Contact Network Simulator

Every message you send has to physically travel between two points before it arrives — even at the speed of light, distance and network conditions shape how quickly and how reliably it gets there. This simulator visualizes a small communication network: a central hub relays messages outward to a ring of contact nodes, each packet tracing the straight line between sender and receiver at a fixed signal speed, with a chance of being lost along the way. Adjust the number of contacts, the send rate, the signal speed and the loss probability to see how a network's connectivity, latency and reliability trade off against each other in real time.