Press kit
Everything you need to write about Velocity.
Copy any of it verbatim. The video and stills are free to use with credit to the project. If a number below matters to your piece, ask and it gets re-measured rather than guessed.
AGPL-3.0v1.0.1No API keys
In one sentence
Velocity is a self-hosted OSINT console: live aircraft, ships, satellites and hazards on one 3D globe, with position history you own and can replay.
In a paragraph
Velocity fuses live aircraft, ships, satellites, earthquakes and conflict events onto one 3D globe, self-hosted, with no API keys for core feeds. The part hosted trackers cannot match: it archives position history to your own disk and lets you scrub back to any past moment. Open source under AGPL-3.0.
The long version
Flightradar24 gives you 7 days of history on the free tier, MarineTraffic cut its free window to 24 hours, ADS-B Exchange discontinued its free API. Velocity is the self-hosted answer: a FastAPI backend and a Cesium globe that fuse aircraft (OpenSky plus the airplanes.live grid), keyless AIS, CelesTrak satellites propagated with real SGP4 in the browser, earthquakes, wildfires, GPS jamming inferred from ADS-B integrity degradation, and conflict events. It records every position to a local SQLite archive with a size cap you choose, and a scrubber rewinds to any moment you kept. Evidence exports carry SHA-256 custody logs. One compose file, AGPL-3.0.
Facts
| Project | Velocity |
|---|---|
| What it is | Self-hosted OSINT / situational-awareness console |
| Licence | AGPL-3.0-or-later |
| Release | v1.0.1 |
| Stack | FastAPI + Python 3.12 backend, React + CesiumJS frontend, SQLite archive |
| Install | git clone https://github.com/AndrewCTF/velocity && docker compose up |
| Live scale | 21,186 aircraft and 55,086 vessels in one measured peak snapshot; a typical day is around 13,000 and 33,000 |
| Satellites | ~16,000 orbital objects propagated client-side with real SGP4, not decorative orbits |
| Also counted | 7,183 military bases, 85 MCP tools, 2,593 backend tests passing |
| Archive | 8.7M positions in a 1.8 GB SQLite file at a 2 GB cap, on one development box |
| Keys required | None for aircraft, vessels, satellites, earthquakes or the base map |
| Repository | github.com/AndrewCTF/velocity |
Video
Product footage, no compositing: every frame is the running console against live feeds. Right-click to save, or link them directly.
Music: “Rising Dawn” by Ethereal88, CC BY 4.0. Keep this credit if you use the film with its audio.
Stills
Logo
What to be careful about
These belong in any honest write-up, and leaving them out is how a tool like this gets oversold.
- Coverage comes from volunteer community feeders, so it is dense over Europe and North America and thin over open ocean and conflict zones, which is exactly where people most want it. AIS is strongest in Northern Europe.
- It is a single-analyst tool, not a team server. Live derived state clears on restart; what you deliberately keep (the archive, case files, the evidence locker) persists to disk.
- The 3D globe wants a real GPU. Satellite mode is a VRAM hog.
- There are AI summarisation features. They are optional, labelled as automated output, can run entirely against local inference, and can be confidently wrong. Please do not describe the project as AI-powered.
- It pulls from third-party sources that have not authorised it. Their terms bind whoever runs it, from their own IP. Not for safety-of-life or navigation use.
- There is no public demo instance, deliberately: redistributing the feeds is not what the volunteer feeder communities signed up for.
Contact
Questions, review copies of anything, or a walkthrough: open an issue on GitHub and it gets answered the same day.
Get started on GitHub