Generic doc tools were never designed for teams building hardware, software, and electronics at once. Requirements live in a deck, the wiring diagram in someone's Drive, the current motor spec in tab five of a spreadsheet, and none of them agree. They don't talk to each other, they don't know what a component is, and every page is a snapshot that's stale the day after it's written.

Prototype holds the current version of every spec, component, and interface in one place. Change a parent spec and dependent work gets flagged as stale instead of quietly drifting. Reuse a flight-proven part and it's checked against the envelope it was actually qualified for. Approvals, documents, and meetings hang off the same source of truth, not five disconnected tools.

Prototype was built from inside a university rocketry team. Student teams turn over every year: knowledge walks out the door with every graduating cohort, budgets are restrictive, and you're coordinating serious engineering around lectures and exams. That's exactly the environment this tool was designed for, and the first 20 founding teams get to shape what it becomes.