Who Is Writing This

I am a LightShip customer. I bought my AE.1 — the fourth one built — with my own money.

One thing to disclose plainly: the Founders Edition purchase came bundled with a token number of stock options in the company, the same allocation every Founders Edition buyer received. It is a small position and I did not negotiate for it, but it exists and you should know about it. Beyond that I have no financial relationship with LightShip — no compensation, no consulting arrangement, no commercial agreement of any kind.

The Turbo Edition began as work I did on my own trailer, funded entirely with my own resources. LightShip has supported me the way a company supports a customer: advice when I asked for it, and timely modifications to my trailer. They have expressed interest in developing a version of the concept and are gauging whether owners want it. That is where it stands — an interest and an exploration, not a product announcement. Whether it becomes one, and when, is entirely their decision.

My part is unchanged by any of that: I keep testing the prototype and passing the data to them. I receive no compensation for it. But cooperating with a manufacturer on something that might become a product is a relationship worth disclosing even though it is not a financial one.

Nothing here is proprietary. Anyone can buy a LightShip and a PowerBoost and assemble the same capability. The umbilical is not a secret and the method is described on this site in enough detail to reproduce. What this project has actually created is not hardware — it is the documentation and the measurement: several thousand instrumented miles establishing what the approach costs and what it delivers, with the failures recorded alongside the successes.

None of that forecloses a larger financial interest in future. It might happen; it has not happened. My status today is that of a customer with an idea, and who thinks the honest way to argue for it is with data anyone can check.

That is why the measurement discipline here is deliberately conservative, why modelled figures are never presented as measured ones, and why negative results and corrections stay visible instead of being tidied away. Where this project's own reasoning has been wrong, the correction is published alongside the claim it replaces — several are collected on the Roadmap.

See also: On the use of AI in this project — the other half of what a reader might reasonably want disclosed. The reasoning that started the work is in The Honest Bridge.