# PFES-ENG-000 — The Engineering Knowledge Cycle

**Status:** Stable architectural principle

## Purpose

The Engineering Knowledge Cycle defines how Project Frankenstein performs engineering. Every subsystem participates in one or more stages. Engineering work is not complete until validated discoveries have been preserved for future engineers.

## The Cycle

1. Acquire
2. Preserve
3. Recover
4. Transform
5. Identify
6. Discover Structure
7. Represent
8. Observe
9. Understand
10. Validate
11. Apply
12. Discover
13. Preserve Knowledge
14. Repeat

## Feedback Loops

The cycle is not linear.

Firmware understanding enables improved media acquisition. Engineering-quality media enables emulator validation. Emulator and hardware validation generate new evidence. New evidence improves firmware understanding. Firmware compatibility analysis may avoid unnecessary feature transplantation. Capability engineering creates new testable behavior that re-enters validation.

## Domain Interaction

Firmware Engineering and Media Engineering are peer disciplines:

- both produce knowledge;
- both consume knowledge;
- both enable engineering applications;
- both generate evidence that feeds back into the cycle.

## Completion Rule

A result is not institutional knowledge merely because it appeared in a tool output or report. It must be classified, validated, integrated into PFES, and linked to supporting evidence.

## Why This Chapter Exists

The analyzer, emulator, corpus, disc-acquisition tools, compatibility research, validation workflows, and PFES itself are cooperating parts of one learning system.
