Every record-setting space battle has shipped with an asterisk. This series is a technical argument, with diagrams and a public benchmark plan, that the asterisk is a design choice.
The method: keep strong consistency small, make the seams part of the game, and print the worst case of every component before it runs.
In plain English: Black Skies is a public systems case study in low-latency coordination for large real-time battles. The game setting is a forcing function. The engineering questions are consistency boundaries, queuing, split-brain handling, latency budgets, simulation ownership, and benchmark design.
Why consistency versus availability is a design choice, and how game rules become scaling decisions. The hub of the series.
Born by coarse-to-fine H3 lookup and CAS, failing over in one to two ticks, garbage-collecting itself. There is no tile manager.
One Redis function per tick, a bridge, and a checkpointer keep commit, delivery, and durability from ever coupling.
Epoch fencing, split-brain resolution, and why the routing read path never touches the database.
One write becomes ten thousand correct screens inside 100 milliseconds, and the 600-byte assumption that carries it all.
Authority moving between CP islands in two ticks, combat at the seam, and mass warp as a queue instead of a protocol.
Leases instead of scheduling, arithmetic instead of forecasting, three speeds of refill, and Lambda as a bridge.
Decision decks, newest-state workers, and an autopilot that shares the wheel without bypassing authority.
The full benchmark table, the two SLIs that define correctness, and exactly what would falsify the design.
Every mechanism in these posts names the production failure it answers, and the closing ledger lists what has been measured, what has not, and exactly what would falsify the design. When the massive-scale run happens, the results post joins this list, whichever way the numbers go.
Every load-bearing claim on this site, sorted by how proven it is. Design targets are labeled as design targets wherever they appear.
A durable orchestrator for parallel development under rapidly changing specs, designed in public with a published kill condition. It runs the agent workflow that helps build Black Skies. Prototype progress, the product spec, and the full story live on its own site.
Early design notes archived here: the blocking task · the kernel · the pattern catalog