Orbital Arsenal

Orbital Arsenal

Call down orbital strikes with a single remote, and watch every one of them happen.

Craft the Uplink Remote, pick a strike, aim and fire. Before it lands, a cinematic jumps you up to the weapon in orbit: a cannon hundreds of blocks long hanging in front of a giant Sun, a mass driver high above Saturn's rings, a black hole bending the starlight around it, a relay platform skimming the surface of a hypergiant star. The beam crosses the gulf to Earth, lights the air round it a glowing blue and, seen from orbit, punches a white condensation dome and rings of cloud and dust into the atmosphere before the camera drops back to your world for the impact.

Getting started

• Craft the Uplink Remote: End Rod on top, Redstone · Diamond · Redstone in the middle, Iron Ingot · Nether Star · Iron Ingot at the bottom.
• Use: fire the selected strike at your crosshair.
• Sneak + Use: open the menu to choose a strike and tune it (power, damage, speed and more for each strike).
• Charge: the remote holds 10 charges. Recharge it from the menu with redstone (10 redstone per charge) or at a Launch Console.
• Sneak during a cinematic to skip it. The strike still lands. Cinematics can also be switched off.
• One strike at a time. While a strike is still playing out the remote answers "Uplink busy"; it is free again the moment the strike is over.

The strikes

Cinematics

• Real space scenes. Earth is lit pixel by pixel and stays sharp however close the camera gets: ragged coastlines with turquoise shallows, mountain ranges and snowy peaks shaded by the Sun, cloud decks that cast their shadows on the ground, the Sun glinting off wave-broken oceans, clustered city lights and storms flickering on the night side, and a blue atmosphere that turns orange at sunset. Behind it all, a night sky painted pixel by pixel: the Milky Way with its glowing core and dark dust lanes, nebulae, a distant spiral galaxy and thousands of faint stars.
• Every strike has its own place in space. Helios fires from solar orbit with the Sun filling the sky behind the dish, EMP from beside the cratered Moon, Cryo from Earth's shadow where the night side glows with cities and the air burns red all round its rim, Sweep from high above a whole blue Earth, the Saturn Spike from far above the rings, and the Hydra Salvo from high Earth orbit, where its launcher eases a carrier out slowly before the carrier sheds its shroud and lets its swarm go, each missile lighting its engine and racing for the planet.
• Megastructures, not models. The satellites are hundreds of blocks long, built from crinkled gold and silver foil, solar cells and painted panels, plated in panels of every size with fine seams and weathered grime, with crisp shadows and dark crevices. Rows of lit windows, beacons and chasing coil lights cover their hulls, and small service craft fly past them for scale. The Lance unfolds its mirror petals ring by ring, the clamps on its accelerator coils spin up one after another, and when it fires a wave of light runs down the coils to the muzzle and shock collars race down the beam. The mass driver wears a great ring station on its breech with spare spikes racked round it, and halos of magnets round every accelerator ring that crackle with arcs as they charge. Its spike has a glowing ablative nose, a copper armature and tail fins; it kicks the whole driver back as it leaves, sheds its sabot petals tumbling into space, and the camera rides beside it out over Saturn's rings.
• The beam crosses space. The camera rides behind the head of the beam toward the waiting planet, then cuts to the strike seen from low orbit.
• Stars and black holes. Stars boil with granulation, sunspots and flames. The black hole is a true black disc ringed with light that bends the Milky Way around itself like a real gravitational lens.
• Shot like a real camera. The camera drifts and breathes like one held by a real operator, and the first shot of every strike pulls back from right against the hull to reveal how big the craft really is. Light blooms around the Sun and the beams and throws thin anamorphic streaks, lens ghosts and a faint halo, with a filmic tone, a soft vignette and a little film grain, on the ground as well as in space.
• Jumps, title cards and a live uplink. You leap up to orbit through streaming starlight and fall back through the burning air. Each strike opens with its own title card, a live readout shows the orbit, the mission clock and the real coordinates of your target, and a meter tracks the weapon's charge.
• Impact frames. At the moment of impact the picture snaps into stark black-and-white ink for a few frames, manga style.
• A camera that keeps the action in view. It finds a clear spot when trees or hills would block the shot, and moves smoothly while craters are being dug.
• Everyone nearby watches. Players around the caster see the cinematic too.

In the world, explosions are made of rolling volumetric fire and smoke, beams are living plasma, and real chunks of the ground fly out of every crater. The big strikes land with a blinding flash, a dome of shock racing outward, a wall of dust rolling over the land and a column of smoke climbing into the sky.

Stations: defense and redstone

• Launch Console: insert an Uplink Remote, set a target (type the coordinates or mark it by looking and sneaking) and fire it with any redstone signal. It also recharges the remote.
• Shield Projector: a dome that catches every orbital strike aimed inside it, using one charge per strike. Charge it with redstone.
• Radar Station: raises an alarm when a strike is aimed inside its radius, sends a redstone pulse with every beep until impact, and shows everyone inside the time left and the impact coordinates.
• Decoy Beacon: pulls the first strike aimed inside its radius onto itself, then disarms.

EMP Pulse passes straight through Shield Domes and shuts every station in the zone down for 30 seconds.

Requirements

• Fabric: Minecraft 26.2, 26.3 or 1.21.1, with Fabric Loader and Fabric API
• NeoForge: Minecraft 1.21.1
• Forge: Minecraft 1.20.1
• Pick the file for your loader and version.
• Install on both the client and the server.

Photosensitivity: the impact frames are brief full-screen flashes. Turn on Hide Lightning Flashes in Accessibility settings to disable them.

Orbital Arsenal is also available for Minecraft Bedrock Edition. Made by tanto811796. Feedback in the comments shapes every update.