Guns Only

Guns Only is a deterministic browser flight simulator built around mechanically honest aircraft, projectively truthful instruments, and short missions that can be replayed and tested without a renderer.

Play the current production build: guns-only.com

What is live now

The production catalogue exposes six accepted experiences, split into military and civilian aircraft:

• F-22A surrogate — Guns Only: an endless visual dogfight with ballistic guns, a real flight envelope, Auto-GCAS, padlock/target management, a deterministic opponent, and a voluntary Call It A Day/Bingo return through an energy-coded left-hand pattern to the runway.
• Rapier — Intercept: fly a visible high-speed path to three balloon mines at 45,000 ft, destroy their lethal drone payloads before deployment, then follow the RTB corridor and trap at the midpoint arrestor.
• Cobra Canyon — Hold the Bridge / Ember Run: fly the AH-1G through the River Gorge ground war, work the AI gunner, rearm at Camp Ember, and hold Iron Bell.
• Area 51½: race toy RC buggies round a desert air base in the spirit of Re-Volt: rigid-body four-wheel physics, AI rivals, cartoon pickups, and a kid mode on by default.
• Top Gun: fly the F-14A against two MiG-28s with guns and two Sidewinders, then recover aboard the carrier in the anime-1986 presentation.
• Okanagan Fire Boss: take an AT-802F from Kelowna to Okanagan Lake for water circuits, a solo initial attack, or a coordinated large-force extension with Air Attack and helicopter traffic.

Additional mission code remains in the repository for development, but it is not silently presented as finished product. Preview and quarantined routes show their release boundary before they load and require an explicit ?preview=1 acknowledgement for deliberate testing. The authoritative matrix is docs/STATUS.md.

Controls

Keyboard bindings can be changed in Settings. Defaults are:

Action	Default
Pitch	↓ pull / ↑ push
Roll	← / →
Rudder	A / D
Power	W / S
Guns	F
Padlock	V
Next contact	Tab
Hand off fight and return to base	O
Envelope override	Space
Auto-GCAS paddle	K
Gear	G
Flaps	[ / ]
Controls quicklook	H
Pause / resume	Esc

On a phone, use the left stick for throttle/yaw and the right stick for pitch/roll. Guns have a separate labelled button. Optional tilt contributes a small roll trim; it is not required to fly.

Product and evidence boundaries

• The simulation runs at a fixed 120 Hz with no wall-clock authority in the kernel.
• Presentation renders versioned snapshots and never invents combat, vehicle, mission, or medical truth.
• Aircraft and content declare whether their values are measured, surrogate, provisional, or fiction and retain source/licence records where applicable.
• Hosted flight diagnostics are off by default. A pilot must opt in from Settings; opting out clears unsent diagnostics. Core play does not require central telemetry.
• Medical and command experiments are fictional educational contexts, not clinical or operational guidance.

The broader product direction is Cohort: an open-source educational game world in which aviation and medicine form the first connected spine. That document is a north star, not a claim that every planned discipline is already available.

Architecture

sim/           deterministic simulation kernel and mission authority
sim.Tests/     physics, lifecycle, determinism, combat, recovery, and mission tests
web/           WebAssembly bridge, snapshot projection, renderer, HUD, and browser shell
server/        local parity server for the multiplayer protocol
world-worker/  Cloudflare Durable Object for persistent identities and sectors
content/       schemas and versioned presentation packs
tools/         content, asset, terrain, audio, performance, and telemetry tooling
docs/          architecture, accepted designs, status, sources, and dated evidence
bin/check      complete local release gate

SimulationSession is the lifecycle coordinator: it owns fixed-step time, Ready/Active/Paused/ Finished transitions, vehicle controls, mission state, resources, and outcomes. Mission runtimes own their bounded domain state. The browser sends semantic input and renders the resulting snapshot.

Build and verify

Requires the .NET 8 SDK and Node.js 24, matching CI. The world-worker package requires Node 22 or newer; using 24 locally keeps its real workerd startup test in the normal gate.

./bin/check

The gate validates content and licences, runs JavaScript and .NET suites, builds the release, checks the publish closure, and drives silent browser smoke. GitHub Actions separates deterministic checks from browser acceptance so a browser failure cannot erase the unit/content signal.

To serve a local release build manually:

dotnet publish web/GunsOnly.Web.csproj -c Release -o /tmp/guns-only-web
cd /tmp/guns-only-web/wwwroot && python3 -m http.server 8877

Current status

Active development. Production, preview, quarantine, verification, and known-player-path status are tracked in docs/STATUS.md; dated handoffs are evidence for the build they name, not evergreen status documents.