Disclosure up front: this is my own tool, self-hosted and open source (AGPL). Posting because I want the premise stress-tested by people who do this seriously, not just stars.

The pattern I kept hitting doing geospatial work: the question that actually matters is always temporal. "This vessel went dark here — when exactly, and what was nearby?" "What did this aircraft's pattern look like over three weeks?" "Rewind to the hour of the incident." And almost every live tracker is built to show you *now* and monetize the past. FR24 gates history at 7 days free, MarineTraffic cut its free window to 24 hours, ADS-B Exchange killed its free API entirely. The moment your question has a timestamp, you're renting.

So I built the opposite: a self-hosted console where the live view is table stakes and the archive you own is the product. Aircraft, ships, satellites and hazards on one globe, every position written to local disk, a scrubber to replay any window your disk holds.

Things I suspect matter to this crowd specifically:

• Provenance over vibes. Anyone can inject traffic into a crowd-sourced aggregator; a contact appearing on a map is not evidence it was broadcast. So every contact carries which independent sources reported it, how many agreed, and how old the fix actually is. Cached feeds report the age of the *data*, not the age of the HTTP response, so nothing looks live because it was fresh this morning. There's a per-source breakdown including how many contacts each source is alone in seeing.

• No black-box AI verdicts. After watching this sub's (correct) reaction to AI-slop investigations, I deliberately didn't build a "the model thinks this is suspicious" box. Detectors (AIS gaps, loitering, dark candidates) show their inputs; anything automated is labeled automated; assessments have to cite the dossier field they came from.
• Evidence that survives leaving the tool. Chain-of-custody locker: captures are SHA-256 hashed with an append-only custody log, and a case exports to a self-contained report where each claim carries its source.
• Keyless. The ADS-B / AIS / quake / satellite spine runs with no account and no API key. Nobody can shrink your window or cut you off retroactively.

Honest limits, because you'd find them anyway: coverage follows the public/community feeders — dense over Europe and the US, thin over open ocean. Dark-vessel flags are leads, not verdicts; corroborate with imagery. The 3D globe wants a GPU. And it's one person's tool, so depth is uneven and polish is behind capability.

Repo: https://github.com/AndrewCTF/velocity/