Sources: What's Cited, What's Invented
Missileer depicts a fictionalized version of a real job, built entirely from public sources. This page is our publication posture, stated plainly — because a product about a serious subject owes you its rules.
The rules we follow
- Public, citable sources only. Air Force public affairs releases, the National Park Service's Minuteman Missile National Historic Site, declassified material, prepublication-reviewed books, and encyclopedic secondary sources. Veteran anecdotes in comment sections are folklore — colorful, uncheckable, and not built upon.
- The procedure depicted is a guess — deliberately so. Where the public record is silent, we invent freely and label it. We do not chase procedural fidelity, because fidelity would be both impossible to verify and beside the point. The vague version is the better toy, and the honest one.
- Real institutions, never real incidents. The product borrows the shape of public institutions — proficiency cycles, unit structures, competitions. It never references real events, named individuals, or any real unit's history of bad days. Public is not the same as usable.
- Listening and republishing are legitimate. HFGCS traffic is broadcast in the clear, worldwide, on known frequencies, and the message content is ciphertext. Our practice matches long-running public WebSDR streams and hobbyist EAM archives.
Cited vs. invented
| Element | Status |
|---|---|
| The HFGCS network, frequencies, and broadcast behavior | Cited — hobbyist references (priyom.org and others), encyclopedic sources |
| EAM format: phonetic strings, repeats, Skyking broadcasts | Cited — same references |
| Missile-field structure: wings, squadrons, two-person crews | Cited — encyclopedic and National Park Service sources |
| Published procedure outlines and console details | Cited — enthusiast histories built on unclassified sources, which are themselves explicit guesses |
| What any message means, or how anything is decoded | Invented — unknowable by design; our device's “decode” is a deterministic fiction and never a claim about meaning |
| Everything playful in the product | Invented — and labeled as such wherever it appears |
One more rule, about tone
Nothing in Missileer reacts dramatically to real-world traffic on its own. The device renders what it hears, soberly. Anything game-shaped happens only because a person chose to run a drill on it. We think that line matters, and it is engineered in, not just promised.
Questions about any of this? Write to us — we like this subject. Or start at the beginning: What is an Emergency Action Message?