diff --git a/scripts/run-qwen38-bf16.sh b/scripts/run-qwen38-bf16.sh
index 5568ef4..52b3968 100755
--- a/scripts/run-qwen38-bf16.sh
+++ b/scripts/run-qwen38-bf16.sh
@@ -39,25 +39,33 @@
 # speculation, fp8 KV, a 32,768-token window, the PLE n-gram table pinned to RAM,
 # and the production chat template rather than the one baked into the container —
 # every scored container is asked the same tokenised questions the reference
-# answered. The window is 32,768 because this corpus is long: measured on
-# Dankserver 2026-10-27, kld.jsonl is 197 records with a longest of 38,263
-# characters (longest prompt FIELD 36,855, median record 27,228), which is ~9,600
-# tokens at the pessimistic chars/4 and ~7,700 at the ratio this repo actually
-# measured on the K3 corpus (380,143 chars = 76,568 tokens, chars/4.97). A 16,384
-# window cleared that by 1.7x; 32,768 clears every record of both corpora by at
-# least 2.6x, and the kldref gate below re-checks it against the file on disk.
+# answered. The window is 32,768: kld.jsonl is 197 records with a longest of
+# 38,263 characters (longest prompt FIELD 36,855, median record 27,228). Its
+# token length — 10,554 for that longest record, counted by the engine itself —
+# is in the funding paragraph below; the kldref gate re-checks the file against
+# the window before it boots anything.
 #
 # NO --vram-kv-mib: it was REMOVED at 1.3.0 and naming it is a boot refusal, not
 # a no-op — verified on the pinned image 2026-10-27: "E --vram-kv-mib was
 # removed: the card is split between the weights and the cache from what the
-# model needs." The budget resolver derives the per-card split from
-# --host-pool-mib and --gpu-headroom-mib, and those two are deliberately NOT
-# production's 49,152 / 1,536 (frank-archon.env:77): the pool decides WHICH
-# experts stay resident, so it buys speed and never logits — the shape the gate
-# has to hold identical is the kv dtype, the slot count, the step size, the spec
-# depth and the window. It is also the only figure that fits: a 335 GiB bf16
-# container cannot be booted against a 49 GiB resident set on a 192 GiB machine,
-# and a prefill-only pass does not care that the disk tier paces at ~3 GiB/s.
+# model needs." The budget resolver derives that split from --host-pool-mib and
+# --gpu-headroom-mib, and this rig inherits BOTH from frank-archon.env, the file
+# that owns them: the cache's funding is `elastic - expert_floor` and the expert
+# floor falls one MiB for every MiB of host pool (frank-archon.md, Laws), so the
+# pool buys KV as well as residency — a private pair is not a free knob. What
+# buying one cost, measured on the first kldref boot the same day with the w4
+# era's 12288 / 768: "I kv: the pool backs 6% of the worst case (4 sequences all
+# at 32768 tokens), 0.2 full-length sessions; a larger --host-pool-mib gives the
+# cache more" — a 270 MiB, 7,436-position cache, after which the recorder refused
+# every one of the 197 corpus documents ("E kld: document 0 is 10554 tokens and
+# the KV pool holds 7436, so it can never be scored") and exited 1. Production's
+# 49,152 per rank is affordable exactly when the rig runs: the rig stops
+# frank-archon first, and that stop frees the same 96 GiB the service was pinning.
+#
+# The 32,768-token window it pairs with is not up for grabs: the corpus's longest
+# prompt is 10,554 tokens by the engine's own count (the header's chars/4.97
+# estimate called that record ~7,700; the true ratio for this file is chars/3.6),
+# so the window clears it by 3x and the cache now funds it.
 #
 # The step size is ONE value for the recording and every scoring pass:
 # FRANK_QWEN38_MNBT, default 2,048. The gate's whole claim is that the reference,
@@ -148,6 +156,11 @@ KLD_REF_DIR="$CAMPAIGN/kld-ref"
 CALIB_DIR="$CAMPAIGN/calib"
 C=qwen38-bf16
 SERVICE=frank-archon
+# The card split, taken from the file that owns it instead of a private pair:
+# --host-pool-mib also funds the KV cache (see the header), so hardcoding it
+# here once starved the recorder. The `:?` guards keep an empty env fatal.
+HOST_POOL_MIB="${FRANK_ARCHON_HOST_POOL_MIB:?FRANK_ARCHON_HOST_POOL_MIB must be set}"
+GPU_HEADROOM_MIB="${FRANK_ARCHON_GPU_HEADROOM_MIB:?FRANK_ARCHON_GPU_HEADROOM_MIB must be set}"
 
 # ONE step size for both logits modes. The file tier streams only at <=2,048 and
 # the gate scores file-tier payloads (the served iq4r, the arms) against the
@@ -201,7 +214,7 @@ fi
 # The measuring shape. Identical for kldref and score by construction — this
 # array is the only place the campaign's KL numbers are defined.
 ARGS=(--tp 2 --placement expert_tiered --weights-disk-tier
-      --host-pool-mib 12288 --gpu-headroom-mib 768
+      --host-pool-mib "$HOST_POOL_MIB" --gpu-headroom-mib "$GPU_HEADROOM_MIB"
       --deterministic --num-speculative-tokens 0
       --kv-cache-dtype fp8 --max-model-len "$MAX_MODEL_LEN"
       --ngram-placement ram
diff --git a/tests/qwen38_reference.bats b/tests/qwen38_reference.bats
index b999fb0..d60f138 100755
--- a/tests/qwen38_reference.bats
+++ b/tests/qwen38_reference.bats
@@ -29,7 +29,7 @@ RUNNER="$REPO_ROOT/scripts/run-qwen38-bf16.sh"
 # The reference shape, spelled exactly as run-qwen38-bf16.sh must pass it: this
 # is the contract the recorded reference is measured at, so a silent edit here
 # is a silent edit to every KLD number in the campaign.
-SHAPE="--tp 2 --placement expert_tiered --weights-disk-tier --host-pool-mib 12288 --gpu-headroom-mib 768 --deterministic --num-speculative-tokens 0 --kv-cache-dtype fp8 --max-model-len 32768 --ngram-placement ram --override-chat-template /models/tpl.jinja"
+SHAPE="--tp 2 --placement expert_tiered --weights-disk-tier --host-pool-mib 49152 --gpu-headroom-mib 96 --deterministic --num-speculative-tokens 0 --kv-cache-dtype fp8 --max-model-len 32768 --ngram-placement ram --override-chat-template /models/tpl.jinja"
 
 # oneline — both dry runs print one shell-quoted argument a line; joining them
 # lets an option and its value be asserted as the pair they are.