04Flight Deck reference

Audience: everyone who wants to know exactly what each control does. This is the reference manual for /deck. Skim it, or look up the one button you're unsure about.

The Flight Deck is the main simulator. Its layout:

┌──────────────────── TOP BAR ──────────────────────────────────┐
│  [Orbit ▾ Solar System]   [fidelity badge]   [Save/Share] [You] │
├──────┬───────────────────────────────────────────┬────────────┤
│ RAIL │                                            │  TELEMETRY  │
│ icons│             3D SCENE                        │  live stats │
│  ↕   │        (Earth, orbits, overlays)           │             │
│      │                                  [Assistant Dock pops in] │
├──────┴───────────────────────────────────────────┴────────────┤
│  TIMELINE BAR:  ▶/⏸ (Space) ·  speed ×  ·  T+ epoch clock        │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

The Top Bar#

The 3D scene (center)#

The scene also draws whatever the active panel produces: transfer ellipses, burn markers, targeting arcs and aim-pins, tracked-satellite orbits, AOS/LOS pass pins, and coverage heatmaps painted onto the globe.

The Telemetry panel (right)#

Live, always-on readouts for the current spacecraft, computed in the Rust engine (never in the website code):

• Altitude — height above Earth's surface (km).
• Speed — current velocity (km/s).
• Plus orbit facts surfaced by the active panel (apogee, perigee, period, etc.).

These update every frame as time plays.

The Timeline bar (bottom)#

The left rail — workstation panels#

Click an icon to open its panel. They're ordered the way an engineer actually works: where am I → where am I going → how do I hit it → what's the real burn → fly a real bird → what's the vehicle → who can hear it → who can the world see → how much do I trust the number.

🛰 Orbit — "where am I?"#

The starting point: define and inspect your orbit.

• Orbit presets — one-click real orbits: LEO, SSO (Sun-synchronous), GTO (geostationary transfer), Molniya, GEO. Each sets a realistic orbit and frames the camera.
• Propagate for — how long to simulate / draw the orbit (often expressed in number of orbital periods).
• Orbit parameters (read-outs) — Apogee (km), Perigee (km), Period (hours), Inclination (°), Eccentricity. This is your orbit's "address."

🔥 Maneuver — "where am I going, and what does it cost?"#

Plans a Hohmann transfer from your current orbit to a destination.

• Destination picker — choose a target orbit/body (e.g. GEO, the Moon / TLI).
• Burn 1 — the first burn's Δv (for the Moon, labeled TLI · trans-lunar burn; otherwise raise apogee).
• Burn 2 — the second burn (circularize / arrive).
• Total Δv — the full price of the transfer (km/s).
• Coast time — how long you drift between burns (hours).
• Propellant · Isp 300 s — the propellant mass fraction this Δv costs at a reference engine efficiency.
• In the scene: the transfer ellipse, the target orbit, and burn markers are drawn.

🎯 Target — "find me the burn that achieves this outcome"#

A differential corrector — the GMAT-style "Vary/Achieve" solver, animated so you can watch it think. Two modes:

Scalar target mode:

• Target type — choose what to achieve: apoapsis (km altitude), period (minutes), or inclination (degrees).
• Solve — runs the Newton solver. The panel then animates the iteration history: a convergence chart where the achieved value (solid line) climbs toward the target (dashed line), with a live amber point; per-iteration it lists Trial Δv, Achieved, and Error.
• Converged · burn — the final verdict: the exact Δv that hits your target.
• Replay — re-fly the result in the scene.

Intercept mode (a vector target — reach an exact point in space):

• Inputs: reach altitude, plane change Δi (°), transfer time.
• Solve intercept — runs a multivariate corrector (Levenberg–Marquardt). A log-scale miss-distance chart plunges toward the 50 m line; it reports the live 3-component Δv and final miss distance.
• In the scene: an orange transfer arc from your orbit to a green aim-pin.

Δ Finite burn — "what does the burn really cost, not the idealized version?"#

Models a real, non-instant engine burn (thrust over time, mass dropping as fuel burns, gravity acting throughout).

• Inputs: thrust (kN), Isp (s) (engine efficiency), wet mass (kg) (mass with fuel), burn duration (s).
• Outputs: ideal Δv (the textbook rocket-equation value), speed gained (what you actually got), gravity + steering loss (ideal − gained — the efficiency penalty of a real burn), propellant %, altitude start → end, and a speed-vs-time chart.
• The teaching moment: a long, low-thrust burn fights gravity the whole time, so its loss is large — you see why short, punchy burns are efficient.

📡 Track a satellite — "fly a real bird from today's catalog"#

• Preset satellites / NORAD id field / paste TLE — pick a known satellite (e.g. the ISS), type a catalog number, or paste a two-line element set. Delta V fetches today's data from CelesTrak.
• Outputs: real orbit facts and a canvas ground-track world map (the path over Earth's surface, with a graticule and the sub-point at the data's epoch).
• Show in 3-D scene — draws the orbit in the main view, with an AOS/LOS station picker (AOS = Acquisition Of Signal / rise; LOS = Loss Of Signal / set) that places green (rise) and red (set) pins on the orbit for the next pass over your chosen station. Draw / Hide toggles it.
• Honest label: quick-look (two-body/J2); accurate near the data's timestamp, drifts over days. TLE age is shown.

🚀 Vehicle — "what's flying?" (and the VAB)#

• Vehicle picker — choose a launch vehicle/spacecraft from the library (Saturn V, Falcon Heavy, Starship, …) or a custom one you built.
• Payload-to-destination — given the vehicle's staged Δv capability, the engine solves the maximum payload it can send to a chosen destination.
• Opens the full-screen VAB (Vehicle Assembly Building) — a KSP-style 3D rocket builder with a parametric preview (real stage lengths, engine clusters, parallel boosters). See The rooms → VAB.

🛰 Access — "who can hear my satellite, and when?" (S2 HORIZON)#

Recomputes live as you change inputs (no compute button).

• Station picker — 8 built-in ground stations around the world.
• RF band — choose a radio band (4 presets) for the link calculation.
• Pass cards — each upcoming pass with NEXT and BEST chips, max elevation, slant range, and duration.
• Link desk — at the best pass, a link budget: signal strength, data-rate verdict (closes / marginal) against a labeled reference threshold.
• Honesty footer: quick-look, first-order link model.

🌐 Coverage — "who can the whole world see, and how often?" (S2 HORIZON)#

Two modes; Compute is an explicit button because it's a heavier calculation.

• This satellite | Constellation — analyze a single satellite or a whole constellation.
• Walker builder — editable T / P / F (total satellites / orbital planes / phasing), inclination, altitude, with presets (GPS, Galileo, Globalstar, Iridium, …). Shows live sats-per-plane and validity.
• Mask slider — minimum elevation angle to count as "covered."
• Window — 6 / 12 / 24 hours.
• Compute → an equirectangular heatmap with a metric toggle: Coverage % (cyan ramp) or Revisit gap (green→red). The 8 ground stations and a graticule are overlaid. Toggling the metric recolors instantly; changing inputs marks the result stale.
• Draw in 3-D scene — draws the constellation (one ring per plane, a dot per satellite) in the main view.
• Show / Update / Hide on globe — paints the coverage heatmap directly onto the rotating 3D Earth, locked to the continents.

📊 Fidelity — "how much do I trust this number?"#

The honesty dashboard. Toggle physics effects and watch the orbit respond:

• J2 — Earth's equatorial bulge; turning it on makes the orbit plane slowly swivel (the mechanism behind Sun-synchronous orbits).
• Drag — upper-atmosphere drag that decays low orbits over time.
• Sun / Moon — third-body gravity tugging your orbit.
• A live drift readout shows how far the orbit has moved from the simpler model.
• Compute L2+ (Orekit, server) — runs the heavyweight server-side engine (full gravity field, drag, SRP, third-body) and overlays its authoritative green trajectory against the instant browser line, with a Rust-computed "L2+ vs browser" divergence.

Full explanation of every level is in Fidelity & honesty.

The Assistant Dock (contextual hints)#

A small dock that pops in with context-aware suggestions based on what you're doing — e.g. "Try turning on J2 — Earth's bulge makes the orbit plane swivel; that's how Sun-synchronous orbits work," with one-click action buttons (Turn on J2, Plan a Moon shot, Fly Apollo 11, …).

Honest note: today the Assistant Dock is rule-based (smart canned hints), not yet the full AI copilot. The conversational AI — CAPCOM — is a planned phase (S6); this dock already follows the interface contract it will inherit.

The two views, recap#

• Orbit view — Earth-centered. Home for Orbit, Maneuver, Target, Finite burn, Track, Access, Coverage, Fidelity.
• Solar System view — Sun-centered (heliocentric). Home for the Porkchop tool: pick Venus / Mars / Jupiter, and a 48×40 grid of Lambert solutions is colored by trip energy (cyan valley = cheap, indigo = expensive, black = infeasible), with a ✛ on the cheapest departure. Click any cell to inspect that departure-date / trip-length combination. This is the "fare calendar" for interplanetary travel from Space without the math.

Next: tour the rest of the building → The rooms.