33.41 turns lunar occultation into a knife-edge common-term tightening court: after unified time and frequency standards, a shared bandpass kernel, frozen beam calibration, explicit 1/f² media subtraction, and knife-edge template removal, residuals must recover a same-sign τ_common / φ_common across frequency bands, stations, and curvature settings, co-occur at effectively zero lag across ingress and egress, and form a stable limb-distance profile; under V08-compatible tighten, this remains only a lunar knife-edge calibration ledger rather than a total propagation or time-delay verdict.
Use this section as a compact machine-readable EFT reference.
33.41 turns lunar occultation from a naturally sharp geometry into a controlled common-term court: the issue is not whether the limb region looks complicated, but whether a same-direction τ_common / φ_common survives after explicit 1/f² media subtraction, knife-edge diffraction handling, troposphere control, and beam-weight removal. Under compat adjudication, this chapter is tighten.
The readout package is five-fold: a common-term index, dispersion-free cross-band consistency, cross-curvature robustness, zero-lag co-occurrence across stations and curvature settings, and a reproducible profile versus limb distance or normalized ingress–egress phase, with environment stratification as an extra pressure test. What matters is not one offset, but whether these fingerprints cohere as one lunar path ledger.
The workflow observes the same event in multiple bands under at least two curvature settings, ties everything to one external time and frequency chain, freezes a shared bandpass kernel and beam convention, and removes ionosphere/plasma, troposphere, and knife-edge templates under auditable rules. Two independent pipelines and blinded arbitration keep beam and timestamp choices from being rewritten after the fact.
False common terms must collapse under 1/f² scaling checks, band-edge holdouts, sub-band permutations, curvature-label permutations, far-from-limb reference windows, ingress–egress symmetry and time-reversal tests, and station-identity cross-checks. If the effect follows station identity or curvature labels more than knife-edge geometry, it belongs to media, beam, or processing ledgers.
The pass line requires at least two pipelines, two stations or subarrays, two frequency bands, and two curvature settings to recover the same dispersion-free common term with zero-lag closure and a stable limb-distance profile. Incomplete knife-edge templates, ionosphere/solar-wind/near-lunar plasma leakage, and beamforming or timestamp systematics remain the named ledgers that must fully absorb the pattern first.
The chapter ends with one lunar knife-edge calibration ledger only: if τ_common / φ_common survives as a dispersion-free, zero-lag, cross-curvature result, it hardens the first-line path court and routes onward to 33.42. If not, it returns cleanly to media, template, and equipment ledgers without being allowed to decide propagation or the total time-delay case.