tera/TODO.md

Open work on Tera

Short, and only things that are decided but not done. Anything speculative belongs in an issue, not here.

The state board became the whole state — what this leaves open

src/cities/california.ts now runs 32.50–42.05 N and -124.50 to -114.0 W. Four things fall out of it that somebody has to pick up.

• The marketing stills are frames of a board that no longer exists. Done 2026-08-23. All 21 shots and all four films were re-shot at e7a8aa0 plus this round's uncommitted work; california-relief's caption now says 554 units and names the north. See "The imagery was re-shot" below for what that run found, and for the two manifests that are still waiting on a clean sha.

• scripts/performance-budget.mjs's header comment is now stale in one row. It records california/mobile at 389,843 triangles; the extended board measures 373,825. The caps in performance-budgets.json were rewritten downward to match. Nobody owned that comment this round.

• ARCHITECTURE.md §12.2 lists the span constants that stay spans, and the list is the decision, not a survey. If a future round wants physical units for the satellite dome or the cloud tile, read the reason each one is where it is before moving it — two of them were tuned by photograph and one says outright that it is arbitrary.

• The Bay Area desktop frame-time cell was red on all three runs that measured this, at p95 33.3, 33.2 and 33.3 ms against a 16.7 budget. Recorded here rather than claimed green, and recorded with everything beside it, because the section below asks for exactly that:

  • geometry is identical to the digit across all three runs — 2,264,928 triangles, 207 draws of a 320 cap — and unchanged from before this work to within 52 triangles (2,264,876);
  • src/cities/sf.ts was not touched and nothing in this change is reachable from that board's geometry;
  • the Bay Area mobile cell renders the same scene, with the same per-camera lighting listener attached, at 16.7-16.8 ms on every run — so a per-frame CPU regression is ruled out, because it would show on both;
  • pp_dpm_sclk read 0: 500Mhz * of an available 2725 throughout, with gpu_busy_percent at 0, which is the state the section below names as the cause.

  Three draws from a bimodal metric on a card parked at a sixth of its clock is still not a scene defect. It is now three, though, and the honest state of this cell is "red on this box, cause identified, not reproduced anywhere else".

  Re-measured after the layers were wired, and it is now six. The final run of this round read p95 33.3 ms on all three attempts again, with the geometry identical to the digit across every attempt — 2,264,956 triangles and 209 draws of a 320 cap — and identical to the pre-round baseline for that board, which is the number that matters: the Bay Area gets no port, no fleet and no sky layer, and its triangle count did not move by one. The card read 500 MHz of 2725 through that run as well.

Aerial perspective is wired, and one seam is still coarse

Fog now follows camera altitude (aerialReach in engine/atmosphere.ts, §12.2). main.ts recomputes the rig on the controls' change event, throttled at 2% of the current altitude, which collapses a chapter flight to a few dozen recomputations instead of sixty a second.

What that does not cover is a camera moved by something other than OrbitControls: the drive, actor and aircraft follow-cameras set the pose directly each frame and do not fire change. Those poses fall back to the one-hertz clock tick, so a fast descent under a follow camera steps the fog up to four times instead of easing it. It is not visible on the boards that exist — the follow cameras sit low and stay there — but a continuous state-to-city descent would need this on the frame loop rather than on an event.

The north is authored, and three things in it are thin

• The Klamath knot is four chains at four bearings, which reads as "not a north-south range" and does not yet read as the Trinity Alps in particular.
• The northern Sierra tapers into the Cascade arc through the Diamond Mountains and Honey Lake, and from the state pose that corner still reads as Basin and Range domes rather than as the end of a range. It is arguably correct — Honey Lake really is Basin and Range — but it was not checked against a photograph of the real ground.
• There is no Sacramento, Redding, Chico or Santa Rosa on the board. The block count is 8,881 against a pack test that caps it at 9,200, and the Central Valley's new northern half is farmland with nothing built on it. The state capital being absent is the most visible gap in the extension. Adding it is a district and about 300 lots; the budget that has to be checked first is draw calls on the california mobile cell, not triangles.

The port, the ships and the sky are wired — what that leaves open

main.ts now supplies all four layer factories and feeds the three that take a feed. ARCHITECTURE.md §13 is the design; these are the things it does not cover.

• A dark navy tower stands in the water off San Pedro, and it is not ours. Roughly 1.5 km south-east of the Terminal Island shoreline, a single building-sized block sits on open water. It is pre-existing: it is in /tmp/tera-look/socal-check.png, photographed before the port kit was wired, when that waterfront was still a bare tan plate. Nothing in the port kit, the vessel layer or this wiring puts it there. What changed is that the new Harbour chapter frames it — it was previously only ever seen from the whole-board pose, where it is two pixels. It belongs to whatever places anonymous blocks on the Southland board, and it wants a land mask.
• The radar sheet has never been seen against a real feed. Both sky projections answer 404 on cloud-1 today, so the layer was photographed against a synthetic fixture served to look.mjs --api. Two things that showed up there and want re-checking against a real composite: a 50 dBZ core draws at PRECIP_ALPHA_MAX 0.92, which is opaque enough to hide the terrain under it (correct for a severe cell, and unreachable on a normal California day at 0.47% wet and 20-35 dBZ, where the same ramp renders as a translucent smudge); and promoteRadar's sentence prints observedAt as a raw ISO string in the middle of an otherwise plain-English line.
• Services still does not carry the two sky services. server/src/app.ts constructs createRadarService and createBirdsService at the route rather than on Services. sources.radar / sources.birds are now on the health body — routes/health.ts reads them off the config, which is what every other line in that route does — but a future route that wants either service cannot reach it through Services the way every other one can.
• The sky is polled by the clock, not by a watcher. askSky fires once per board and then only when the body's own ttlSeconds has expired, checked on the once-a-minute tick that already exists. That is deliberate — a fourth polling ladder in adapters/http.ts to re-ask a question whose answer changes twelve times an hour is machinery bought for nothing — but it does mean the two sky feeds have neither watchFires's visibility check nor its failure back-off. A feed configured with a 30-second TTL would be asked once a minute, and a box answering 500 would be asked again every minute rather than backing off. Both are fine at 300 s and 600 s; neither is fine at 5 s.
• Every hull on the board is modelled and the AIS licence is still unread. VesselsSourceId is 'none' | 'modelled' | 'cloud1', the modelled body carries "not an observation of any vessel", and vesselSummary says the live feed is not configured. When /api/sea lands, the only change in main.ts is where body comes from — but the aisstream terms decide whether a real position may be shown to the public at all, and nobody has read them.
• Nothing photographs the sky layers in CI. layerSeams.test.ts asserts the wiring from source at both ends, which catches a deleted line; it cannot catch a layer that builds and draws nothing. The fixture that proved this one works lives in a scratchpad and is not committed.

One command re-shoots the imagery: npm run refresh

npm run refresh                 # build, stills, cards, films, both manifests
npm run refresh -- --dry-run    # what it would shoot; no browser, no build
npm run refresh -- --stills-only        # …--cards-only, --films-only; they compose
npm run refresh -- --rough      # films at 24 frames, for looking at
npm run refresh -- --skip-build # you just built; do not build again

scripts/brand-assets/refresh.mjs exists because re-shooting used to be a procedure — build first, because the scripts photograph dist/ and not src/; then three commands in an order that matters; then check the run actually got the GPU. A procedure that lives in somebody's head gets half-run, and the evidence was in this file: the stills were re-shot at one commit and the films at another two weeks older, and nothing said so until a human compared two files.

It prints a diff of the deliverables at the end — new, changed with the size delta, byte-identical — and it fails loudly and specifically on the three failures that otherwise produce confident wrong output:

• SwiftShader. Software rendering makes the same pictures fifteen times slower and reports success. Any child that prints a software renderer stops the run.
• A chapter expect guard firing. That means a pack was reordered under the shot list, so re-running cannot fix it. node scripts/brand-assets/shots.mjs --list prints what the shot list believes.
• A play guard firing. A shot that takes a body did not get the one it asked for — see the section below. Also not a flake, and also not fixed by re-running.

Two things it does not do, on purpose: it does not commit, and it does not re-stamp the manifests afterwards. Commit tera first, then shots.mjs --manifest-only and films.mjs --manifest-only, so the manifests name a clean sha rather than a dirty tree.

A shot can take a body now — play in shots.mjs

Three stills are pictures of an agent rather than of a place: drive-101 (chase camera behind the EV on US-101), crow-nav (the crow over the Bay Area board) and california-flight (the aircraft on the corridor). They replace three hand-made screenshots in lumbridge-v4/apps/web/public/arena/, which were the last imagery on the site no script could reproduce — and so also the last that nobody could re-shoot when the engine moved. All three still showed a left column reading "Explore as your crow →", a "FULL VIEW" badge no visitor to the site ever sees, and one daylight frame served to dark-mode readers as well.

play drives the mode dock, which is the same class of input aim is: no back door, just the control a reader uses. #mode-dock and #play-hud stay in these three frames deliberately — they are what the picture is of — while remaining in FURNITURE.BARE for the share cards.

Three guards, all of them tested by making them fire, because every way this goes wrong renders a plausible-looking frame with the right filename:

• the dock button must be offered, not merely present — the EV and the aircraft exist on the California board alone, and driving also needs US-101 or I-5 to be the current chapter, so elsewhere the button is hidden and clicking it is a no-op that leaves an orbit wide shot;
• aria-pressed and #play-hud, exactly as performance-budget.mjs does — transitionControlMode substitutes a fallback for a request it will not honour;
• the HUD's own chip names the body ("Drive", "Crow", "Flight"), checked at the click and again at the shutter, because a route that completes or a bound that is hit ends the mode mid-wait.

refresh.mjs surfaces all three as their own headline, next to SwiftShader and the chapter guard.

untilProgress, not a duration, for anything that was already moving. The crow and the aircraft are built inert, so n ms after the dock hands them over is the same place every time — measured identical at 1x and 2x. Road traffic is not: it runs from page load, so a duration is really "boot plus a bit", and the same run: 9000 put the EV at 55% of the leg in a 1x preview and 69% in the 2x render, which is a different stretch of road with the edge of a town across the top of the frame. untilProgress waits on the app's own route percentage instead, so preview and delivery agree. Overshoot throws rather than shooting.

drive-101's night frame is the weak one — fixed in the engine, 2026-08-22

This section used to say the frame's subject nearly disappeared, that the hour was not the lever, and that both candidate fixes were in the engine: give the EV a headlamp spill on the road ahead, or let the corridor's terrain keep some moonlight. The first one landed. The EV now throws a low beam on the road in front of it, the corridor carries continuous edge lines, a yellow median pair and cat's eyes, and the frame was re-shot at the same camera and the same hour. Canvas-region mean luminance, 1600w, before → after: 7.8 → 10.2 overall, and 5.5 → 11.7 on a 580×470 crop around the car and the road ahead of it. It reads as a car with its lights on rather than as two tail lamps.

What is still true, and is a capture limit rather than a light one. The EV is about 55 px wide in a 1440 px frame and always will be from this camera: applyFollow in roadTraffic.ts puts the chase camera 0.72 back and 0.92 up with its target 0.32 ahead, which is a fixed 38° looking-down pose, so the road fills the picture and there is no horizon in it. The stretch of road is the only lever the shot list has, and it was swept: untilProgress 0.64 puts the car on a bend but loses the far carriageway, 0.72 lands it at an off-ramp with a settlement's buildings — drawn at 1,919 m to the unit — across the right of the frame, and 0.82 is a wider carriageway with the car smaller again. 0.55 is still the best of them and stays. If the car is ever wanted larger, that is a change to the chase offsets in roadTraffic.ts, not to shots.mjs.

The crow moved to the Bay Area board for the same reason and it worked: over a city the night frame is the better of its pair. The hand-made original was on the state board, where a one-metre bird stands in front of ground drawn at 1,919 m to the unit with an oak the size of a hill behind it.

bay-bridge was aimed at the wrong thing — re-aimed, 2026-08-22

The old frame ran the crossing diagonally out of the top-right corner, left the entire right half of the picture as open water, and contained only one of the two shores the bridge joins — so its own note had to say so, and its caption described a wide bay view rather than the bridge the id promises.

It now seeks to 37.8085, −122.363 (the causeway just east of Yerba Buena, which is the midpoint of what has to fit rather than of the structure, because the panel eats the left 310 px) at zoom: -4, and drags azimuth: -45 to turn the chapter's almost-due-north stance broadside to a crossing that runs ENE at about 57°. elevation: -6 drops the camera far enough to put Marin, Angel Island and the Golden Gate along the top, which is what stops the water reading as empty. Both landings are inside the frame, with San Francisco's skyline at one end and the East Bay shore at the other, and the whole 2013 topology — two suspension towers, the deck coming down onto the island, the third tower, the piered causeway — is legible across the middle. Caption, both notes and both alts were rewritten to the frame that is actually delivered.

Night, 1600w: canvas-region mean 8.3 → 16.7, and on a 420×110 strip lying on the causeway — the half of the crossing the old frame did not contain at all — peak 18.7 → 134.9. The night frame no longer needs a lift before anything appears, which is what this file used to record about it.

The Golden Gate needs an earlier hour than everything else — retired

golden-gate's night frame was shot at 20:50 (sun −7.5°, nautical twilight) with a note explaining the exception: the other night frames are cities carried by their own windows, and a bridge over open water had none, so 21:35 rendered this one as a black rectangle. The deck now carries its own lamps, so it is back on the standard 21:35 with everything else and the special case is gone from shots.mjs.

Worth knowing before anyone "fixes" the number: the canvas-region mean went 8.2 → 7.0 at the deeper hour, because losing the residual sky costs more mean luminance than 1,600 lamps over open water add back. Measure the subject, not the canvas, on a bridge frame. On the deck the lamp run, both tower silhouettes and the red light over each tower head all read clearly at 21:35, where at 20:50 there was no light on the structure anywhere.

The imagery was re-shot on 2026-08-23 — what that run found

npm run refresh at e7a8aa0 + this round's uncommitted work: 21 shots x 2 frames, both share cards, all four films, both manifests. Every run printed ANGLE (AMD, Vulkan … Radeon RX 6700 XT (RADV NAVI22)) and not SwiftShader; no chapter guard and no play guard fired. Timings on this box, for budgeting: build 7 s, stills 545 s, cards 26 s, films 416 s.

Both manifests are dirty and that is the one thing still owed. SHOTS_COMMIT and FILMS_COMMIT are e7a8aa0 with SHOTS_DIRTY / FILMS_DIRTY true, because the tree was not committed when the shutter opened — the port, vessel and night-light work of this round is in every frame and in no commit. That is the manifests being honest rather than naming a sha that would render something else. Once tera is committed:

node scripts/brand-assets/shots.mjs --manifest-only   # no browser, no render
node scripts/brand-assets/films.mjs --manifest-only

then commit lumbridge-v4 and deploy it.

Two new shots, and one of them needs a page

• harbour — socal chapter 5, aimed at 33.7405/-118.2565 broadside across Terminal Island. Four crane rails at four bearings, the container yards, hulls alongside and one under way, the Vincent Thomas across the Main Channel, and at night a red obstruction light on every gantry apex.
• california-fire — the state board with the fire feed behind it. See the section below; it is the only frame here that is not the keyless experience.

Both are in shots.ts and both are delivered as WebP. Neither is on a page. Every one of the other nineteen ids is named explicitly by something in lumbridge-v4/apps/web/src, so a new shot appears in the manifest and nowhere else until somebody places it. That is a handoff, not a defect.

The fire feed is photographable now, from a fixture

drawsFire() gates the whole layer on access.feeds?.fires === true, which comes from /health. A keyless capture — which is every other frame here — can therefore not photograph fire at all, while tera.lumbridgecorp.com answers "fires":"cloud1" and every anonymous visitor to the deployed site does get it. The site was about to ship an imagery set in which the most visible thing the engine gained this round did not exist.

shots.mjs now has serveFeed() and a per-shot feed field. It fulfils exactly two routes and 404s the rest of /api/v1, and the body is scripts/brand-assets/fires-2026-08-23.json — the verbatim response from the live feed on 23 August 2026, kept whole. Do not trim that file. promote() counts the rows it refuses and the panel prints that number, so a fixture with the refused rows deleted would draw the same eight fires under a sentence claiming a gate that never ran.

Three consequences worth knowing before extending this:

• the synthetic /health says auth.mode: "none", which resolves the visitor to member and keeps #tier-adds out of the frame. That card is the sign-in offer, it is shown only to anon, and it is not in FURNITURE.CLUTTER — so the day this pipeline meets a real API it will arrive in the art silently, exactly the way #mode-dock did;
• california-fire is the only shot clocked to 2026-08-23 rather than 2026-08-06, because the panel prints the body's own fetchedAt and how long ago that was. A fixture from the 23rd photographed on the 6th reads "fetched 2026-08-23 · just now";
• the hot-pixel layer draws every FIRMS detection inside bounds, and bounds is a lat/lng rectangle. On the state board that puts a handful of cyan points over open water and over Baja in the night frame. They are real detections and the rectangle is the honest gate the layer has; it is worth deciding whether a board wants a land test before the count in the panel is ever quoted as a California number.

The marine layer decided two of the day frames, and it should decide any more

atmosphere.ts models the Pacific marine layer on apparent solar time, and the curve is 0.95 before dawn, 0.6 at nine, 0.2 at eleven, 0.4 again by four. Two shots were on 09:10 and 09:20 — a little after eight solar, where the layer is at about three quarters — and at a whole-board or 32 km standoff that is not weather in the picture, it is a white lid over the entire subject. bay-relief's caption is about eighty-three named hills and four octaves of value noise, none of which was visible; peninsula's is about twenty miles of city, likewise.

Both moved to the late afternoon (17:00 and 17:10) and both frames are now legible. The compromise is forced: the layer is thinnest at solar 11-14, which is 12:07-15:07 on a wristwatch here — the exact hours a heightfield has no shadow. Around five is thin enough to see the ground and low enough that the ranges still throw.

Any future wide day frame on the Bay board has this constraint. Close and low poses do not — fidi at 10:10 and crow-nav at 09:20 are both clear, because the camera is under the deck.

⚠️ A 1x --preview does not predict the cloud in the 2x delivery. The deck animates on elapsed time and the two runs have different settles (3000 ms against 6000), so the puffs land somewhere else. Framing, pose and light all preview faithfully; cloud does not. Judge cloud on the delivered frame, which is how peninsula's note lost a sentence about SFO that was true of the preview and not of the render.

Four captions had been falsified by engine changes, and nothing catches that

A caption is prose next to a camera pose. When the engine moves under it, the frame still renders, still looks deliberate, and still ships. All four of these were found by opening the delivered frame and reading its own note back:

• california-flight day ended "and the Pacific past the wingtip". Aerial perspective now follows camera altitude, so at 1,413 m the ocean is inside the haze rather than beyond it and there is no sea in the frame at all.
• california-flight night promised "the basin's lit ground in the corner" and "the moon's path broken across the water". The frame is over dark coastal mountains: no basin, no water. What actually carries it is the aircraft's own navigation lights and the corridor's road markings.
• lax day said "the traffic overhead is the real traffic: registration and type come off the same feed". It cannot be. Every frame but california-fire is shot keyless, so TrafficSource is the bundled simulator and not ADS-B. A caption may not borrow a fact from a deployment the shutter never opened on — and this is the failure mode to watch for now that one shot does have a server.
• golden-gate day said the towers "throw along the deck". They throw across the water beside it, which is checkable and was checked.

fidi-day's day poster had drifted onto the wrong renderer

poster: 0.86 was chosen as "a few minutes before sunset: the last of the low sun down the length of Montgomery". On ACES with the world-space sky dome, 0.86 is 20:09 with the sun at +0.4° and the towers are unlit silhouettes — the frame measured mean luminance 33 out of 255 against the night poster's 21. That is not a pair, and it matters more than a poster usually would: Film ships preload="none", so the poster is what most readers see for most of the time the film is on their screen. Now 0.76 — twenty past six, sun twenty degrees up, towers lit and throwing, mean 87.

The other three films' posters were checked the same way and are fine (147/24, 106/21, 155/46 day against night). Check a poster pair by measuring both, not by reading the clock: the fractions were all chosen on an older renderer and this is the one that had moved.

Smaller things the re-shoot turned up and did not fix

• freeway and drive-101 are nearly the same photograph. Both are the chase camera on the 101 chapter at 09:00; the only difference is where on the leg they land — 47% against 57%. freeway gets there with settle: 3000, which is the duration-not-position trap drive-101 exists to document. It has landed on 47% on two consecutive runs, so it is reproducible in practice on this box, but it is a duration and it is measured from boot. It cannot simply be given a play block: the 101 chapter is already in drive mode, and enterPlay clicks the dock button, which would toggle it off.
• office-desks slices the hardware card. The panel is taller than the viewport, so Desk speaker's controls are below the fold and its header sits on the frame edge. That is the exact condition shot.hide was invented for, and it cannot be used here because the hardware is the subject.
• #sky-section stays in the product stills, deliberately. It prints "No radar feed is configured … that is a fact about this box, not about the sky" twice, which reads like a hole — but tera.lumbridgecorp.com answers "radar":"none" and "birds":"none" today, so a real visitor sees the same two sentences. It is not the #tier case (local disagreeing with deployed); it is the product's own voice. If either feed is ever wired, this decision has to be taken again, because then the local frame and the site would disagree.
• #sea-section stays too, and it is the one that earns it: the harbour is modelled identically here and on the deployed site, and its sentence is what keeps a frame full of ships honest about their being modelled rather than observed.
• PROVENANCE.json's two card records now name a date they were not made on. refresh.mjs re-stamps the share cards narrowly — it substitutes the sha256 in the text and nothing else, which is what keeps that diff two lines instead of a reflow — so intakeDate still reads 2026-08-22 for files written on the 23rd. check-provenance only validates the format, so nothing catches it. It is one line in the one document whose entire job is accuracy.

The vessel layer has two gaps that belong to other files

Both stated in code comments already; recorded here so they are not only there.

• Pier 300 and the East Basin take no port calls. The straight run from the nearest point on Port.channel to those berths is 1.9 km and 2.9 km and crosses Terminal Island, so BERTH_APPROACH_REACH_METRES (1100) gates them out and they keep a static hull alongside rather than driving a container ship over a container yard. The proper fix is an optional per-berth approach path on Berth — approach?: LatLng[], water-side first — which socal.ts could then author for Pier 300 as the real route out through Angels Gate and north-east across the outer harbour. harbourCalls would prefer it to the nearest-point projection; about ten lines once the field exists. The field is on src/engine/types.ts, which the vessel work did not own.
• The tug's own solid is correct, cheap, and sub-pixel at every SoCal pose we ship. Its payoff is banked for the Bay board and for closer poses rather than realised today.
• engine/nightlights.ts now imports craneLights from engine/ports.ts. No cycle — ports.ts imports only three, terrain, types and world — but the two files are coupled and want moving, and re-photographing, together.

The GPU on this box never leaves 500 MHz, and every frame-time number here is a floor

This is a machine fault, not a scene fault, and it invalidates frame-time measurement on amd-server until it is fixed.

Traced 2026-08-23: /sys/class/drm/card*/device/pp_dpm_sclk sampled every two seconds through eighty seconds of sustained rendering — 2,264,956 triangles at 1440x900 — reports 0: 500Mhz * on all forty samples. It never ramps. power_dpm_force_performance_level is auto. The card's own ceiling is 2725 MHz core and 1000 MHz memory, so it is running at roughly 18% of core and as low as 96 MHz of VRAM clock.

The consequence: bay-area/desktop is fragment-bound at exactly this clock and sits on the vsync deadline. Same build, same geometry, viewport swept —

viewport	pixels	p95
1440x900	1.296 MP	33.3
1280x800	1.024 MP	16.7
1152x720	0.829 MP	16.8
1024x640	0.655 MP	16.7

The cell is ~27% past what this board sustains at 500 MHz. So a build that adds a trivial amount of fragment work flips it from 16.8 to 33.3 while its geometry is identical to the digit, and a build that removes some flips it back. That is what makes single-run frame-time comparisons on this box worthless, and it is how two separate investigations here reached two different wrong conclusions.

Do not "fix" this by raising a cap. Geometry is the gate — it is deterministic and identical across runs. Frame time is advisory until the card clocks properly.

Two ways this diagnosis was reached wrongly first, both worth remembering. One investigation blamed the desktop shadow map: disproved, because 4096, 2048, 1024 and 256 all render the board in 1.21-1.31 ms. Another blamed a camera change listener rebuilding the PMREM environment: disproved three ways — every field environmentKey() fingerprints is bit-identical from 500 m to 67,600 m of camera altitude; 105 camera-lighting applies produced 0 rebuilds; and the budget harness runs under reducedMotion: "reduce", so its camera is stationary and fires no change events at all during the sample window. Both wrong conclusions came from comparing a single run against a single run.

To settle it properly: power_dpm_force_performance_level needs root. Forcing it to high and re-running the matrix would give the first trustworthy frame-time numbers this project has had.

The aeroplane glyph is still larger than the Golden Gate

GLYPH_MAX_SCALE in src/engine/flights.ts is 52 and that is a mitigation, not a cure. The glyph has a screen-space floor — never smaller than legible — which scales by the distance to the aircraft, when what makes it look wrong is how far the camera is from what it is looking at. At a whole-board pose those are the same thing; at the Golden Gate chapter the bridge is two units from the camera and the traffic is two thousand, so the floor fires hard on the aeroplane and not at all on the bridge.

A ceiling of 52 was chosen because the raw scale at 1,160 units — the far end of the orbit over the California corridor — is 51.0 at a 60-degree field of view, so anything lower shrinks aeroplanes at a pose people actually use. (26 was tried first and put the glyph at 0.0123 of the frame, against the 0.012 at which flights.ts says the wings stop resolving.) 52 takes the worst case from about two and a half times the bridge's main span down to about one and a half.

The complete fix is to clamp against the camera's focus distance rather than the aircraft's, so the glyph collapses toward its authored size whenever the viewer has zoomed in on something near, at any aircraft range. That is a signature change through glyphScale, tick and their callers.