Week 18 Capstone Defense Log

This is the final engineering record for the course.

Do not use it to say that everything worked perfectly. Use it to record what your team can defend, what remains limited, and what the next responsible review would need to verify.

Final defense decision

Choose one:

• Ready for defense
• Ready for defense with revisions
• Not ready for defense

Then justify the decision with three pieces of evidence from your dossier.

Strongest claim

Write the claim your team can defend with the strongest evidence.

Then identify:

• supporting artifact;
• evidence type: direct, indirect, or assumption;
• one limitation that still applies.

Weakest claim

Choose the important claim with the weakest evidence.

Do not hide it.

Write:

The claim is ________. The current evidence is ________. The missing verification is ________. Until that verification exists, the mission plan should only claim ________.

This is what technical honesty looks like.

No-go decision you would defend

Select one condition that would make your team stop or redesign the mission even after all this work.

Record:

What changed across the capstone?

Trace one important design decision from Week 16 through Week 18.

Week 16 — concept

What did you originally believe or propose?

Week 17 — plan

What evidence, route logic, source check, or reviewer finding changed the design?

Week 18 — defense

What is the final bounded claim now?

The strongest capstone evidence is often the revision path, not the original idea.

Final limitations

List three statements your project does not prove.

Examples might include:

• it does not authorize a real operation;
• it does not prove future weather or site conditions;
• it does not certify an aircraft configuration;
• it does not establish survey-grade mapping accuracy without appropriate validation;
• it does not replace current official-source review or qualified operational responsibility.

Use limitations that actually match your project.

Next responsible verification

If this classroom dossier were handed to a qualified engineering/operations team for further review, what should they verify first?

Name the check, the evidence needed, and why it could change the decision.

Course closeout

Finish these three prompts:

1. Earlier in this course I treated ________ as a simple fact. Now I model it as ________.
2. The most useful kind of engineering evidence for me was ________ because ________.
3. The question I would ask first before trusting a future UAS mission plan is ________.

You are done when your final record shows something more valuable than confidence:

a mission argument that another person can inspect, challenge, revise, and either accept or reject for clear technical reasons.