On the Inertial Resistance of a Self-Stabilized Field Pattern

This record contains two PDFs: the preprint "On the Inertial Resistance of a Self-Stabilized Field Pattern" (v1.0, November 2026) and a companion description. The preprint asks what structure, holding assigned energy, resists a force, and starts from a divergence-free momentum-flux field whose flux lines close into a Hopf class. The model rests on three postulates: an energy quadratic plus quartic in the vorticity magnitude, an amplitude condition on the vorticity core, and a quadratic kinetic term. The energy is assigned, not generated: conditional on a hypothesized equilibrium, the virial balance fixes the rest energy, the constrained second variation fixes the dilation modulus, and the translational zero mode fixes the trace of the mass tensor. The three determinations yield one and the same number, the rest energy itself, and share one source: the equilibrium's stored distortion content. The equality is not generic: it holds only for the quartic degree and only in three spatial dimensions. Below the internal-mode gap the response to a weak quasi-static force is Newtonian, with translation mass equal to the rest energy divided by three (the number of spatial directions) times the square of the substrate wave speed. The response is frequency-independent and unrenormalized at zero drive frequency, and isotropic exactly for rotor states of zero angular momentum. Matching the observed mass and suppressing preferred-frame effects are conditions on a covariant completion that the model specifies but does not construct. Neither document has undergone peer review. Both disclose AI assistance (Lumo, Proton) in their acknowledgments.