The palette correction (panel, 4-0): v6's neon gradient + forever-animating spectrum bar contradicts the settled rules ("material over hue", "no ambient idle loop"). Byron's industrial ask IS the vote: umber chassis, brushed aluminium, amber as light source only, meter blue for verified, mono tabular figures. Motion is evidence, not decoration — the only things that move are driven by real state.
C4a — THE FACEPLATE (the platform UI). Cars solved this in 1968: a cluster that never moves or scrolls, and a center stack that pages. Phone (390px): bottom 112px cluster in the thumb arc — nameplate + tally lamp (dark unless a render/publish/live session actually runs), two-line NOW PLAYING with a scrub rule that doubles as the chapter map (taller tick = where the judge fired), 44px transport, and five fixed-position tell-tales: HUMAN/AUTO lamp · attestation tier (3-bar signal glyph) · citations n/n (mono) · judge lock · ledger. Above: six printed preset keys, long-press-to-bind — an episode, a station, or a standing intent ("15 min, both sides, drive home"). Center stack: station strips with detent-paged episode cells (no infinite scroll, 03/07 position readout), each cell dense with per-claim state — verified/drifted/unsourced as a three-segment micro-bar. Density from governance metadata, never from inventory (the three-station panel must read as an unfilled appliance, not a padded website — dark preset blanks with printed numbers). Desktop (1440): same object wider, no reflow — cluster spans the top, matrix of stations × last-8 episodes, The Cutting Room as its own row type, right pane = the selected episode's live claim table. Hold any cell 500ms = the lid (Braun T1000): the printed attestation sheet + claim table + live citations, audio uninterrupted.
C4b — NOISE FLOOR (the governance control, same product). A squelch: one detented control, printed end labels OPEN → JUDGED → VERIFIED → ATTESTED, with a live mono readout (ATTESTED · 6 OF 41 AUDIBLE · 35 BELOW FLOOR). Raise the floor and the catalog visibly thins; below-floor rows grey in place and stay tappable to show why they failed (the Spike Log made continuous). SCAN plays 20s of each surviving episode's highest-uncertainty claim. Presets store a floor ("The Signal at ATTESTED"). The RAI demo: slide to ATTESTED in front of a room and watch 80% of your own catalog go dark — scarcity signals authority as a physical gesture.
C5 — THE CARRIER (the brand object, wildcard). Change the verb from browse to join: one continuous 24/7 stream, one published clock. You arrive and something is already playing; the catalog is rewound into, not browsed. The Air Strip renders the broadcast day as a 24px timeline with a NOW cursor (left = published, cursor = live edge, right = scheduled per Approve≠Publish) — three stations can't fill a grid but they fill a clock, inverting the density problem. TuneStart rocker on the cursor: LIVE joins the edge, START plays from the top. And the only-Byron move: killed episodes stay scheduled — at their hour the carrier goes to dead air and one line is read over the silence: what it was, which claim failed, why he wouldn't sign it. A dated, audible, unskippable gap in his own programming.
Supporting features (from the user round): STANDBY (a real appliance idle state — pin as PWA, dims to unlit face + one pilot lamp, moves ONLY on real events: judge pass, live start, spike, governor trip) · SECOND NEEDLE (narrowcast presence: the recipient's position as a second needle on your scrub gauge — no chat, per-link opt-in, never public, never retained) · TUNESTART rocker · trust cluster tell-tales · /listen one-page handoff per station (say-this-to-your-speaker + feed URL + QR) · LARGE mode auto-triggered by OS text scale.
Assembly: Faceplate is the platform. Noise Floor is its first control. The Carrier is the brand's front door and the Air Strip is its chassis rendering. STANDBY/Second Needle ship as P2 features. All prior settled constraints hold (DOM-first a11y gate, RSS-first, review-debt governor, no wheels, no idle motion).