Project Kickoff: Setting Up the Framework

Before any geometry gets created, the framework needs to exist. This post documents the setup work done to get the project running cleanly.

What's been established

Documentation structure

The project documentation follows a controlled system from day one:

• PC-001 — Project Charter: Scope, objectives, constraints, and an open decisions register. Anything unresolved goes here until it's resolved.
• NCS-002 — Numbering & Classification Standard: The part numbering scheme. You can't build a product structure without this. Version 0.4 is active.
• DL-001 — Decisions Log: Every significant design decision gets logged with rationale. Future-me will thank present-me.

Toolchain

• CAD: CATIA 3DExperience — full product lifecycle management, not just CAD. The product structure lives here.
• Documents: Typst for controlled docs. Clean, version-controllable, outputs to PDF.
• Website: Next.js static export, deployed to Vercel. You're looking at it.

Why document first?

Two reasons:

1. You forget. The decisions that seem obvious today are opaque in three months. The log exists so I don't have to reconstruct reasoning from geometry.

2. Discipline scales. A project of this complexity — FIA 2026 spec, every subsystem interacting with every other — needs structure from the start. Adding process to a mess is harder than building process into a clean foundation.

What's next

Phase 1 is the master skeleton: overall vehicle envelope, wheelbase, track widths, and the packaging study that defines where everything lives. No detailed geometry yet — just the constraints that detailed geometry must satisfy.

The first real CAD work starts next.