Merit function checkpoint - 23 May 2026
Optical candidates carry fire-camera mission penalties.
EmberScope ranking exposes ground sampling, swath, dwell, revisit, diffraction sampling, target-fill proxy, payload mass, and payload power beside the optical and manufacturing scores.
Code checkpoint
The merit function rejects designs that are optically tidy but weak as fire-survey cameras.
Position
This is a mission-gate layer, not yet a detection-performance claim.
The new code records the camera quantities that decide whether an optical candidate is useful for early hot-spot survey: sampling, coverage, revisit, time on target, diffraction scale, target fill, mass, and power.
The non-RFS default profile keeps the fire-camera weight at zero. The RFS profile activates it so future rankings can penalize designs that miss the current survey gates even when their optical or manufacturing numbers look attractive.
Current RFS profile
The current provisional value survey case passes the coarse fire-camera gates.
| Metric | Current value | Gate used in penalty |
|---|---|---|
| Ground sample distance | 5.94 cm | <= 6.0 cm |
| Swath | 38.0 m | >= 30.0 m |
| Route spacing after overlap | 26.6 m | Informational |
| Effective area rate | 91.9 ha/h | Informational |
| 100 ha revisit | 65.3 min | <= 90.0 min |
| Dwell | 2.53 s, about 76 frames | >= 2.0 s |
| Diffraction first-zero radius | 3.42 pixels | <= 4.0 pixels |
| Target fill fraction | 0.20 for a 3 cm target | >= 0.15 |
| Relative target-signal proxy | 2.21 | >= 0.05 |
| Complete payload mass proxy | 1.38 kg | <= 2.0 kg |
| Payload power proxy | 12.0 W | <= 15.0 W |
What changed in exports
Future candidate summaries will show the fire-camera checks directly.
Merit value
The RFS profile adds a weighted fire-camera penalty to the existing optical, manufacturing, cost, and package penalties.
Candidate CSV
Candidate dictionaries include GSD, swath, route spacing, area rate, revisit, dwell, frames on target, target fill, signal proxy, mass, power, and fire penalty columns.
Design cards
Per-design cards include a Fire-Camera Mission Metrics section, so review packets can flag mission failures without rerunning calculations by hand.
Shortlist reports
The shortlist table carries GSD, dwell, and fire penalty beside architecture and manufacturing score.
Remaining risk
This closes the metric hook, not the radiometry problem.
The current target-signal number is a relative LWIR band proxy. It does not include detector noise, atmospheric path, calibration drift, thresholding, missed-detection probability, or false-positive behaviour.
The next hard closure remains the small-hot-target radiometry model and the first end-to-end simulation report. The new merit columns give those tasks a concrete interface.