Missions

Missions are the unit of play. The board generates 8–12 of them for you on each refresh — derived from your tier, your hangar, your home country, and a live snapshot of VATSIM (who's on the air, what the weather is doing). They expire. They mean something.

The board

The board is your queue of offered missions. Each card shows route, aircraft, base reward, stacked multipliers, and a short scenario blurb. Accepting a mission is free; it then lives in My Missions for up to 7 days, regardless of what the board does next.

• Refresh. Manual refresh has a ~5-minute cooldown. The board also auto-regenerates on login when the last refresh is more than an hour old.
• Quota. Roughly 70% of missions have a leg in your declared home country; the remaining 30% are ferry / international slots so the board never feels parochial.
• Diversity. The generator avoids back-to-back duplicates: no two missions on the board share the same departure + arrival + aircraft class.

Generator inputs

Generation is a pure function of player state, a VATSIM snapshot, the class templates, and a per-player RNG seed. The seed is stable inside a refresh window so the same board is reproducible during a session, and rotates on refresh so you don't see the same eight missions forever.

• Player state. Your cid, each entered class with its tier and certified aircraft, your home country, your recent mission history.
• VATSIM snapshot. Active controllers (Tower, Approach, Center), current METAR per airport, and known traffic levels.
• Class templates. Per-class leg-length range, IFR/VFR rules, allowed aircraft, airport constraints (runway length, paved/unpaved), and how strongly to weight ATC coverage.

Generation stages

The generator runs in five stages — filter, then score, then sample.

1. Class shortlist. For each class you've entered, pick the current tier template. Locked classes are skipped.
2. Departure selection. Filter airports against runway/category constraints, prefer those with active ATC, score by home-country bias, weather difficulty, and recency. Sample a weighted top-K.
3. Arrival selection. Pick a target leg length from the class range, filter airports within ±20%, apply class arrival constraints, score by ATC coverage at arrival, weather, and full-pair recency.
4. Attributes. Attach aircraft, IFR/VFR flag, base reward, the difficulty multiplier (weather × ATC × time-of-day × first-time-at-airport), a 20% chance of a time-sensitive window (+15% reward), and a one-line scenario blurb from a per-class template library.
5. Board composition. Trim to 8–12 missions, ensure each entered class is represented, enforce the home-country quota, and sort by reward with one "easy local" anchor at the top.

Completion verification

vCareer verifies missions server-side from your VATSIM track — there is no client-side report, no manual completion button. Once per minute, a background tick reads recent positions from the VATSIM data feed plus your historical session record, and decides whether each accepted mission has transitioned from IN_PROGRESS to COMPLETED, COMPLETED_DIVERTED, or FAILED.

• Filed plan required. Missions need a filed flight plan; the departure and arrival on file are what we match against.
• Diversion. Landing within 75nm of the filed arrival under deteriorating weather is treated as a successful diversion — partial reward, no failure.
• Disconnect. Going offline mid-leg without reaching the destination fails the mission. Crash detection lands here too.
• Trust. Awards are computed server-side from the VATSIM track. We don't read your sim and we don't trust the client.

Expiry & abandonment

• Offered. A mission on the board expires when the board refreshes — it's not yours yet.
• Accepted. Once accepted, you have 7 days to complete it. After that it expires automatically and the slot is freed.
• Abandonment. You can abandon an accepted mission at any time. No reward, no penalty beyond the lost slot — abandon freely; the generator gives you more.
• Time-sensitive. Missions with a "depart within 60min" window forfeit the +15% bonus if you miss it; the mission itself remains valid for the normal 7-day window.