Velocity
Self-hosted, keyless flight, ship and satellite tracker that keeps a replayable history you own, with source provenance on every contact.
Velocity is a self-hosted geospatial tracking console for aircraft, vessels, satellites, GPS jamming, dark-vessel candidates, temporary flight restrictions, military bases, ports, earthquakes, internet outages, and conflict events. Everything draws on one CesiumJS WebGL2 globe, and the core feeds need no API key: ADS-B comes from OpenSky, airplanes.live, adsb.lol and FR24, AIS from ShipXplorer, MyShipTracking, Digitraffic and Kystverket, quakes from USGS and EMSC, and satellites from CelesTrak. Optional keys (AISStream, an OpenSky login, NASA FIRMS, ACLED, Cloudflare) only widen coverage.
The feature the project leads with is history you own. Positions are written to a Postgres + TimescaleDB hypertable with 6-hour chunks and columnar compression, with SQLite as the keyless fallback, and a time dock scrubs the globe back through 1h, 6h, 24h, 3d, and 7d windows with playback from 1x to 3600x. Aircraft can also reach back to 2024 through public readsb heatmap archives that the backend proxies and caches. Depth is bounded by your disk, and /api/history/coverage reports the real recorded window rather than a configured ceiling.
Every contact carries provenance: which independent sources reported it, how many agreed, and how old the actual fix is, with a per-source /api/status/provenance view of how many contacts each feed alone is seeing. On top of the live picture sit a watch-officer inbox that fuses jamming, dark vessels, military air activity, and conflict events into ranked, cited alerts; an evidence locker that hashes captures with SHA-256 and appends them to a custody chain; case exports as JSON, self-contained HTML, or PPTX; a Foundry layer for bringing in CSV, JSON, or NDJSON through governed pipelines; and a Workflows node graph for automating the feeds. The backend also runs as an MCP server so an AI agent can query the same warm feeds, and the repo ships a Claude Code plugin with an analyst skill and slash commands.
Compared with Flightradar24, MarineTraffic, and ADS-B Exchange, Velocity is not a better live feed: the underlying community data is largely the same. What changes is the paywall and the archive. There is no account, no key, and no vendor truncating replay to 7 days or 24 hours, but you supply the disk and the box, and you absorb the third-party terms of the sources it scrapes. It is explicitly a single-analyst tool: live derived state such as incidents and briefs clears on restart, AIS coverage is densest over Northern Europe, and the 3D satellite mode is VRAM-heavy.
