FLIGHT
PLAN

Every launch window sends 50 jets with 10 seats each toward Mars. Each window lasts 2 hours. Boarding a seat locks a 50,000 $HELIOS entry. In each window a wallet is assigned 1 jet, then can board up to 10 seats on that jet. The next window starts fresh: every jet is open to it again. Boarding, the seal and every award settle on Arc mainnet.

After boarding closes, drand decides which 1 of the 50 jets reaches Mars first. Every booked seat on that jet shares 50% of the round's prize pool, one equal share per seat. The other 49 jets arrive too late to be paid, and receive no award.

Not from a seat's entry. The award vault is funded by creator fees and must lock every published award before the launch can open. The contract rejects an unfunded mission rather than promising an award it cannot pay.

Because a mission hands over 50% of the vault, the other half carries over. Each launch escrows half the free balance at the moment it opens and leaves the rest as the floor of the next pot, so the pool you see on mission control is the whole vault: the fees banked so far, compounding across launches, with this mission's share locked out of it on-chain.

A public beacon called drand, run by a consortium that has nothing to do with us. It publishes a signed random number every three seconds, forever, whether or not this game exists.

When a launch closes it commits — by arithmetic, before the value exists — to a future drand round. Anyone can relay that signature to the contract, which checks it against drand's public key on-chain before it counts. Every seat's result comes from that one number: the contract takes it modulo 50 to pick the jet that lands first, which anyone can re-run.

We cannot see it before it lands and cannot change it after. We also cannot substitute one. If no valid beacon arrives, the round does not settle at all — there is no fallback number anywhere in the code.

Awards are denominated in USDC — the asset $HELIOS trades against, not $HELIOS itself — and held on-chain by the award vault. The amount for each result is locked before the launch opens, so the contract cannot create an unfunded award.

If USDC cannot be moved — a blocked address, a frozen issuer — an awarded payload stays escrowed until it can be. The claim is still recorded on-chain; the pause does not let anyone reassign your award.

USDC awards stay reserved for 24 hours after settlement. Your mission page shows each award and its claim window. Claiming is an Arc transaction, and Arc charges gas in USDC — the same asset the award is denominated in.

If the beacon never arrives, no mission result is drawn and no awards are assigned. Each boarded seat's entry stays recoverable under the contract's stalled-mission path.

Anyone can relay a valid beacon or trigger stalled-mission recovery. The launch does not depend on us being awake or willing.