Press kit
Last updated 25 August 2026
Everything here is free to use in coverage, no permission needed. For a review build, an interview or anything not listed, email press@celestrike.com.
Fact sheet
- Title
- Celestrike
- Developer
- Independent, solo
- Platform
- iOS (iPhone, portrait). Android after launch.
- Release
- September 2026
- Price
- Free. One optional cosmetic purchase.
- Genre
- Orbital strategy / simulation
- Modes
- Single player
- Connectivity
- Fully offline. No accounts, no server.
- Website
- celestrike.com
Descriptions
One line
An orbital-warfare game about running a satellite intelligence company, with the real physics left in.
Short
Celestrike puts you in charge of a satellite intelligence company. Design a platform inside a budget, launch it into an orbit you can live with, and earn on what it can see. Orbits are genuinely Keplerian, delta-v is finite and never refills in flight, and every burn is a permanent decision about the rest of that satellite's working life.
Full
Celestrike is a mobile strategy game about espionage logistics. You are not flying a spaceship — you are running an intelligence business whose physics won't negotiate.
Two pillars govern everything. Orbit is the gameplay: where a satellite sits decides what it can see, how often it comes back, and who can reach it. Low orbit gives sharp imagery and four minutes to get the shot; geostationary lets you stare at one longitude forever and resolve almost nothing. Neither is an upgrade over the other, and progression never pushes players upward — it only widens the set of regimes they can operate in.
Delta-v is the scarcity: money is a flow, but the fuel budget a satellite launches with is a fixed stock that only a servicing mission can restore. It is never sold for real money. That single constraint produces the game's arc — launched, productive, over-manoeuvred, stranded in a mediocre orbit, decommissioned and replaced.
Underneath, orbits are propagated from six classical elements with J2 nodal precession, so ground tracks drift correctly between passes and sun-synchronous orbits behave. There is no simulation tick: position at any timestamp is computable in constant time, which means the world does not run while you are away so much as remain derivable. Close the app for an hour and the intel is exactly where the orbit says it should be.
Features
- A real propagator. Classical Keplerian elements plus J2 secular precession. Burns are applied as impulsive delta-v in the local orbital frame and the resulting orbit is whatever the physics produces.
- Hidden ground sites. Every country holds one or two, generated deterministically from its own name, so the same world exists on every device with nothing stored and no server involved. They are invisible from orbit and must be hunted.
- A 2D orthographic globe drawn with Skia — filled country geometry, true small-circle sensor footprints, and orbit rings depth-split so the far arc genuinely disappears behind an opaque Earth.
- Intel that is computed, not ticked. Collection is a function of footprint coverage and altitude, evaluated on demand, so the game is honest about time whether it is open or closed.
- Design rules that are published. Delta-v is never sold; nothing is taken while you are away; there is no offline defence buff; insurance is an in-game mechanic and never a purchase; altitude is never a level gate.
Artwork
Right-click to save, or link directly.
Screenshots of the shipping build will be added here at launch.
The angle, if it helps
The premise is barely fiction. Geostationary inspector satellites shadowing each other is documented, ongoing behaviour — in 2023 a US surveillance satellite manoeuvred toward two newly arrived Chinese satellites in the belt, which scattered, one of them repositioning to get a sunlit view of its observer. Celestrike is a game about that world, built by someone who thought the interesting part was the logistics rather than the lasers.
It is also a deliberately unfashionable design: free with no capability gated, no energy timer, no ads, no offline attacks, and a scarce resource that is explicitly not for sale.