Shot-Sequence Orchestration
The breeder shot lifecycle is a strict state machine where each phase has entry guards, exit conditions, and its own safe-abort path.
The shot as a lifecycle
On the breeder (Hyperion), a shot is a bounded pulsed experiment. Orchestration drives it through a fixed sequence of phases, each with an entry guard, an actuation program, an exit condition, and a dedicated abort path. Phases never overlap on a shared actuator, and every phase transition is journalled to the event log.
IDLE -> PUMPDOWN -> FIELD_RAMP -> BREAKDOWN -> RAMP_UP
-> FLATTOP(diagnostics, fuelling, heating) -> RAMP_DOWN -> RECOVERY -> IDLE
any phase --fault--> SAFE_ABORT -> RECOVERY -> IDLEGuards reference frozen design points
Entry and exit guards are written against the machine's design targets so the procedure and the physics stay consistent: toroidal field ramp targets 8 T on-axis (16.84 T peak at the conductor), flat-top plasma current targets 9.66 MA, and the equilibrium is held at negative triangularity delta -0.30. These are design-and-simulation set points; the engine validates that commanded programs stay inside them and defers to the safety envelope for hard limits.
Per-phase abort
- During FIELD_RAMP a coil fault triggers a controlled field de-energize, not a free ramp-down.
- During FLATTOP a predicted disruption triggers the disruption-mitigation workflow before an uncontrolled event.
- A magnet quench triggers the quench-abort orchestration, which has priority over the running shot procedure.
Parameter variation across a campaign
A campaign is an ordered set of shots that sweep parameters (fuelling, heating waveform, shape). The sweep orchestrator generates the shot plans; the shot-sequence engine executes each one identically so results are comparable. Tritium-production accounting rolls up per shot into the tritium campaign workflow.
Because each shot is deterministic given its recorded inputs, an anomalous shot can be re-run in simulation via replay to reproduce exactly what the orchestrator saw and did.