Globe and rendering
The globe is not a map with markers on it. It is a persistent, living scene: satellites move continuously at display refresh rate, links fade in and out as geometry changes, analyses animate their results into the scene, and the camera flies rather than teleports. The goal is that an operator watching the globe never has to mentally reconstruct what changed, because everything that changes, animates.
This page is conceptual: what the rendering engine guarantees and how to work with it as an operator. Display preferences live in Settings.
The globe at dusk in realistic style: fleet satellites with feeder links down to a gateway, terminator crossing the Atlantic, clouds over the tropics.
Earth styles
Four styles under Settings, Display (or ask the assistant to switch):
| Style | Character | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Realistic | Photoreal imagery, atmosphere, day/night lighting | Demos, situational awareness, shareable views |
| Operational | Muted, high-contrast surface tuned for long NOC shifts | Day-to-day operations (the default) |
| Dark | Minimal dark basemap | Dense link topologies, screenshots |
| Tactical | Stark, high-legibility styling | Briefings, wall displays |
The realistic style is built from public NASA GIBS imagery: a Blue Marble base, a 250 m daily detail layer that crossfades in as you zoom toward the surface, and VIIRS night lights that appear on the dark side of the terminator. No imagery API key is required for it.
The console's color language is deliberate: metallic gold for planned contact windows, bronze for live contacts, silver for history and structure. Utilization tiers render as luminance differences, not red/green alarm colors, so a wall of assets stays readable across an eight-hour shift.
Quality tiers
Three presets balance fidelity against GPU load:
| Preset | Detail imagery | Clouds | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cinematic | Yes (close-zoom 250 m layer) | Yes | Default on desktop |
| Balanced | Yes | No | Sharper tile budget control |
| Performance | No | No | Default on touch devices, where it is the difference between 60 fps and a hot phone |
Terrain: gateway-focus views and elevation masks sample real world terrain when a Cesium ion terrain token is configured; without one, the console falls back to synthetic horizon profiles and says so. Weather visuals are physically motivated: rain-seeded cumulus appears near gateways whose telemetry reports precipitation.
Satellite motion at any speed
Satellite rendering is decoupled from the data tick. The propagation worker precomputes SGP4 positions over a sliding window, and the globe interpolates between samples every frame with cubic Hermite curves. Playback speed only changes how fast the clock advances; per-frame smoothness is identical at 1x and 64x. Interpolated positions stay within roughly 2 km of direct SGP4 for LEO satellites.
This applies to every satellite origin equally: operator fleet, catalog constellations, uploads, and synthetic assets all resolve through one interpolation path. If a seek lands outside the precomputed window, satellites hold their coarse positions (correct, just tick-rate motion) until the next chunk of samples lands, then return to full smoothness.
Transitions
- Nodes never pop. New assets fade in; removed assets retire through a fade-out; an asset that returns mid-fade revives smoothly.
- Links fade on a shared wall-clock envelope with horizon hysteresis, so a link at the edge of visibility does not flicker as geometry oscillates around the elevation mask. Link carriers are retained across data ticks to keep transitions continuous.
- Layer toggles (links, labels, sky glow) apply immediately.
- Emphasis: when the assistant explains a result ("this gateway is the bottleneck"), the relevant nodes pulse on the globe rather than the answer living only in text.
- Optimization playback: siting analyses animate their process, candidates appear staggered, rejected ones dim to traces, scored picks are labeled, and the winner pulses.
Camera
- Select: click any satellite, gateway, data center, or link line. Selection opens the entity card and highlights the asset.
- Follow: double-click a satellite to have the camera track it along its orbit; interact with the globe to release.
- Gateway descent: clicking a gateway begins a staged descent to the site. The final approach holds until terrain tiles and the elevation-mask overlay are ready, so you arrive at a fully dressed site instead of watching it assemble.
- Assistant-driven: ask for a view ("frame Europe", "overview the globe", "fly to the gateway in Oslo") and the camera flies there while the simulation keeps rendering. The camera never teleports unless asked.
- 2D mode: a flat projection is available for ground-track-centric work; all the same entities and interactions apply.
What the engine guarantees
- The scene is never torn down and rebuilt; every update is incremental.
- Heavy computation (propagation, link synthesis, capacity engines) runs off the main thread; the renderer holds frame rate while results stream in.
- Scrubbing the timeline evolves the scene continuously, in both directions.
- Anything the eye tracks is interpolated, never frame-stepped.
Example scenarios
Watching a pass at 64x. An operator scrubs to ten minutes before AOS at a gateway and plays at 64x. Satellites sweep smoothly overhead, the feeder link fades in as the satellite clears the elevation mask, holds bronze through the pass, and fades as it sets, with no flicker at the horizon.
Explaining congestion to a customer. During a review, the operator asks "which gateway is the bottleneck for the northern region". The assistant computes the breakdown, and the congested gateway and its saturated links pulse on the globe as the numbers land in chat.