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Orbitals

Orbitals are the lifeblood of your planet. They are the primary source of resources, the measure of your planet's size, and the prize every attacker is after. Everything in Orbitarion — your fleet, your research, your buildings — ultimately traces back to how many orbitals you control and what they produce.

What are orbitals?

Orbitals are resource extraction platforms orbiting your planet. Each orbital produces one resource per tick — either Titanium, Silicon, or Uranium — depending on how you configured it when you initiated it.

The more orbitals you have, the more resources you generate each tick. A planet with 100 orbitals produces vastly more than one with 20 — which is exactly why large orbital counts make you an attractive target.

There are three types of orbital:

Type Produces Primary use
Titanium orbital +150 Ti/tick Ships, buildings, orbital initiation
Silicon orbital +150 Si/tick Scanning, research, advanced ships
Uranium orbital +100 Ur/tick Fleet fuel, late-game ships

In addition to your orbitals, every planet has a small core income — a base amount of each resource produced per tick regardless of orbitals. Core income keeps you alive early on, but it's a fraction of what a developed orbital economy produces.

Getting orbitals

There are two ways to acquire orbitals: scanning and stealing.

Scanning

Scanning is how you find new orbitals in the space around your planet. Each successful scan yields one uninitiated orbital that you can then configure and put to work.

To scan, you need to have researched Basic Sweep Sensors — your very first research priority every season. Without it, you cannot scan at all.

Each scan costs 1 000 Silicon (750 for Sytherian Cartel). The chance of a successful scan depends on several factors:

success chance = 80%
               − (total orbitals × 0.5%)
               + (Scan Enhancer buildings × 5%)
               + (scanning research bonus, up to +40%)
               + (STC race bonus: +10%)

The result is clamped between 5% and 95% — you can never be guaranteed a success, and you can never be completely locked out.

The penalty for growth: The more orbitals you already have, the harder it is to find new ones. At 60 orbitals your base chance has dropped to 50%. At 100 orbitals it's down to 30%. This is intentional — it means combat becomes a more efficient growth path than scanning as the season progresses.

The comeback mechanic: Lose orbitals in a raid? Your scan chance goes up. Losing 20 orbitals to an attacker makes the next 20 significantly easier to replace through scanning.

Scan success by orbital count

Orbitals Base chance With 5 Scan Enhancers With full scanning research
0 80% 95% 95%
20 70% 95% 95%
40 60% 85% 95%
60 50% 75% 90%
80 40% 65% 80%
100 30% 55% 70%
120 20% 45% 60%

Stealing

The other way to gain orbitals is to take them from someone else. Send a fleet with Orbital Pods or Transport ships to an enemy planet, win the battle, and your capture ships steal a portion of their orbitals.

Stolen orbitals arrive as uninitiated orbitals — you still need to initiate them before they produce resources. See Combat for full details on how orbital theft works in battle.

Note

The Sytherian Cartel cannot steal orbitals through combat. They raid resource stockpiles instead. STC compensates with cheaper scanning and initiation costs.

Scanning enemies

Orbital scanning finds new orbitals. But scanning can also be used to spy on enemy planets — their fleet, resources, and defenses. See Scanning & Intelligence for the full guide on planet scans, military scans, scan penetration, and signal jamming.

Initiating orbitals

A freshly scanned or stolen orbital is uninitiated — it exists but produces nothing. Before it contributes to your economy, you must initiate it by spending Titanium and Silicon, and choosing which resource type it will produce.

Initiation cost scales with how many orbitals you already have:

cost_titanium = 300 + (current orbitals × 30)
cost_silicon  = 200 + (current orbitals × 20)
Current orbitals Titanium cost Silicon cost Total
0 300 200 500
10 600 400 1 000
20 900 600 1 500
40 1 500 1 000 2 500
60 2 100 1 400 3 500
100 3 300 2 200 5 500

Sytherian Cartel gets a 20% discount on all initiation costs — part of their compensation for not being able to steal orbitals through combat.

Choosing resource type

When you initiate an orbital you choose whether it produces Titanium, Silicon, or Uranium. Think carefully:

  • Titanium is the most universally useful — ships, buildings, and orbital initiation all consume it heavily. A solid Titanium base is never wrong.
  • Silicon fuels your scanning cadence. The faster you want to grow through scanning, the more Silicon orbitals you need. Also required for research.
  • Uranium becomes important once you're regularly sending large fleets. Uranium is consumed as fleet fuel — the more ships you send, the further you send them, the more Uranium you burn. Under-investing in Uranium means your fleet stays home.

A common early distribution is roughly 60% Titanium, 30% Silicon, 10% Uranium — then shifting toward Uranium as your fleet grows.

Orbitals and score

Your orbital count contributes directly to your score. Each orbital adds 500 points. A planet with 100 orbitals has 50 000 points from orbitals alone — significant, but still less than the contribution of a well-built fleet.

This balance is intentional. Orbitals matter, but the game rewards active players who build and use their fleets. Hoarding orbitals without military power makes you a target, not a winner.

Quick reference

Action Cost Notes
Buy scan 1 000 Si (750 for STC) Requires Basic Sweep Sensors research
Initiate orbital 300+ Ti / 200+ Si Cost scales with orbital count
STC initiation discount −20% Compensation for no orbital theft
Max steal per battle 15% of target's orbitals Scales with battle dominance
Scan chance range 5% – 95% Modified by orbitals, buildings, research
Each orbital produces 150 Ti or 150 Si or 100 Ur per tick Chosen at initiation