Slingshot — Gravity Assist Puzzle

What is Slingshot — Gravity Assist Puzzle

Slingshot hands you a probe you are not allowed to fly. It leaves the pad in a straight line at a fixed heading and never turns on its own. What you control is the gravity around it. Tap an empty cell and a planet appears; when the probe crosses that cell the planet bends its course by exactly a quarter turn, teal to the right of travel and rose to the left. You carry a small fixed number of planets, counted by the diamonds in the header, so a sector is solved by placement rather than by reflexes. Nothing chases you but a time bonus that quietly decays while you think.

Every sector holds crystals and a gate. The gate stays sealed until the last crystal is aboard, so a trajectory that reaches it early simply ends there, and the order your route sweeps the crystals in becomes the actual problem. An asteroid ends the flight on contact, leaving the grid ends it too, and a route that closes on itself orbits forever without arriving. A dashed line previews the whole outcome before you commit, so a failed launch is always a choice. Daily Ops gives five fixed sectors; Free Flight keeps going, on three hulls and boards growing from six squares a side to nine.

How to play

1. Pick Daily Ops for the five sectors every pilot gets today, or Free Flight for an endless run on three hulls. The probe already waits on its pad, pointing inward.
2. Tap an empty cell to drop a planet: teal bends the probe a quarter turn right of its heading, rose left. Tap again to flip the spin, once more to remove.
3. Follow the dashed line, which redraws after every tap and shows exactly where the flight ends. The diamonds in the header count the planets still left in your bay.
4. Collect every crystal before letting the line fall onto the gate, then press Launch, Enter or Space. R clears the sector, and the time bonus drops while you plan.

Strategies that work

• The preview is free and a launch is not. The dashed line already carries the verdict, and the sentence under the board names the failure: asteroid, off-sector, sealed gate, stable orbit. A launch you know will fail costs 150 points and, in Free Flight, one of your three hulls.
• Treat a planet as curvature, not as direction. It never points the probe at a target; it adds a fixed quarter turn relative to whichever way the probe arrives. The same cell with the same spin throws the probe somewhere else if you reach it heading north instead of east.
• The order of the crystals is the whole puzzle. The gate is sealed until the last one is aboard and touching it early ends the flight, yet the gate usually sits near the end of the route. Build a loop that sweeps every crystal before the line falls onto it.
• A crystal square cannot hold a planet, because planets only drop on empty cells. The probe always crosses a crystal in a straight line, so the turn has to happen on a free cell before or after it. For a crystal in a pocket, look one step beyond.
• Read the asteroids as a map. Rock is only placed where the intended route never goes, so a dense field marks dead space and the corridor threading between the stones runs close to the solution. Daily sector one carries a single asteroid; sector five carries about seven.

A little history

Gravity assist is real engineering. A spacecraft passing close to a moving planet leaves with a different speed and heading, borrowing a sliver of that planet's orbital momentum. Mariner 10 was the first mission to use the manoeuvre to reach another planet, swinging past Venus in February 1974 and arriving at Mercury the following month. Voyager 2 rode a rare alignment of the outer planets to visit Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Slingshot is an original puzzle written for this site, not a simulation: it trades continuous orbits for a grid and a clean ninety-degree turn.

Frequently asked questions