Bounding the pointer scan to 0xBC000000-0xBD000000 (with a full-sweep fallback)
drops find_mission from a ~371MB walk to 0.7s. The run then went 694s with the
probe attached and NO freeze, against 3-of-3 frozen inside ~4 minutes with the
unbounded version. n=1, but the first probe-attached run to survive.
State encoding pinned to three points: 1 = not yet deployed, 2 = active,
4 = destroyed. ADN111 caught going 2 -> 4 at 433s while the active count fell
36 -> 27.
The phase ended at 694.9s WITHOUT the ordinal advancing, and every field matches
the branch read statically from sub_82260710: [phase+300]=2 (last-phase flag),
[mission+20]=0 (mission-over state), [phase+196]=1 (finished), [mission+40]=1
(unchanged). The static state machine is confirmed on the live oracle for the
mission-over half.
But this was a LOSS, not a clear: GAME OVER on screen, escort at 35.7%, pilot
DEAD at 676s, and two of the three objective squadrons still at state 2. So the
'destroy all three clears phase 1' prediction remains untested. What is
established is that the else-branch is the only route to phase 2 and needs
[phase+300] != 2 when the phase ends.
Five attempts, still no phase advance observed -- the obstacle is now keeping the
escort alive, not the freeze or the instrument.
Unblocks the phase experiment, which was stuck because '38 enemies died' could
not say whether the right ones did. Chasing craft->squadron was the wrong angle:
the script VM keeps that table itself, indexed by the .ssb symbol-table-2 index.
Route: find the .ssb header in guest memory (0xAB840010 for a Stage 02 run),
code base = filebase + 0x24, scan for a word equal to it, then VALIDATE
arithmetically -- [ScriptMission+44] must equal filebase + symtab1 offset + 4.
Measured 0xAB874C94, predicted 0xAB874C94, exact. A second candidate that also
pointed at the code base failed that check and was discarded; without it either
would have looked plausible.
ScriptPhase+324 -> +4 is an array of 122 per-unit records -- exactly the size of
Stage 02's symbol table 2, an independent confirmation of the index space.
[ScriptMission+40] reads 1 in a phase-1 mission. The mirror at
[*(0x828F35F8)+236] that three earlier runs polled reads 0, because ChangePhase
only posts once the ordinal exceeds 1 -- so +40 is the real counter and is
reachable from /dev/shm with no debugger.
Flagged rather than asserted: the three objective squadrons read state=1 with a
LIVE object pointer in a mission where nothing has been shot, which does not fit
the built-in table's '1 = gone'. Reading state != 2 as destroyed would be a
plausible-but-wrong inference; the encoding needs pinning first.
New tool tools/re-capture/squadron_state.py, verified end to end against the
manual reading.
