion Outpost
Six months before anyone mines a crystal on the outpost, Operator Seven has the helm of the survey supercruiser Meridian Reach. That mission is Long Haul — a second playable Three.js level on this site. You fly a 1.6-kilometre capital ship, hold station over five survey worlds, and log the body that becomes the Asterion drop.
What Long Haul is
Asterion Outpost is the ground mission: harvest Aster Crystals, fortify the energy core, and survive Shardling waves. Long Haul is why that ground exists. The Reach is sent to catalogue a sweep of five bodies — Kessel Prime, Vareth, Hollow Nine, Asterion, and Tarn — and to find a world whose aster-crystal signature is worth a landing party.
Visiting is only half the job. The hull has to sit inside a world's orbit band and slow below cruise speed before the survey array can read. Each body has its own read time. Vareth, the ringed ice giant, takes longer because the rings have to be swept separately. Hollow Nine is the fastest. Asterion is the deep one. Logging Asterion (AS-04) closes the survey and rolls the descent briefing that becomes the outpost mission.
The other four worlds can be read in any order, or skipped. That choice is the point: the outpost is not a random island. It is the world the Reach measured off the top of the scale.
Two ways to fly the same scene
The Meridian ReachA 1.6-kilometre survey flagship with seven capital drives and a helm that handles like a city. Throttle early, turn early, and give her room to stop. The same Three.js scene keeps the planets, belts, and starfield at kilometre scale while you sit on the bridge.
The interceptorA cruiser sitting still with her array open is a soft target. Roughly half of the reads draw raiders. When they come, the Reach puts her interceptor up and you fly it — auto-cannon, lock missiles, then home to the hangar so the survey can continue.
The survey fieldFive distinct worlds share one procedural catalogue: iron-oxide crust on Kessel Prime, ice bands and rings on Vareth, a mined moon on Hollow Nine, the teal drop world on Asterion, and volcanic Tarn. Those maps also hang in the outpost sky once you are on the ground.
No second downloadLong Haul is another route on the same website, linked from the Asterion Outpost menu as “Board the Supercruiser.” A visitor can fly the prologue, then drop to the island, without leaving the browser.
Why the prologue belongs in the same showcase
A single level can prove that a browser can run a game. Two levels that share a story prove something more useful for a commercial brief: the same engine can change scale. One session is a person with a rifle on an island. The other is a capital ship, a fighter, and a field of planets. Both are still a URL.
That is the same discipline we take into product work. A configurator, a venue tour, and a training sim do not need three runtimes if the interaction loop is designed first and the scenery is built to serve it. Long Haul and Asterion Outpost are the research version of that claim — playable, linked, and updated like any other page on the site.
Suggested article: How we built Asterion Outpost—and what it teaches us about digital engagement.
Take the helm, then take the drop
Fly the survey, log Asterion, and step onto the outpost — or start on the island and board the Reach from the mission menu. If that two-scale idea is useful for a product, venue, or campaign, we can shape the same kind of browser experience around your brief.