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+# Shield and Pickup Presentation Contract
+
+Date: 2026-09-18
+
+Status: target, operator direction only. Nothing here is built or scheduled. The
+panel interceptor's means live in `docs/shield-panel-cut.md`; the Lariat has no
+map. This document owns the contract both answer to.
+
+## Why
+
+Aetheria is growing more than one presentation of the same capabilities: the
+existing field shield (`FieldDriver`), the hard-light panel interceptor, and the
+Lariat. They must be interchangeable without the simulation knowing which one is
+equipped.
+
+## Rulings (operator, 2026-09-18)
+
+- **Every shield effect is a drop-in behavioural replacement.** A presentation
+  takes capability events, presents them, and decides nothing.
+- **Coverage is expressed through the ship's envelope**, not through an
+  effect's own geometry. The envelope is derived from the existing per-ship
+  shield transform, not authored twice (`docs/shield-panel-cut.md` R6).
+- **Presentation may anticipate.** Operator: "anticipatory is great, and we'll
+  want it for other one too". A presentation may begin reacting before a shot
+  lands, and may be wrong when it does.
+- **One presentation may serve several capabilities.** Operator: "the Lariat
+  would be a presentation for both pickup and shielding capabilities."
+- **The hits a presentation shows are cosmetic.** Fire control decides what
+  happened; the intercept point is where the presentation says the shot arrived
+  (`docs/shield-panel-cut.md` R6).
+
+## The anticipation feed
+
+Capability events (`ServerShared/CapabilityEvents.cs`) report what happened.
+Anticipation needs what is *about to* happen, which is a different kind of
+signal and must never be mistaken for the first:
+
+- **It is speculative.** A threat may miss, be absorbed by something else, or
+  be destroyed in flight. A presentation that committed to it is simply wrong,
+  and a whip that lunges at a shot it does not block is characterful, not a bug.
+- **Nothing outside presentation may read it.** No gameplay decision, no
+  damage, no state change. If a consumer wants certainty it waits for the
+  capability event.
+- **Its source is the simulation's shots in flight**, not Unity's `Projectile`
+  instances, once fire control moves shot resolution into the sim
+  (`docs/three-gates-scope.md`). Until then a Unity-side feed stands in, and it
+  is the presentation layer's own business.
+- **It carries enough to aim at:** where the threat is, where it is going, when
+  it is expected to arrive, and how big it is. Not who fired it, not what it
+  will do.
+
+## A presentation serving several capabilities
+
+The Lariat answers absorb and grab with one object, so it owns an arbitration
+the single-capability presenters never needed:
+
+- **It decides what it is currently doing** — idle, snapping, coiling, reeling
+  — and what interrupts what. That decision is presentation-local.
+- **It may not delay or deny the simulation.** The pickup completed and the
+  damage was absorbed when the simulation says so, whether or not the whip has
+  finished reeling. A presentation that is still animating is a presentation
+  that is behind, never a gameplay state.
+- **It may refuse to show something** (a second absorb mid-coil), and that
+  refusal is cosmetic.
+
+## Open
+
+- Where the anticipation feed lives, what publishes it today, and what publishes
+  it after fire control.
+- Whether the Lariat is one item carrying both capabilities, or a presentation
+  shared by two items. The item data has to say which.
+- The Lariat's strand: a node chain with distance and bending constraints, drawn
+  as a tube, with the snap as a travelling kink. `FieldDriver`'s bezier tendril
+  (extend, envelop, pull, damped sliding base) is the existing half, and it
+  cannot leave the field surface.