05The rooms

Audience: everyone. A guided walk through every page, what it's for, and the key controls. The Flight Deck has its own detailed reference; this chapter covers everything else.

Remember the metaphor: a home with a room for every kind of person, who all unite in the common hall. Each room produces forkable documents; the common hall (The Loop) is where they meet, get argued about with numbers, and get improved together.

Routes use mission-control callsigns. Here's the map, then a stop at each room.

🏠 The landing page (/)#

The front door. It introduces the platform and links into every room. Sections highlight the Flight Deck, the Napkin Works sketch studio, and The Loop. If you arrive cold, start here or go straight to Your first flight.

🏗 The VAB — Vehicle Assembly Building#

Reached from the Vehicle tab on the Flight Deck. A full-screen, KSP-style 3D rocket builder.

What it does:

• A parametric 3D rocket preview that updates as you configure it — real stage lengths, engine clusters (e.g. the Falcon octaweb of 8+1, Super Heavy's 33-ish), and parallel boosters (Falcon Heavy's twin side cores, the SLS/Shuttle solid rocket boosters).
• Family-correct paint via procedural textures (the Saturn V roll pattern, Starship stainless steel + heat-shield tiles).
• Engine-solved performance — as you build, the Rust engine computes the vehicle's staged Δv and payload-to-destination capability live.
• Save produces a vehicle document (with fork lineage) you can fly, share, and publish to the Hangar.

The point: a rocket isn't a picture, it's a spec with real numbers. Build it, then go fly missions with it.

✏️ Napkin Works (/napkin)#

"Every legendary aircraft started as a napkin sketch."

The sketch-to-spacecraft studio. The flow:

1. Draw a rocket silhouette (or upload an image).
2. Delta V traces it (image processing — Otsu/median thresholding) into a clean blueprint SVG.
3. It lathes the outline into a 3D hull (spins the 2D profile around its axis into a solid of revolution).
4. You pick engines from the engine catalog.
5. The engine solves the performance (Δv, payload).
6. Save it as a real vehicle document.

There's a format reference at /docs/sketch-format explaining what the studio expects. This room turns "I have a shape in my head" into a vehicle the rest of the platform can fly.

🏛 The Hangar (/hangar)#

"Where the machines live." The vehicle catalog.

• /hangar — browse all vehicles: the built-in library (Saturn V, Falcon Heavy, Starship, …) plus community-built ones.
• /hangar/[id] — a SpaceX-grade overview page for one vehicle: its stages, engines, dimensions, staged-Δv capability, and payload-to-destination numbers, all engine-computed.

Use it to pick a ride for a mission, study how real rockets are configured, or show off one you built.

📂 The Flight Archive (/archive)#

"Every flight plan ever filed, forkable." The mission library.

• Browse community + canonical missions (the Apollo 11 mission is the flagship — fully sourced from the NASA press kit, Apollo Flight Journal, and SP-4029, with 12 phases and real Δv numbers).
• Each mission is a .dvmission document. Open one and you can fork it.

📄 The Mission page (/m/[id])#

One mission in full detail:

• All its phases and the Δv ledger (the budget, burn by burn).
• Sources / provenance — where the numbers came from (real missions cite real documents).
• Fork — make your own copy. The new document carries a fork chain (its lineage), and a banner shows what it descended from. Fork-of-a-fork works, so credit flows down the whole tree.
• Save from simulator — when you build a mission on the Flight Deck and save, it becomes one of these pages.

This is the GitHub-for-missions idea made concrete: a mission is a living document with history, not a dead file.

📡 The Loop (/loop) — the common hall#

Mission control's voice loops — "get on the loop." The community feed where every room's work comes together. It has four zones (named after mission- control console roles):

How it works:

• Posts use a dv-brief format — a structured mission/discovery summary with real numbers, not just text.
• Likes, comments, reposts — with a transactional points system.
• Rank ladder (/loop/ranks) — earn points to climb from Cadet up to Commander (at 1,000,000 points). Ranks reward what the community keeps coming back to.
• Follows and a smart "hot" feed ranking.

Honesty firewall (from the Constitution): ranks and points are about community engagement, never a hidden score of your engineering skill. Professional work-quality review stays private to your organization — see the Glass Room. This separation is deliberate.

👤 Profiles (/u/[id])#

A member's page: their rank, their published missions / vehicles / discoveries, and who they follow. Forking someone's work credits them here.

🔭 Deep Field (/deep-field)#

The exoplanet-discovery workstation — point at the sky and find planets around other stars using real NASA telescope data. It's unique enough (and important enough) to have its own chapter: → Deep Field guide.

In one breath: it has THE FIELD (a 3D star map of thousands of real candidate host stars you can fly through) and an Analysis Desk (load a star's brightness data, find the transit dip, vet it, and publish a forkable candidate). Day-1 demo: rediscover π Mensae c — a real planet — in about 90 seconds.

📇 The Visitor Desk (/contact)#

The front desk. Pick why you're reaching out — friendly feedback, collaborate, invest, press, or something else — and send a message. It's rate-limited and lands in the team's inbox. This is the door for partnerships, investment, and bug reports.

📖 Docs (/docs)#

In-product documentation, including the /docs/sketch-format reference for Napkin Works. (This onboarding handbook lives in the repository under docs/onboarding/.)

How the rooms connect (the document is the through-line)#

Everything in the building produces or consumes a forkable document:

        Napkin Works ──draw──▶ Vehicle doc ──▶ The Hangar
                                   │
                                   ▼  (fly it)
   Orbit presets ──▶ FLIGHT DECK ──▶ .dvmission doc ──▶ Flight Archive / /m/[id]
                                   │
   Deep Field ──analyze──▶ .dvdiscovery doc            │
                                   │                    │
                                   ▼                    ▼
                            ┌──────────────────────────────┐
                            │   THE LOOP (the common hall)  │
                            │  share · discuss · FORK · rank │
                            └──────────────────────────────┘

A mission you fly, a rocket you build, a planet you find — each becomes a document with a link and a lineage. Send the link, someone forks it, improves it, posts it back. That circulating, peer-improved library is the platform's moat — the one thing a lonely desktop license can never reproduce.

More rooms, now open#

Since this chapter was first written, several rooms have shipped:

• The Loop, Big Board, Direct Loops & Ready Rooms — the community: a feed, a live-ops wall, encrypted DMs, and (infra permitting) live voice/video.
• The Glass Room — the director's console: a review queue, a compare console for two mission forks, a budget desk, a trade study sweep, and Go/No-Go polls (vote to approve, like a flight director polling the room).
• CAPCOM — the AI copilot that answers with computed numbers and citations, never guesses — now with seven mission-control role lenses.
• Mission Heritage — the canon plane: curated, engine-verified records of missions that actually flew.
• The Clean Room — design the spacecraft itself, with live mass/power/link/Δv budgets.
• The Exoplanet Catalog — landmark discovered worlds, each credited to its discoverers.

The mission lifecycle chapter walks the whole trip; For executives has the roadmap and honest status.