FLIGHTMANUAL

01 // CONCEPT

The page is a night sortie.

Viper Squadron is a fictional crew room seen through a pilot’s canopy. Its emotional register is alert, not triumphalist: the machinery feels alive, but the central ritual is about protecting the person beside you. The page begins in a dark cockpit, crosses through an operations brief and personnel wall, then finishes on a runway pointed home. The moving acquisition box turns scrolling into a repeated “find, identify, confirm” rhythm.

Specific invented details make the room feel occupied: tail numbers, weather strings, fuel gates, six callsign stories, and the 1987 origin of “Check Six.” The mission is identification and escort, with systems explicitly simulated and safe. Cinematic tension remains, while the cost of uncertainty—and the duty to bring everyone back—stays in frame.

02 // VISUAL SYSTEMS

How the HUD works.

CANOPY FILM AND ATTITUDE

The hero stages /assets/gen/vipers/hero.jpg through .hero-film, with letterbox bars, asymmetric scrims, grain, and amber flare layers. resizeSky() seeds capped drifting particles on #sky-canvas. animate() eases pointer input before writing --mx, --my, --bank, --pitch, and film offsets. Image, pitch ladder, haze, and HUD then move at different optical depths. The loop pauses when document.hidden is true; reduced motion draws one still frame.

LOCAL FILM PIPELINE

The production route is a GPT Image 2 hero still, animated into a five-second ambient loop with Kling 3.0 through Higgsfield, then stored locally as hero.jpg and loop.mp4. This checkout includes the still but not the MP4, so the intentional fallback uses code-driven parallax, haze, particles, and flare motion instead of requesting remote media. The radar, pitch ladder, tapes, patch embroidery, blind-arc scanner, runway, grain, and acquisition reticle remain code-generated.

SECTION ACQUISITION

acquire() ranks visible .section-target headings by distance from the viewport acquisition line. It sizes and positions .section-lock, swaps “ACQUIRING” for “LOCK,” updates navigation state, and triggers lockTone() only when the visitor arms audio. On phones, the reticle becomes a compact status rail so the signature survives without covering copy.

TELEMETRY AND IMPACT

telemetry() gives the airspeed and altitude tapes restrained synthetic drift. Scroll distance divided by elapsed time drives the G value and bar; settleG() returns it to 1.0 after input stops. A fast scroll briefly adds the red inset vignette through .hit, an impact beat that never moves layout.

PATCH CULTURE

Every callsign patch is inline SVG with a shield, round, or diamond silhouette. Dashed rings, stacked borders, colored thread shapes, and multi-stage drop shadows suggest embroidery. The roster deliberately staggers patches like a crew-room wall, while every story remains visible without requiring hover.

BLIND-ARC HOLD

runCheck() advances only while the Check Six control is held, sweeping a phosphor beam across all six callsigns. Releasing early produces an incomplete state; finishing changes the instrument to “Six Clear” and plays a three-note confirmation only when audio has been explicitly armed.

03 // TOKENS

Phosphor against night.

Michroma handles names and section commands; its engineered forms feel stenciled onto equipment. IBM Plex Mono carries prose, telemetry, and board data. Night Sky dominates; phosphor signals action, amber marks human judgment, and red appears only under fast-scroll load.

04 // REPRODUCE THIS

Prompt the system.