The previous iteration was right that neither structure points at the other's
base, and wrong to stop there. Craft point eight bytes into a roster record.
Resolving the 5101 "pointers into the roster range" by distance to the nearest
roster base gives a distribution that is neither flat nor diffuse: +0x08 appears
exactly 300 times, matching the 300 live craft, while every other delta appears
at most twice and 4780 of 5104 land more than 0x4000 from any base.
A count matching a count is the coincidence that has already misled this corpus
three times, so the link was tested on something a coincidence cannot survive.
Each side's unit type is resolved by a different chain -- the craft's from its
definition pointer at +0x130, the record's from its +0x04 name chain -- and they
must agree. They do, on all 300, with zero disagreements, and the fan-out
histogram is [(1, 300)]: every craft has exactly one such pointer, none has zero
or two.
The fan-in is the useful half. Only 41 of the 116 roster records are referenced
at all; the other 75 have no craft. Craft per referenced record is discrete:
24 records with 2, one with 4, four with 8, and twelve with 18 -- summing to
exactly 300. The twelve holding 18 are all e007 Turret.
This is the observable four iterations have been hunting. A member with zero
craft is not deployed; a member's craft count is its live strength; so an
arrival is craft appearing for a record that had none and a kill is that count
falling. Both are attributable to a named squadron, because the record is a
UnitGroup member and UnitGroup names the squadron that Route_S02.tbl ties to a
phase and an arrival time. The chain from a memory observation to a static route
entry is complete.
Not claimed: that the 75 undeployed members are waiting on phases 2 and 3. That
is a plausible reading, but the run only shows they have no craft.
Fourth failed attempt to explain how 116 roster members become ~300 live craft,
recorded so it is not retried. Count (116), the member field n (387) and
formation slots (630) were rejected earlier; this rejects a head pointer.
link_probe.py scans the first 0x400 bytes of every object for an address of the
other kind. Roster record to craft base: 0 of 116. Craft to roster base: 0 of
300. Both directions empty.
The scan also measured the address spaces, which is the useful part. The two
structures live in different regions about 19 MB apart -- roster records at
0xbc372c00..0xbc9bc720, craft at 0xbdb2fd80..0xbdcd1d80 -- and the 14 unit
definitions match Stage 02's 14 distinct unit types exactly. The craft count is
not fixed: three runs at comparable mission times gave 296, 298 and 300, so the
population must be compared within a run and never across runs.
One thread is left open but explicitly not counted as evidence. Craft objects
hold 5101 words pointing somewhere into the roster VA range, which sounds like a
lot until you notice that range spans 6.5 MB and holds many allocations besides
the 116 records. The test that would settle it is the distance from each such
pointer to the nearest roster-record base: a spike at a single delta means a
link at base+X, a flat distribution kills the thread. Not run yet.
The association may not be a pointer at all -- an index, a hash, or a third
object such as a squadron instance would all look like this. Since an arrival is
already known to be a state change rather than an allocation, finding that
mediating structure matters more than finding a flag: it is what would let an
observed change be attributed to a named squadron and hence to a route.
