How a fully sovereign QA stack — local Wikipedia index, distilled Qwen2.5-3B reader, and crutches built only from measured failures — went from 33% to 52% on facts no LLM can have memorized, and matched a zero-shot 7B more than twice its size. TL;DR Configuration Post-cutoff-150 accuracy 3B naked (no retrieval) 0.0% [0–2.5] 7B naked 0.0% (by construction — see below) 3B + sovereign chain (start, Sep 29) 33.3% 3B + sovereign cha...