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Timeline and simulation

The console runs on one simulation clock. The globe, entity cards, analytics, and assistant answers all sample the same instant, so "utilization is 82 percent" always means "at this timeline time", never "sometime recently". The sim transport at the bottom of the shell is where you control that clock.

Screenshot

The sim transport: play/pause, scrubber across the active window, speed selector, UTC readout, and the live/replay mode indicator.

Modes​

ModeWhoWhat drives the clock
LiveSigned-in, live API configuredThe playhead pins to the newest stored telemetry; the scene tracks incoming data
ReplaySigned-inA stored telemetry window replays deterministically; scrub anywhere within it
DemoGuests, or on requestThe bundled demo fleet and timeline

Replay windows are selectable slices of stored telemetry: the last hour, a twenty-minute window centered on a representative feeder pass, and a sample incident-review window for training. Your default mode, default window, auto-play, and default speed are preferences under Settings, Sim.

A connection indicator distinguishes live, stale (no fresh samples in 90 seconds), and disconnected states, so a frozen feed never masquerades as a quiet one.

Controls​

  • Play / pause advances or freezes the clock.
  • Scrubber jumps to any instant in the window; the whole scene (positions, links, telemetry, charts) evolves continuously to match, in both directions.
  • Speed: 1x, 5x, 10x, 30x, 60x, 64x. Speed changes the clock rate only; rendering smoothness and physics are unaffected.
  • UTC seek: enter a timestamp to jump precisely. The assistant can do the same ("seek to 12:30 UTC", "go back to just before the anomaly").
  • Replay loops within its window, so an unattended console keeps a living scene.

Determinism guarantees​

The simulation side of the console is deterministic by construction, which is what makes its answers trustworthy and reproducible:

  1. Same question, same time, same scene, same answer. Deterministic analytics (statistics, trends, breakdowns, coverage, capacity, outage models) contain no randomness. Re-running an analysis at the same sim time with the same filters returns identical numbers.
  2. Replay is fixed. A stored window replays the same frames every time. Scrubbing back and forth does not mutate anything.
  3. Playback speed is not fidelity. 64x does not skip physics; it advances the same clock faster.
  4. Windows are reported, never padded. If you ask for a 24-hour trend and the store holds 60 minutes, the result states the real coverage and marks it truncated. Data is never invented to fill a request.
  5. Scenario mutations are pure. What-if scenarios apply to a copy of the snapshot and reset cleanly; see Simulations and scenarios.
  6. Catalog constellations are epoch-safe during replay. Every catalog object propagates only within a validity window around its own TLE epoch, and entries more than 90 days behind the newest epoch are dropped as decayed, so scrubbing a replay window never renders a constellation in physically fictional positions.

Analytics and the sim clock​

Every analytic is stamped with the clock it computed against:

  • Snapshot statistics ("p90 link latency") evaluate the frame at the current instant and report that timestamp.
  • Trends ("mean utilization over the last hour") walk the replay frames and report the exact window, step, and frame count they covered.
  • Charts built from fleet data are tied to sim time; in live mode the newest point is the newest stored sample, not the wall clock.

The practical rule: pause before you quote a number in an incident channel, and the number will still be true when someone re-checks it at that timestamp.

Example scenarios​

Incident review. After a link degradation, an operator switches to replay, seeks to five minutes before onset, and steps through at 5x while watching the affected gateway's links. The assistant compares fleet statistics just before and just after onset at two exact timestamps, and both instants can be revisited identically tomorrow.

Rehearsing a pass at speed. A new operator loads the gateway pass replay window, plays it at 30x to see the whole contact arc, then replays the AOS at 1x to watch the feeder link acquisition sequence closely.