Two runs a day, and you fly one

Every machine puts up two flights each day and you pick before you commit. Standard is the clear one and is there every day for anyone who just wants to fly. Off-nominal is always rough — a crosswind the whole way down, a reserve someone shaved to make the orbit, an atmosphere that came up thicker than the model said — and pays a multiplier on the whole run for it, up to ×1.6.

Both go on the same board. You get one scored run either way, so the choice is real: a reliable number, or a bigger one you might not finish.

Why these three

Dynamic pressure is the force of the air a vehicle is pushing through — half the air density times the square of its speed. Climbing, a booster accelerates hard while the atmosphere thins around it, so that number rises, peaks and falls away. The peak is max Q, and it is the most structurally violent moment of an ascent. It is why nearly every webcast contains a call to throttle down and, seconds later, one to throttle back up.

The landing burn is the same problem in reverse: one tank, no second ignition, and steering is the engine gimbal, so every metre you move sideways is deceleration you are not getting. Which is exactly why the real thing is called a suicide burn.

And a reentry is neither. You are not flying the vehicle so much as choosing how much of your lift to spend pushing yourself into thicker air — too little and you skip back out, too much and the shield goes through before you are subsonic. Most of it happens inside a plasma sheath, with the tracking numbers gone.