Cosmic Command Pinball

Hold Space to draw the plunger back and let go to launch. The arrow keys work the flippers — left arrow or Z for the left flipper, right arrow or / for the right — and they are independent, so both can be up at once. On a phone the whole left half of the table fires the left flipper and the whole right half fires the right, with no visible buttons covering the playfield, and a drag near the bottom pulls the plunger.

The first thing to shoot is the Hull Plating bank: three drop targets on the left, square to a right-flipper shot. Knock all three down and the Command Deck hole behind them is exposed. Shoot the hole and the deck offers you a mission; either flipper button locks it in. There is no timer on the choice, so you can read all five.

You are the duty pilot on the deck of the cutter Cosmic Command. Every device on the table is part of the ship: the pop bumpers are a Debris Field, the spinner in the left orbit is a Solar Sail, the centre ramp is The Gantry, two standup targets charge the Reactor Cells, and the scoop they light is a Jump Gate that teleports the ball across the playfield into the Command Deck. It is a space pinball game in the plain sense of the words — a pinball table with a space theme — and the whole thing is original: the layout, the art, the mission names, the rank ladder and the synthesised sound.

The palette is a dark, jewel-toned instrument panel rather than the warm paper the rest of this site uses, because a pinball machine is a lit object in a dark room and looks wrong any other way. It stays dark in both light and dark themes; the page around it follows your theme normally.

All Hands is only offered once the other four are done, and it is the only place multiball comes from. Finish all five and the table loops: everything resets to available and every award is worth half as much again, then twice, then two and a half times. That is why a good game keeps going rather than ending at a fixed ceiling.

It is a real simulation, not a set of scripted bounces. The ball is integrated on a fixed 240 Hz timestep with swept continuous collision detection — every wall is tested against the ball's whole path through the step rather than its position at the end of it, so the ball cannot pass through anything however fast it is travelling. That is the failure that makes most browser pinball feel broken, and there is a test in this repository that fires a maximum-speed ball at every wall on the table from sixty-four angles and asserts it never gets out.

The flipper impulse is resolved in the flipper's own moving frame, so where you hit the ball matters. At the base the flipper surface is moving about 550 units a second; at the tip it is moving 2,200. A tip shot makes the orbit and a base shot dribbles, which is the whole reason a pinball player learns to aim with the tip. Hold a flipper up and the ball settles into a cradle instead of bouncing off.

Yes, and it is designed for it rather than shrunk onto it. The flipper zones are the two halves of the table and are tracked per finger, so both flippers work at once — a second finger cancelling the first is the single commonest bug in touch pinball. The plunger is a pull and release with a power bar, and a short tap launches at full power so nobody gets stuck on it. Nudging needs a deliberate two-finger tap, which cannot happen by accident from a flipper press.

The table is sized from the space the board actually has, so it fits in portrait without cropping, and the fullscreen button gives it the whole screen. In landscape the mission list and the rank ladder move into columns beside the table rather than the table stretching.