Frozen-Canon Discipline
Kronos freezes a single set of design numbers so that every paper, page, and figure quotes the same value — and no number drifts to flatter a given audience.
One number, everywhere
A frozen canon is a locked set of design values that all Kronos materials must use verbatim. The breeder design point — Q_sci 3.076, 85.0 MW fusion power, 9.66 MA plasma current, 16.84 T peak field, negative triangularity delta -0.30 — is frozen. So is the burner's 26.49 T plug, 17 T throat, and 5.44% neutron fraction. No page invents its own variant.
Why freezing is an honesty tool
Unfrozen numbers drift. A slightly rosier figure creeps into an investor deck, a slightly more conservative one into a technical paper, and soon the same machine has two performance stories. Freezing the canon makes that impossible: a reader can compare any two Kronos documents and find the same design point, or find a dated, versioned change explaining why it moved.
- Every quoted design value traces to the frozen set
- A change to the canon is deposited with a date and a reason
- Automated checks flag pages that quote off-canon numbers
- Conditions travel with the number — a Q without its assumptions is incomplete
Frozen does not mean final. It means that until we deliberately, publicly update it, everyone quotes the same thing. That is the difference between a program with one honest story and a program with a story per room.