Honest Gates in the MLOps Pipeline

The four burner physics gates are encoded as hard checks in the pipeline, so no model can be trained, validated, documented, or promoted into implying a capability the physics denies.

Encoding honesty as machine-checkable rules

Kronos states the burner's limits plainly as design-and-simulation findings, and the MLOps pipeline enforces them so no model can overstate the machine. The four honest gates are registered constraints that training objectives, validation gates, model cards, and promotion approvals all reference. They are physics facts, never translated into economics, and they are never softened.

The four gates as pipeline constraints

• Plug stress: the plug coil is over-stressed 3 to 3.9x at the design bore — infeasible as specified. No model may be validated as operating that bore.
• Operating regime: the plug regime is 166 to 830x beyond any existing device — un-post-dictable today. Models must abstain there; none may claim predictive authority in it.
• Fuel supply: He-3 demand is about 400x domestic supply per commercial unit — gated on a supply that does not exist at terrestrial scale, which is why breeder-bred and lunar He-3 matter.
• Availability: 0.86 to 0.995 vs hyperscale Tier III 0.99982 — 30 to 100x short on downtime; not a sole Tier-III source today.

In practice these become assertions. A control policy's reward cannot be maximized by trajectories inside the barred plug regime, because such trajectories are flagged and excluded. A model card for any burner artifact must reference the honest-gates registry entry or it fails the card gate. A promotion approval that would imply operating past a gate is blocked at the governance step.

HONEST_GATES = {
 'plug_stress':    (3.0, 3.9),      # x over-stress at design bore
 'regime_beyond':  (166, 830),      # x beyond any device
 'he3_demand':     400,             # x domestic supply per unit
 'availability':   (0.86, 0.995)}   # vs 0.99982 required

def honest_gate_check(model):
    if model.machine != 'burner': return True
    assert model.card.references('honest_gates')
    assert model.abstains_in(regime='plug_beyond_device')
    assert not model.claims_operability(gate='plug_stress')
    return True

These gates are why the breeder is framed as a supported platform breeding tritium and He-3 while the burner remains plug-gated and fuel-gated. The MLOps pipeline makes that honesty structural: it is checked, logged, and enforced at validation and governance, not left to good intentions. See also model cards, which surface the gates to every reader.