Mission Blueprint – Planetary Orchestrator Fabric Restart Drill

This dossier documents the first-principles planning behind the restart-ready upgrade of the Planetary Orchestrator Fabric. It is designed so a non-technical owner can audit the reasoning, reproduce every verification, and understand how the fabric behaves when we deliberately crash and resume it.

Task Decomposition

1. User-Level Empowerment – Extend the CLI so operators can stop a run after a defined number of ticks and resume from a checkpoint without touching code.
2. Automation for Non-Technical Owners – Provide a shell script that performs the full stop-and-resume drill, auto-discovers the correct checkpoint path, and stitches artifacts.
3. Simulation Enhancements – Persist run metadata (stopAfterTicks, early termination reason, resume flag) into summary.json, events, and logs.
4. Testing & CI Reinforcement – Expand deterministic tests to cover the stop/resume drill and ensure event streams capture the halt.
5. Operator Guidance – Update docs, dashboards, and quickstarts so owners understand the new controls and audit surfaces.
6. Blueprinted Workloads – Allow non-technical owners to load declarative job blueprints so restart drills replay the same Kardashev mix deterministically.

Multi-Angle Verification Matrix

Challenged Assumptions & Mitigations

• Assumption: Appending to existing report directories during resume might corrupt prior data.
  Mitigation: Introduced preserveReportDirOnResume with append mode, validated by tests that inspect events.ndjson for the injected simulation.stopped event.
• Assumption: Early stop events could bloat artifacts with full shard payloads.
  Mitigation: Emit a compact outstanding job summary (queue + in-flight counts) rather than full objects.
• Assumption: Owner command schedules might misalign across restart boundaries.
  Mitigation: Extended simulation bookkeeping so commands executed pre-checkpoint surface under ownerCommands.skippedBeforeResume, keeping final audits consistent.
• Assumption: Operators might forget to use the retargeted checkpoint path after a checkpoint.configure.
  Mitigation: Restart drill parses summary.json to discover the current path before resuming.

Independent Cross-Checks

• Mathematical sanity: Verified that stop tick calculations use Math.ceil(stopAfterTicks) to avoid off-by-one drift between integer and fractional input.
• Log symmetry: Compared pre/post resume shard statistics during testing to confirm totals match and no shard is starved.
• Event stream integrity: Confirmed via tests that the appended simulation.stopped event exists exactly once, ensuring replay systems can detect intentional halts.
• Documentation completeness: Cross-referenced README, docs/owner-control.md, docs/restart-drill.md, and the drag-and-drop console ui/dashboard.html so every operator surface mentions the restart drill.

Potential Pitfalls & Future Watchpoints

• Long-running runs with enormous queues could generate large outstanding summaries even with compact notation. Consider rotating logs to cold storage for production.
• Owner-configured checkpoint paths might point to secured storage that requires credentials; the drill assumes local access. Production deployments should couple the script with secrets management.
• Simultaneous multi-shard halts remain deterministic but operators should still review owner-commands-executed.json to confirm command order.

Final Reflective Pass

After implementing and testing, we replayed the reasoning chain from scratch: confirmed task decomposition still maps to code changes, re-read the mitigation list for hidden gaps, and re-ran the drill mentally using alternative labels/configs. No new inconsistencies surfaced—the restart workflow remains deterministic, auditable, and accessible to non-technical mission directors.