LIMITATIONS — AeroForge

Every incomplete or non-live component, labeled DISCLOSED_SEAM. None of these are hidden; the verification report and certification report carry the same list.

DISCLOSED_SEAM — high-fidelity CFD is interfaced, not executed

AeroForge is a lower-order, engineering-level tool (Newtonian / perfect-gas / analytic). It is designed to bracket and feed high-fidelity CFD (FUN3D, Loci/CHEM, DPLR) and ParaView/Tecplot post-processing. It does not run a Navier-Stokes solver, an unstructured mesh generator, or a 3-D field visualizer.

DISCLOSED_SEAM — synthetic post-flight data

The pre-flight vs post-flight reconciliation uses representative, model-derived "measured" data (datasets/postflight_sample.json), not real flight telemetry. The reconciliation machinery is real; the flight data is not.

DISCLOSED_SEAM — perfect-gas, inviscid physics

No real-gas chemistry, no viscous boundary layers, no laminar-turbulent transition, no radiative heating, no ablation. The Newtonian method models pressure-dominated hypersonic loads only; it does not model skin friction, base flow, or separation.

DISCLOSED_SEAM — simplified geometry

Vehicles are axisymmetric sphere-cone stand-ins at the public 9 m stack scale, NOT the actual finned, control-surfaced, belly-first Starship/Super Heavy OML. Absolute coefficients reflect the stand-in, not the flight vehicle.

DISCLOSED_SEAM — analytic paneling, not CAD/grid generation

"Watertight" means an analytic surface-of-revolution panelization that passes the closed-surface identity, not a CAD kernel or a flight-quality unstructured CFD grid.

DISCLOSED_SEAM — MATLAB reader not executed

matlab/load_aerodb.m is provided against the shared JSON schema to demonstrate the cross-language interface, but it is not executed in the verification pipeline (no MATLAB runtime available).

Consequence for certification

Because the customer outcome (a *lower-order engineering toolkit*) is delivered and verified as such, these seams do not contradict the outcome — but they cap what may be claimed: reference-validated relations and qualitative trends are asserted; absolute flight-vehicle coefficients are not.