Stage-gated.
Capital is committed in tranches tied to measured evidence, not to narrative completion. Each stage carries a pre-declared no-go signal that terminates the program with clarity.

Capital is committed in tranches tied to measured evidence, not to narrative completion. Each stage carries a pre-declared no-go signal that terminates the program with clarity.
The thesis tests two questions: whether the pulsed FRC state can be formed, merged, compressed, and diagnosed reproducibly; and whether expansion and recovery hardware can measure useful electrical energy capture without destructive fault behavior.
Electromagnetic recovery is part of the architecture, not a downstream afterthought. Recovery fraction is a measured quantity at the protected electrical takeoff, not an assumed one.
Bench articles for representative coil families precede first plasma. Subsystem hardware is built, instrumented, and characterized before the integrated machine is committed.