Records the mechanism investigation in journal 8c. The headline: still unknown,
but the shape is now constrained and a long list of dead ends is closed.
Onset is a ramp of minutes-to-hours, not a step — BE18438 Vert resolved to
one-minute cadence via the histogram corpus, 50% of the excursion in 7 minutes,
>=25 intermediates, validated 75/75 against Blastware's own ASCII. That kills
both poles of the original dichotomy: not a latched digital step, not slow
component wear. What survives is a reversible two-time-constant settling
process, which is a shape constraint and not a mechanism.
Thermal, ground-motion shock, handling/redeployment, accumulated duty, age,
firmware and a mechanical element fault are each refuted or explicitly bounded,
with the power behind every negative stated.
Retracts two claims this journal carried: polarity consistency was a tautology
of offset_scan3's spread gate, and the fleet is 8-9 units rather than 5 once
that gate is dropped. Also notes the gate is blind to onsets by construction --
it rejects a moving floor, and it rejected the one record where the ramp shows.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01HgTe8CamXAHcAmaQ6QNcog