PROJECT ION PLANNER — START HERE

A working model of 26 proposed technology centers across Central Texas. Every number is an assumption you can change. It asks “what would have to be true?” — it is not a proposal, and not a pro forma.

Sheet 1 of 3 · Orientation

Your first five minutes

Look at the map first. Network Map ↗, top row. Twenty-five locations, chosen because people already commute out of them — not because they look like coworking markets. Click any center for its numbers and its QRI emblem — the three-hexagon readiness mark — with a one-click path back into the Planner, straight to that center or its Facility Audit.
Pick the lens that matches your question. The lenses run across the top — same model underneath, different question each. The table below says which is which.
Change something. Start with Adjust assumptions ↗, top right — it holds the 51 defaults that apply network-wide. Most of the model is not adjusted there. Anything that varies by place, tier or center is adjusted inside the lens that owns it. Sheet 2 maps all eight places; sheet 3 is a path through them for six kinds of reader.

Watch Coverage. The number it all turns on — cash after operating costs, divided by the loan payments due that year. Below 1.00 the network cannot pay its loans; lenders want 1.25. It stays pinned at the top as you scroll, with a bar per tier.
Open one center. Operator → Explore a center ↗. Every assumption can be overridden for one location — where a conversation about a real site starts.

The nine lenses — what each one answers

Lens	The question it answers
Public ↗	What does the network do for the region?
Operator ↗	What is built, where, and what does it cost to run?
Investor ↗	Does it pay its loans, and what is the return?
Government ↗	What does the public get for public money?
Developer ↗	What is the building program and capital?

These five run across the top of the Planner.

Lens	The question it answers
Employer ↗	What does moving seats here cost my company?
Worker ↗	What do I save in time, money and driving?
Host ↗	What do I get for contributing a building?
Community ↗	What lands in my town?

These four open as their own pages.

The five words that mean something specific

Coverage	Cash after operating costs ÷ the loan payments due that year. The financing test.
Enclave	A secure room for one worker, with dedicated connectivity, computing and power. A seat is the right to occupy one — one enclave carries one seat, taken at the service level the worker needs: an hour of backup power or a full day, standard or hardened connectivity. The center’s Grade — Bronze to Platinum — is the ceiling: a center serves every level at or below what it is engineered and audited to.
Tier	How big a center is: Core, Regional, District, Outpost. Not quality.

Grade	How hard a center is assured: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum. A small center can be high grade.
Area type	Urban, Suburban, Exurban, Rural — the character of where a center sits. Sets rent and commute distance. Not the tier.

WHERE THINGS ARE, AND WHAT TO WATCH FOR

Roughly 200 controls, in eight places. Below: where each one lives, and the four things readers most often get wrong.

Sheet 2 of 3 · Reference

Where the commute distances come from

The commute figures drive the VMT, CO₂ and Commuter Dividend numbers throughout the Planner, so it matters where they come from. They are measured, not assumed.

Twenty-five of the twenty-six sites use LEHD LODES — a US Census Bureau dataset showing where people live and where they work, built from employer payroll records rather than surveys. ION uses the 2023 Texas file, the newest published year. Lago Vista, added 26 August, is not yet in the LODES extract and falls back to its area-type default until it is. That is why each center carries its own distance, like Killeen’s ↗ 80.4 miles, rather than a rounded estimate.

A site you add has no measured record, so it falls back to the Area-type estimate in Operator → Locality assumptions ↗ — 25, 40, 60 or 90 miles round trip by Area type. That figure is marked FALLBACK ONLY there, and no roster center uses it.

Reading a table or a chart

Unless a heading says otherwise, every table and chart is about the 26 centers on your roster — real towns, each with its own rent, commute and county.

Where a figure is a prototype instead, the heading says so. A prototype is one typical center of a given size, in no particular place. It is priced from the Adjust assumptions rail alone, so it does not pick up any town’s rent or Area type.

This matters most on the Investor lens, where prototype and roster figures sit close together. Coverage by tier shows all three bases side by side: prototype, roster and hosted.

Two kinds of control

Every control in the Planner is one of two things, and the difference explains nearly every “I moved it and nothing happened.”

Kind	What it does	Where it lives
Network setting	Applies to all 26 centers at once. A center setting overrides it.	Adjust assumptions ↗
Center setting	Applies to one center only, and wins over the network setting.	Network roster ↗ — the tinted columns (deploy year, NOC) · Explore a center ↗ — pick your center, then the blocks headed CENTER BUILD (property) and CENTER LOCALITY OVERRIDES (rent, cost, grants, tax, commute)

If you see	It means
at factory defaults	Nothing has been moved. Once something has, this becomes a count — click it for which figure moved, from what to what, and where.
N moved	A blue badge on a collapsed section: the figures inside have moved since your baseline. Hover for the movements, click for all of them. updated instead means the section gained or lost rows, so there is nothing to pair one-to-one.
Default / Locality / Custom	The Overrides column. Default — nothing set, inherited values untouched. Locality — nothing set on this center, but you edited the area type or county it inherits from. Custom — a figure was typed in for this center.
drives this lens	On a rail group: this group changes what you are looking at. not on this lens means its results show elsewhere — the line beneath the heading names where. On Public, only one group of seven drives the lens.
Not yet wired	The ERCOT grid-outage slider is read by no calculation yet. It is kept and labelled rather than removed, because the resilience case behind it is real.
out of network	The last option in the Deploy pick-list. It suspends a center without changing its year, so putting it back restores exactly what was there. suspend all and restore all sit above the roster.

The Employer, Host, Worker and Community lenses are neither. Those boxes describe your company, building or commute — they are not assumptions about the network, and nothing you type there is saved or sent anywhere.

If you move a network setting and nothing changes, read the line underneath it. Either nothing is reading that control yet (it says what to switch on first), or all 26 centers already carry their own more specific number, in which case the control is only pricing the prototype. Each group heading also names which lenses show its results — so if you are on Investor and move a commute assumption, the answer is on Public and Government.

Where the inputs actually live

What you want to change	Where it is
Financing — debt rate, leverage, grant share, loan term, hold period, sale yield	Adjust assumptions ↗ → Financing
Property tax (network default), corporate overhead, who owns the fiber	Adjust assumptions ↗ → Financing (network-level entries live there)
Seat rent, running cost and commute by Area type; job grant, property tax and abatement by county	Operator → Locality assumptions ↗
Seats, floor area, program and common space, construction $/SF, technology $/SF	Adjust assumptions ↗ → Per-tier build — space & cost (in the rail, not the Operator lens)
Which centers are built, deploy year, host, network operations centers	Operator → Network roster ↗ (deploy year, NOC); Build editor ↗ (add a location)
Anything, for one center only — rent, structure, incentives, deal terms	Operator → Explore a center ↗
Technology financing — rates and terms by class, salvage value, outside revenue	Investor → Financing structure ↗
The public funding case, agency by agency	Investor → Grant funding sources ↗

The pinned figures at the top of the screen react as you change any of them.

Four things people misread

The base case does not pencil, and that is the point. Coverage is 0.84 against the 1.25 a lender wants, and a seat costs more than it earns. This is where the gap gets worked, not papered over. If you are shown a version that clears 1.25, ask what was changed to get there.

“Provisional” means exactly that. Technology cost per square foot is the largest of them — it drives 69% of the debt service, and no vendor has quoted it.

The three bars per tier are three different things. On Coverage by tier, in Operator and Investor: Prototype is a generic center of that size, priced off the sliders, in no particular place; Roster is one of the 26 real towns, with its own rents and commute; Hosted is the same center with an anchor contributing the building. Only Roster describes a place that has been chosen. Nothing has been built anywhere.

The Books switch changes nothing real. Hybrid and Split show the same coverage and the same cost per seat. Only the presentation of capital differs.

WHICH PATH IS YOURS

Sheet 1 says which lens answers your question. This says what to do once you are in it — where to click, and which number to stop on.

Sheet 3 of 3 · Paths

Six readers, six paths

If you are…	Go here	Do this	Stop on this number
A county or city official	Planner → Government ↗	Read the six tiles across the top. Open By county / jurisdiction ↗ to isolate your own. Then open Transportation & corridors ↗.	$91.9M of public grant sits alongside $367.6M of private capital — both one-time, network-wide. The corridors panel is where the roads-versus-centers comparison lives.
An employer	Employer opens as its own page	Enter your current offices and where employees live — or Upload roster ↗. Print when you are done.	Your own monthly figure. The Guide works one all the way through: 330 people, $272,250/month gross becomes $91,050/month net.
A developer or real-estate firm	Planner → Developer ↗	Read the tiles, then open By developer (risk-share) ↗ — that panel sets how much of the build is yours.	1,228,210 SF across 26 facilities; $343.7M of hard construction, one-time. Five of the 26 are shell builds inside a host's building. Risk-share starts at 0% allocated to developers — that is the number to negotiate.
A host institution with a building	Host opens as its own page	Name, host type, your ZIP, which center to host → Show my hosting deal ↗. Try an example ↗ first if you would rather see one.	A hosted Regional center covers its loans at 1.57x against 0.80x standing alone. Hosting is the largest single lever in the model.
A community leader	Community opens as its own page	Pick the community, the county, a center size and what people drive today.	For the people who fill the seats, the daily drive falls from roughly 24 miles each way to under five.
An investor or lender	Planner → Investor ↗	Read the capital stack and Coverage. Then open Grant funding sources ↗ and apply If the five funding asks land ↗.	$1,114 all-in against $978 of revenue, per seat per month. Coverage 0.84 where a lender wants 1.25 — and 1.326 if all five asks land. None of the five is papered today.

Every figure above is the default case. All of them move when you change an assumption — that is what the Planner is for.

If a number looks wrong, say so. Every figure traces to a stated assumption, and the ones from measurement are marked differently from the ones from judgment. The fastest way to improve this model is to tell us which assumption you would not accept — and, if you have one, the number you would use instead.
Write to mshear@pocketsnet.com. Name the lens and the figure — that is enough to find it.