Symbology of Captain Forever

Captain forever is a top-down construction game set in space. You and your enemies are composed of a grid of "parts", some of which permit further interconnections, some of which are weapons, and some of which are imbalanced (either way).

First, fundamental details.

There are 11 tiers of parts. Each is objectively better than the last, but often heavier than the prior. Each is named with concurrent NATO phonetic alphabet symbols, from "A" to "K":

• Laser Tier 1
• Alpha: Green
• Bravo: Yellow
• Charlie: Orange
• Laser Tier 2
• Delta: Red
• Echo: Pink
  Foxtrot: Purple
• Laser Tier 3
• Golf: Blue
• Hotel: Electric Blue
• India: Teal
• Laser Tier 4
• Juliet: White
• Kilo: All of the above

A major theme of the game is balance. The most straightforward analogy is in flying, to fly straight requires an equal distribution of parts on either  side of the core, and any deviation will incrementally or adversely affect your capabilities of flying. The most imbalanced ones (usually the result of half of the ship being torn off) can't even move in any direction.

Each part augments the whole, and the greatest shape it can take is a balanced one. For absence of the trivial, the important loses urgency. For lack of bodily living, the mind loses its grounding. Muscles come in pairs, as do limbs. The thumb secures the fingers.

The less straightforward one is in the progression of the colors. The next theme is in cycles & spirals:

To learn something new is ultimately cyclical: In learning, we first deviate, but ultimately we return to the same point, only with a deeper, higher level of understanding. Understanding is not a line but a spiral upward, endlessly moving upwards through its variations. 

The ships' colors represent something somewhat indefinable, but with certain aspects. 

• There are multiples of them, and while they can be combined to produce variations (and some of those variations have importance separate of their parents), many are incomparable within solely the terms of the other. You cannot make blue with a yellow crayon. 
• There aren't million granularities in the game, so clearly one variation of it is as fine as any other. Blue can be found in teal or aquamarine, and either suffices. The Trilogy addition of bloom adds confidence to this, since now many simultaneous shades of it can exist at any time, with the same effective gameplay meaning. 
• The color range has direct contrasts; a the progression through both colors is necessary, not only a specialization in one "side".

In non-metaphorical terms there might not be 6 of these, but there is a range, a cyclical element (the rainbow; we will come back to this later), and a pantheon of the meaningful distinctions there really are. 

The most important question in Captain Forever symbolism is in determining the meaning of the colors. I would call color the range of experience or experiential fluencies. Not a specialization, exactly, but a familiarity in certain ways of being of which encompass particular specializations. Mastery of some shade of color is required, but particular mastery of any or all is not. 

Each color is a new understanding, a new mastery, a new approach to living. We could naively say "Life is about experiencing everything", or "Life is about becoming the greatest version of ourselves". I think the answer is both, but not entirely both. To master life is to master many incomparables of the mind, creating a result that works in a way only known in the mastery of these parts.

The names and progressions of each tier imply this; the self-distinctive NATO alphabet was designed such that each "A for Alpha" phoneme could be heard distinctly without mistaking it from others. The less idiosyncratic Greek alphabet could be used, or simple numbers. Why NATO? A man named Charlie stands alongside the nation of India in equality. The mundanity of playing Golf lives next door to the relative obscurity of a Foxtrot. Each color is distinctive, yet they have a similarity owing to their unifying factor: The person at the center of it all.

As you improve, you and your enemies become more and more powerful. The upgrade from green and yellow doubles firing rate, and from yellow to orange again, to over four times the prior green.

Each three upgrades however is not met with a doubling of firing rate, but rather with it resetting to what it was at the prior three tiers, with a much more powerful laser (8 times more damage) than before. Spirals meet spirals; the progression of increasing fire rate is lost for the gain of far increased firepower. Now, we can take our improved technology, the completion of our macro-cycle, and start firing faster with them. 

Each of these macro-cycles also makes the girders longer. This shows a natural increase of capabilities (larger girders permitting faster ship reassembly), and an incremental shift in paradigm greater than a normal tier shift, which is merely an increase of numbers and a change of color. Unlikely bedfellows combine to create powerful capabilities seen in unexpected ways. 

The pace of the color change incrementally slows in these macro-cycles, reflecting how in early times, it is easy to pick up understanding; the model of the world we start with is one nobody needs to deliberately learn. But as time progresses, as we learn more, it takes more to learn further, but less means more. A bridge a brick away from completion is different from its blueprint, and also from its finality in perceived completion. To learn the first three "colors" took little, and to learn "red" nothing more. But to learn "purple", we must first incrementally learn pink. This is prophetic of the third cycle.

The mechanic of allowing you to dynamically reassemble your ship on the fly and the results of doing so are interesting. You have effectively 4 "docking points" you can use however you prefer. Mostly, you place girders onto these so you can use the girders to place more parts upon them. If ever these girders are destroyed, everything that was attached to it will be as well. This clearly is deliberate. It wouldn't be very difficult to just have everything on it detach as it does when it is removed by your own decision. 

The ship can be considered the "self". To have one of these core girders destroyed representing a collapse of a fundamental value of your worldview. Everything connecting to it is powered by it, and lacking it withers away to nothing. You can obtain something new, but it will never be quite the same. 

The mechanics of ship-building encourage small, speedy ships that can maintain a stronger positional advantage over larger ones that may be more tolerant of injuries. The simple problem being that a lack of maneuverability will well make up for a presence of greater protection. This emphasizes that the best self is a subtle and nonintrusive one; a tool for interacting with the world rather than an elaborate machine that insulates you from it. It's a necessity to continually improve your "gear", or else new situations will become at best slogs or usually unsolvably problematic. 

You have options in how you construct your ship. You can either go for a lightweight design by deliberately choosing to use older girders with newer parts, or simply to periodically replace your entire ship with newer parts. While being lighter is useful, it also leads to further risks in combat: The girders will break the first time they are shot, so if your thrusters and lasers can't take the hits, you are in trouble. We can stick to the past - but if the past is hit, it might not be such a good idea. 

The prior two macro-cycles allowed us to gain the first 5 colors of the rainbow. With it, we have the third level laser. But to quit now would be nonsense. The last element is the hardest to learn, and it takes the most effort to do so, because of everything else before, yet, it is the most meaningful of them all because of the prior journey. The last color, blue, has 3 separate stages of increasing brightness (navy blue to teal). The adoption of blue brings with it a specific and increasingly powerful laser. This leads up to white, the last macro-cycle. 

The fourth laser tier, white is the culmination of the lasers, of ability, and the culmination of the cycle from green to blue. Now, we have all of the colors. White, in digital terms, is all of the colors at maximum brightness. 255, 255, 255. Black is the opposite. The first three macro-cycles show the acquisition of ingredients, and the last shows their combination to a greater effective whole. The incomplete third tier laser naturally evolves to the fourth with the completed acquisition of blue. 

Juliet, the second-last tier, shows the understanding of all, but an awareness that isn't there yet. It is all at once, but it is yet in the shape of old. Kilo shows the integration of it, and brings with it a considerable transformation. Juliet is statically all colors as white, kilo is any and all as a flashing rainbow. Juliet's girders follows the form of the past tiers, kilo's become "X"s as if fundamentally differently constructed. 

The game's progression reflects this as well. To progress to Kilo requires to quickly adopt the newer Juliet-tier lasers, and kill one of the Peacekeepers without the characteristic "tier advance delay". The reward is the completion of a cycle; to have the Peacekeepers' rainbow become yours. You have become incomparable to what you were prior. At last, we have achieved the quest of existence we were never quite able to articulate. The broken heart upon your ship becomes reunited. The game is completed, itself a cycle.

But we observe 11 tiers. It feels incomplete. Surely, there should be another above? A "Lima" tier? Not exactly.

The fourth macro-cycle represents integration of all of these different aspects. Even the fundamentally differing Kilo & Juliet are as far from Lima as an Alpha. There is no reaching perfection. After this, there is nothing left to do but either die from an accident or leave of boredom. There is only so far to go in one life.

You live only long enough to set your affairs in order and die right.