The LCH-110-32 thirty-two-tube launcher on a wet concrete hardstand at dusk, its tube array raised, air receivers and control cabinet at the near end, forest and snow-capped mountains behind.
CDNS UAV Platforms

Interception on Shop Air.
Carriers, Never Munitions.


Three programs leave the ground on compressed air, from launch platforms that hold no chemistry and send no signal. This is the line's front door: what flies, what fires it, and which of the three answers the airspace you have to hold.

Doctrine

Carriers, Not Munitions.
Nothing Aboard Transmits.


Human safety first. Carriers, not munitions. No radio and no satellite navigation. A person arms every shot. Each is a property of how the hardware is built, not a setting somebody chooses.

Human safety comes first, on every line. Here that starts with the ground crew, because the energy that throws the round stands in a vessel long before anything leaves a tube.

Carriers, not munitions. Nothing here carries a warhead, a fuze, a primer, a propellant, an initiator or any other energetic material, and nothing here operates a weapon. Goose CS-110 defeats a small uncrewed aircraft by arriving in the same place at the same time. Encapsulator CS-111 catches one and brings it down intact. CS-120 does the first job in a heavier class. The verb on this line is intercept.

Nothing in the fleet transmits by radio, and nothing guides on a link. No design here carries a satellite navigation receiver. The lead round takes that to its conclusion: no battery, no motor, no receiver, no servo, no sensor, no indicator and no initiator are aboard it, so there is nothing aboard to jam and nothing aboard to listen for. Where a round does need a person in the loop, the loop runs down an optical fibre paid out of the tube.

A person arms every shot. A partner fire-control signal is a permissive only, and it can never bypass the manual interlock chain or the arm action. No automated fire path exists on this line, and no remote-only fire path exists either. It is set out link by link on Safety on the Launch Line.

The slim upright rods on the receiver deck are not radio aerials. Nothing Canadian Shield builds for this line transmits.

Doctrine
Human safety comes first, on every line. Carriers, not munitions.

No warhead, no fuze, no energetic material, nothing that operates a weapon. Nothing in the fleet transmits by radio and nothing guides on a link. A human arm action is mandatory for every shot, and a cue is a permissive rather than a trigger.

What leaves the ground

Thirty Bar, Three Metres,
and Then It Is on Its Own.


The whole launch is one expansion of stored air into a growing barrel volume. There is no cartridge in it and nothing to ignite, and the round does nothing at all until a valve opens behind it.

A compressor fills an accumulator bank and holds it at 30.0 bar, shop-air class. Behind the round sits a normally closed solenoid breech valve, a port of at least 95 cm² open in under 5 ms. In front of it, a seamless steel tube Ø90.00 mm across and 3.00 m long. The valve opens, the bank dumps into the bore, the obturator cup takes full pressure across 63.617 cm², and about 15.9 L of air goes down the tube.

The round is in the barrel for 28.6 ms. Peak base force is 18,191 N and it lands at the instant the valve opens, before the round has moved: 1,159 g at the peak against 608 g mean. Every part is sized against the peak, because accumulator volume sets exit velocity and does nothing to peak load. The only levers on that are lower pressure, a smaller bore or a longer stroke.

At the muzzle the round is doing 189.2 m/s and carrying 28.64 kJ, at a combined energy efficiency of 85.9%, and a residual 9.0 bar vents at the exit. From there nothing reaches it and nothing has to: six fixed fins bonded into the boom lands at 60° ± 0.5°, live from the first metre, and 2.01 calibres of static margin holding the nose forward on a ballistic arc.

30 bar
charge pressure at the bank, shop-air class
Ø90 mm
bore, and the obturator cup that fills it
189.2 m/s
at the muzzle, 28.6 ms after the valve
0
batteries, receivers or initiators aboard the lead round
Goose CS-110

A Steel Nose on a Moulded Body.
Five Parts and an Adhesive.


Goose CS-110 is the lead round: pneumatically launched, fully unpowered, built to defeat a small uncrewed aircraft by collision. It is the simplest object on this site and the one the line is measured against.

The round is 1.600 kg all-up and 463.0 mm long, 6.6 calibres on the Ø70 reference diameter. A Ø70.00 mm main body steps down to a Ø32.00 mm tail boom over a 30 mm cone, and six fins span from that boom back out to Ø90. The moulded wall is 2.50 mm, set by buckling rather than strength: the material needs 1.19 mm to hold the load and 2.14 mm not to buckle.

That comes to five moulded and machined parts and one adhesive — a normalized AISI 4140 nose slug, a body shell, a tail boom, a set of six fins and an obturator cup. The slug alone is 77.1% of the mass. The result reads the way a buyer should read it: the airframe is a carrier, the steel is the effect, and there is no chemistry anywhere in the round.

Stability is settled by geometry alone, with the centre of gravity 90.0 mm from the nose tip, the centre of pressure 230.4 mm behind it, and 2.01 calibres of static margin against a target band of 1.5 to 2.5. At the target the arithmetic is a collision. On a point-mass solution computed at ISA sea level with a drag coefficient of 0.35 on the Ø70 reference diameter, the round arrives at 120.6 m/s and 11.7 kJ off a 10° quadrant and at 99.7 m/s and 8.0 kJ off 45°. Part by part and figure by figure, it is on Goose CS-110.

THE NOSE

Normalised steel, and most of the mass

A machined AISI 4140 slug at 77.1% of the round. No fuze, no initiator and no electrical path, mating to the body on an interface that takes structure and nothing else.

THE BODY AND BOOM

Glass-filled nylon, moulded

A Ø70 shell stepping to a Ø32 boom, moulded in PA66-GF33 at a 2.50 mm wall. The boom carries the highest shell stress in the round.

THE TAIL

Six fixed fins and an obturator cup

Six fins bonded into the boom lands at 60° ± 0.5°, spanning to Ø90, with no cam, no trim tip and no servo. Behind them a moulded cup with a TPU 90A or filled PTFE land seals the bore.

The Goose CS-110 round seen from the side, its tail cap and fin set at one end and its nose at the other.
Encapsulator CS-111

The Same Round Behind the Bulkhead.
A Bay That Opens in Front of It.


Encapsulator CS-111 is Goose with a nose that catches instead of one that collides. Everything from the tail fins forward to the nose bulkhead is CS-110, unchanged, and that is a constraint being held rather than a coincidence.

Mass, bore, exit velocity and magazine pitch are held identical to the lead round: 1.6 kg all-up, Ø90 mm across 63.6 cm², about 189 m/s at the muzzle. That is what lets the two index in one magazine, so a launch position is not a position for one round or the other.

Forward of the bulkhead is a bay about 180 mm long and about Ø80 mm internally: 50.3 cm² in section, about 0.90 L, and 0.90 kg of mass to work with once hull, tail and fins have taken their 0.65 kg. Whatever goes in there rides about 607 g mean over roughly 32 ms: about 5.4 kN, about 546 kgf, into the nose bulkhead, and about 11.8 bar at the base of a 180 mm liquid column.

Two consequences follow from that. The payload self-pressurizes for the stroke, so a pressure-triggered release is a contradiction and the release has to be a positive mechanical action. And free-expanding chemistry runs a thousand to three thousand times too slowly for the window, so the medium is stored cold gas: about 100 cm³ at about 200 bar through a choked throat of about Ø11.5 mm, filling at airbag class, about 2,400 L/s, inside a 5.0 ms window.

The effect is rotor fouling. Enveloping a 600 mm quadcopter outright would want about 113 L of foam or about 4.1 kg of liquid, roughly 4.6× the entire round, so the achievable effect is localized: foul one or two rotors, unbalance the disc, and the target comes down intact. Because the release is timed against an observed closing geometry, fibre is the recommended primary tier here. The arithmetic in full is on Encapsulator CS-111.

The Encapsulator CS-111 round seen from the side, the packed capture envelope carried behind its nose.
CS-120

Fifteen Kilograms, Powered,
and a Tube of Its Own.


CS-120 is the second class on this line: heavier, powered in flight, fibre-guided, and launched from its own tube at its own bore and pressure. It answers a question the lead round closed with arithmetic.

Powered flight was worked at 1.6 kg and did not close: at that mass the airframe wants about 212 m/s and about 22 kW, and cannot carry the battery. Power falls away steeply with mass — about 5.7 kW at 4 kg, about 2.0 kW at 8 kg, about 1.1 kW at 12 kg, about 0.78 kW at 15 kg. Fifteen kilograms is where it becomes easy, and that is what was selected. Powered flight did not fail on Goose because the idea was wrong; it failed because the mass was wrong.

Fifteen kilograms will not go up a Goose tube. Putting 72 kJ into that mass at 30 bar over 3.0 m would want a Ø143 mm tube; 50 bar over a 4.0 m stroke brings it back to Ø96 mm, and that is the bore selected. So there are two bore and pressure classes here rather than one tube at two masses. The Ø96 lands near Goose's Ø90 by coincidence of the pressure and stroke choice, and the rounds are not interchangeable.

The heavier, slower launch is a gentler one. CS-120 leaves the muzzle at about 98 m/s with a peak launch shock of about 240 g, against the lead round's 1,159 g. That is what lets live electronics ride the stroke: a tail sustain motor and propeller, a four-fan bow-thruster ring bursting to about 1.2 kW, a 0.40 kg battery of the 0.2 kWh class, a flight computer, servos and a fibre payout spool. It is the first round in the family with a wiring harness of its own, a Wired Industries assembly. Forty per cent of the round is effector, fibre is its primary tier and preset flight the degraded mode, and the mass budget is on CS-120.

What it shares with the lead round. The doctrine, unchanged: no warhead, no fuze, no energetic material, no radio. The pneumatic architecture — a charged bank, a fast valve, a smooth-bore tube and a ballistic exit. And the safety spine: a series interlock chain, a manual arm action for every shot, a normally closed breech.

What it does not share. A barrel. CS-120 is Ø96 mm at 50 bar over 4.0 m and Goose is Ø90 mm at 30 bar over 3.00 m, and the two do not load into each other's tubes. The shared-tooling doctrine stops at this program, and its launcher is a definition of its own.

The frame

One Bore, One Interface, Many Noses.
And a Second Class Above It.


Two sentences hold this line together. Everything else on the line is one of the two worked out in detail.

Goose CS-110 and Encapsulator CS-111 are one round in one tube. The same 1.6 kg all-up mass, the same Ø90 mm bore, the same ~189 m/s exit and the same magazine pitch, held identical on purpose so the two index in one magazine. Every head is ballasted to a single nose-interface baseline so the round flies identically regardless of which is loaded, and the launcher is indifferent to what sits in the breech: it delivers the same 30 bar and the same 3.00 m stroke to any head. No head carries power or signal lines from the launcher.

CS-120 is a second and heavier class with its own launcher. Its own bore, its own pressure, its own stroke — Ø96 mm at 50 bar over 4.0 m, 2.5× the launch energy and a fifth of the launch shock. It shares the family's doctrine, its pneumatic architecture and its safety spine. It does not share a barrel and its rounds do not interchange.

The seam that makes the first sentence work is small: a Ø64.9 mm spigot register inside a Ø70 mm shoulder, closed by a three-lug bayonet. Structure crosses it and nothing else. That one mechanical interface is why a new head is a tooling job rather than a new round, and it is set out on Heads and the Nose Interface.

The launch platforms

A Skid Frame, a Cradle,
and Air in Three Receivers.


A launch platform is ground equipment. It is what throws the round, it is named and configured on its own terms, and it is never a UAV and never counted among them.

The line is built in configurations rather than in one machine, and the configurations are named from the hardware. LCH-110-32 is the skid-frame launcher: a tube array raised on a scissor-elevating cradle over a base frame with six screw-jack levelling feet, three horizontal air receivers marked 3000 kPa (30 BAR) AIR ONLY, a control cabinet, a manifold with a mechanical gauge, lifting and tie-down points, and forklift pockets cut into the frame. The same load rigs for airdrop, webbing gathered through shackles to a single lifting ring.

LAUNCHER LCH-110 is the single-tube configuration on the same skid frame and the same three receivers, the tube elevated on a cradle by a linear ram and a cable chain. The pedestal mount is the fixed-site configuration: a slewing head carrying a tube pod on a four-legged levelling base with lifting eyes, above a cabinet. It carries no designation. Round storage is a rack that carries finned rounds to the line.

What every configuration has in common is the pressure. The marking on the receivers is the same 30 bar the round is launched on, and behind it sits the same pneumatic chain, the same normally closed breech, the same interlock chain and the same arm action per shot. The platform and its configurations are on The Launch Platform.

The LCH-110-32 thirty-two-tube launcher on its skid frame, the tube array raised on a scissor cradle, air receivers and a control cabinet alongside it.
Guidance

Three Tiers, and What Each Round
Is Built to Receive.


Guidance here is described by what is physically aboard, because that is the only description a customer can check. Each program sits on one tier, and one of them sits on a tier with nothing on it at all.

The framework the whole fleet uses is on Technology. Scoped to this line it comes to three tiers and one rule across all of them: nothing here transmits by radio, and nothing here navigates on a satellite signal.

What the launcher knows and the round does not is the useful way to read that list. The launcher takes a cue — bearing, range and height — from a fire-control interface or from a person entering it by hand, computes a point-mass laying solution against the mount envelope, lays the tube and reports on target. After the muzzle the round is a shape with a known centre of pressure and a known centre of gravity. Where each program sits is on Guidance on This Line.

The LCH-110-32 launcher on a wet rooftop at dusk, standing on its jacks with its tube array raised, cable reels and transit cases beside it, and a lit city skyline with a tall observation tower beyond the parapet.
The exchange

Energy Is Not the Hard Part.
Getting Close Enough Is.


The commercial argument for this line is an arithmetic one, and it does not turn on how much each round carries. It turns on what a light airframe takes to break, and on how many rounds a position can put into the sky.

Structurally destroying a light composite or polymer airframe is an order-of-magnitude 0.1 to 1 kJ proposition. A Goose CS-110 arrives with 11.7 kJ off a 10° quadrant and 8.0 kJ off 45°, on a point-mass solution at ISA sea level with a drag coefficient of 0.35 on the Ø70 reference diameter. The round is over-matched against the structure by one to two orders of magnitude, and the consequence follows directly: miss distance is the failure mode rather than insufficient energy.

That points the purchasing argument one way. If the energy is already an order of magnitude past sufficient, more energy per round buys nothing, and every dollar that goes into the round instead of into the magazine works against the exchange. What is worth buying is depth: more rounds in the tubes, more tubes on the position, and a round cheap enough in parts and process that depth is affordable.

That is the shape of the object above: five moulded and machined parts and an adhesive, with no battery, no motor, no seeker, no receiver, no initiator and no energetic material. The complexity a defence round normally carries sits on the launcher instead, bought once and reused every shot. The loop the exchange runs in — cue, lay, arm, fire, assess, reload — and where its real bottleneck sits are on The Engagement.

No chemistry

No Warhead, No Fuze, No Propellant.
The Launch Energy Is Air.


There is no energetic material anywhere in this system, on any program, in any configuration. It is a design boundary rather than a preference, and it is the strongest single fact the line has.

Nothing here contains a warhead, a fuze, a primer, a propellant, an initiator or a pyrotechnic gas generant. The whole chemistry of a Goose round is a two-part structural epoxy holding six fins into their lands and the nose slug into the shell, at a lap shear of 20 to 30 MPa. That is the list.

The launch energy is compressed air in a vessel. A store of these rounds holds no propellant, because there is none in the design for a store to hold. The capture round declines a pyrotechnic gas generant by name and takes the stored-cold-gas path instead, accepting the mass penalty. The collapse trigger the capture noses use is a nose that collapses mechanically on contact, the collapse itself releasing the net or canopy, with no initiator, no electrical path and no proximity sensing in it.

What follows reaches past a data sheet: it changes what a magazine is, what a store has to be, what a transport pack is, and what a round on the ground is. A miss here is a falling 1.6 kg moulded body, and that is the whole of it.

Made here

The Moulds Are the Product.
Every One of Them Is Cut In-House.


A round that is five moulded and machined parts is a tooling problem before it is anything else. So the tooling is where the work and the ownership sit.

The moulds for the body shell, the tail boom, the fin set and the obturator cup are cut in-house on five-axis machines. That puts the tooling wall inside the building instead of in a supplier's queue, and a new nose on this line becomes a tooling job, not a negotiation. Own the mould and you own the part, the revision and the schedule with it.

The moulded parts are PA66-GF33, a 33% glass-filled nylon 6/6, at 110 MPa and 7.0 GPa conditioned at 50% relative humidity and 1,400 kg/m³, worked against ISO 1874 and UL 94 as the references the engineering applies. The nose slug is machined from AISI 4140 normalized at around 655 MPa and 7,850 kg/m³, against ASTM A29 and A331. The obturating land is a TPU 90A or a filled PTFE. Each of those is a material designation, not a make.

Two things on the launch side are bought instead of made, for the same reason. The pressure vessel has to be built to TC/CSA/ISO 11119 with a registration number on the vessel and on its relief valve, and the barrel stock is seamless DOM tube to ASTM A519, proof-tested at 1.5× the working pressure. Where the plant sits is on Manufacturing; the containerized version that goes to the customer instead of the rounds is on the Forward Manufacturing Cell.

MADE

The moulds, and everything out of them

Body shell, tail boom, six fins and obturator cup, moulded in glass-filled nylon out of moulds cut on five-axis machines in-house. The nose slug is machined steel, and the jig and the two acceptance gauges that check the build come from the same shop.

BOUGHT

The pressure side, and the stock

The vessel that stores the air, the compressor that fills it and the seamless DOM barrel stock. A vessel built to a pressure standard and stamped with a registration number is a bought item.

A thirty-two-tube launch platform standing on six levelling jacks on gravel, its tube array raised, air hoses run out to one side and a transit case behind it, with forest and mountains in the distance.
Human safety

Human Safety Comes First.
A Person Arms Every Shot.


The hazard on this system is not the round. It is 0.89 MJ of stored air standing in a vessel with a crew around it, and the design answers that first.

Stored pneumatic energy is named in the engineering as the dominant hazard on this system, at 0.89 MJ in a charged bank. Nobody is inside the exclusion zone while the bank is charging. The vessel and its relief valve are proven before the pneumatics are trusted, the line is leak-checked at 5 bar first, and the interlock chain is proven on control power alone, uncharged.

Four permissives sit in series and every one has to be made before the arm relay energizes: a dual-channel emergency stop, an area-clear key, a muzzle-cover switch and a pressure-relief-proven switch. A fifth condition, accumulator pressure proven, sits in firmware. The arm key is re-set for every shot, not once for a session. The breech valve is normally closed and fail-safe, so a de-energized solenoid is a shut valve. The control states run safe, armed, firing, and a fault is a hard latch that a person at the machine has to reset.

A partner fire-control signal enters at one place only, as a permissive: it cannot bypass the manual interlock chain and cannot substitute for the arm action. Because there is nothing energetic anywhere in the system, a miss is a falling 1.6 kg moulded round rather than a hazard footprint. The hazard register, the exclusion zones, commissioning and the maintenance intervals are on Safety on the Launch Line.

The three programs

Three Programs, Two Bore Classes.
One Set of Rules.


Side by side, with the figures each program closes on, the bore each fires from and the tier each one sits on.

ProgramWhat it doesAll-up massBore · charge · strokeAt the muzzleGuidance
Goose CS-110Kinetic interception. It defeats a small uncrewed aircraft by collision.1.600 kgØ90 mm · 30 bar · 3.00 m189.2 m/s · 28.64 kJTier 1 preset
Encapsulator CS-111Capture by rotor fouling. The target comes down intact.1.6 kgØ90 mm · 30 bar · 3.00 m~189 m/sTier 2 fibre, recommended primary
CS-120Powered interception in a heavier class, on a launcher of its own.15 kgØ96 mm · 50 bar · 4.0 m~98 m/s · 72 kJTier 2 fibre primary, Tier 1 preset degraded

Goose CS-110 and Encapsulator CS-111 index in one magazine on one bore. CS-120 is a second bore and pressure class with its own launcher, and its rounds do not interchange with theirs.

Three columns there are worth reading twice. The mass column is why the first two share a magazine. The bore column is why the third does not. The guidance column is the doctrine in shorthand: one round that receives nothing, and two that take a person's decision down a wire.

Peak launch shock is what separates them physically. Goose and Encapsulator ride 1,159 g at the peak and 608 g mean, and the lead round carries nothing aboard that could object to it. CS-120 rides about 240 g, and that is what lets a flight computer, a battery and servos go up the tube.

Who it is for

Who Holds This Kind of Airspace.
And What This Line Is Not.


Both lists below are properties of the build rather than positions taken in a conversation, and reading them together is the fastest way to place your own problem inside this line.

WHO IT IS FOR

The ground you already control

  • A site or installation holding the airspace over ground it already controls, and somewhere to stand a launch position: a hardstand, a levelled pad or a fixed base.
  • A force that wants the cost of an intercept to sit well under the cost of the thing it intercepts, and is buying depth rather than excellence.
  • An operator who needs a magazine that holds no propellant, no primer and no initiator, and a transport pack that follows from that.
  • An integrator that already detects, tracks and classifies, and wants the effector end of the chain reached over a wired permissive.
  • A position that has to work with the spectrum quiet: nothing here transmits by radio and nothing navigates on a satellite signal.
  • A safety officer who wants the interlock chain, the exclusion zones and the stored-energy case in writing first.
WHAT IT IS NOT

Read this before the enquiry

  • Not a munition. No warhead, no fuze, no primer, no propellant and no initiator, and nothing here operates a weapon.
  • Not a detection system. No radar, no command and control and no sensing of our own; detect, track, classify and cue are the customer's.
  • Not a wireless system. Nothing transmits by radio, nothing guides on a link, and no satellite navigation receiver is aboard anything here.
  • Not an automated fire path. A person arms every shot, a cue is a permissive, and a fault is a latch a person clears at the machine.
  • Not one tube at two masses. CS-120 has its own bore and pressure class, and its rounds do not load into a Goose tube.
  • Not an offer. Every enquiry is screened; international transfer is subject to Canadian government permits issued per shipment, and counsel comes first.

The buyer's door, what a position consists of and what we would need from you are on Who the Line Is For.

The conversation

The Airspace Comes First.
What You Already Sense Comes With It.


Bring the ground, the airspace over it and the sensing you already own. Nothing on this page is an offer, and every enquiry is screened before any discussion.

The nine pages under this one carry the line in full. The round part by part is on Goose CS-110. What throws it, and the configurations it is built in, is on The Launch Platform. Stored energy, exclusion zones and the interlock chain are on Safety on the Launch Line. The capture round is on Encapsulator CS-111 and the powered tier on CS-120.

Across the three, Guidance on This Line sets out the tiers and what a round does and does not receive; The Engagement runs the loop from cue to reload and marks the boundary at either end; Heads and the Nose Interface is the one seam every head crosses; and Who the Line Is For is the buyer's door. The fleet doctrine these pages sit under is on Doctrine, the other three domains are on the fleet, and the enterprise's other half, the removable operator for machines a customer already runs, is on CDNS Autonomy.

Write with the ground, the airspace and the cue you already have. Every enquiry is screened before any discussion; international transfer is subject to Canadian government permits issued per shipment, export posture is counsel-first, and Controlled Goods status is disclosed to qualified enquiries. The reply comes in writing, from a person.