SCILLA: Altitude-Coupled Transient Maritime Surface Observation — Geometry, Paired State Estimation, and Falsification of Adaptive Scan Allocation

SCILLA is an audited technical research programme investigating transient maritime surface observation using predominantly vertical platform motion as part of the sensing geometry. The work formalizes altitude-coupled surface-intercept geometry, ascent/return paired state estimation, resource-constrained scan allocation, an independent trace verifier, and a prepublication robustness programme. The central result is deliberately bounded. Adaptive scheduling does not universally improve raw discovery: in the frozen uniform synthetic reference regime, adaptive allocation underperforms the raster baseline on that endpoint. What survives is more specific. Across the declared synthetic reference regimes, adaptive allocation increases paired ascent/return observations and reduces the programme’s constructed priority-weighted Track Debt metric. The release includes the canonical technical research note, publication audit, robustness addendum, public claims register, reproducible protocol, run-level synthetic evidence, sensitivity and ablation analyses, source code, independent verifier, and standalone SCILLA simulation software. All quantitative performance results in this release are synthetic or model-derived unless explicitly identified otherwise. No physical SCILLA field-performance, 150 km detection capability, operational ROI, patent status, QPU execution, or quantum advantage is claimed. The next validation gates are external historical sensor replay and a cooperative paired-observation flight using synchronized platform navigation and independent target ground truth. SCILLA v1.1.0Michele Giletto — Giletto Systems Lab | Aerospace & Industrial Decision Research