What Is Real in Enspinors

Real

The compass reads your phone's actual magnetometer, and the bearing is a true one.

Shortwave propagation is real, and the band in the game behaves the way a real band behaves.

wwv in Fort Collins exists and is broadcasting the time as you read this. The tick, the minute tone and the voice are faithfully modelled. Caesium clocks, and the definition of the second, are as described.

Harmonic analysis, the Fourier series, the Doppler effect and the electromagnetic spectrum are taught here as they are taught anywhere. Professor Vega's lessons contain no deliberate simplification that a physicist would object to — only the ordinary kind that every good explanation makes.

Morse code is real Morse code. The map is the real world.

Invented

The game does not consult live space-weather data. The ionosphere here is modelled from how the real one behaves, not measured from how it is behaving today; an earlier version of this article claimed otherwise, and was wrong.

Nobody is hiding a message in the timing of a time signal. There is no quantum spectrum. There is no craft, no light shield tuned to a single wavelength, no organism that can cross into a phone.

North and Professor Vega are characters. Enspinor Command does not exist, and neither does the decontamination laboratory it will tell you to contact.

The interesting middle

The story is invented, but the *method* is not. Timing anomalies really are how hidden signals are found. An unexpected peak in a spectrum really is how something concealed inside a transmission gives itself away. Doppler really is used to decide whether a thing is approaching. Amateur observers with modest equipment really do find satellites, decode weather images from orbit, and occasionally discover things professionals missed.

If Enspinors leaves you with anything, let it be that: the instruments in the game are toys, and the reasoning behind them is exactly how the real work is done.

Go further

A shortwave receiver costs less than this game did. Software-defined radio dongles cost less again, and there are public receivers on the web you can tune from anywhere. Amateur radio licensing is open to anyone who sits the exam. Every citizen-science project in radio astronomy, meteor detection and satellite tracking will take volunteers.

The sky is genuinely full of signals nobody is listening to.