Encapsulator CS-111 is Goose CS-110 with the steel taken out of the nose and a capture bay put in its place. Same mass, same bore, same tube, same magazine pitch. What changes is the last metre.
Encapsulator CS-111 is not a second airframe. It is the Goose round with a different nose on the same mechanical interface, and the launch platform has no way of knowing which of the two is in the breech.
Everything from the tail fins forward to the nose bulkhead is Goose CS-110, unchanged. The six fixed fins bonded into the boom lands, the Ø32 mm tail boom, the Ø70 mm moulded body, the obturator cup that takes full bore pressure across Ø90 mm: all of it is the round already defined. Forward of the bulkhead the steel slug comes out and a capture bay goes in.
Four figures are held identical on purpose. All-up mass 1.6 kg. Bore Ø90 mm on 63.6 cm². Exit velocity the same ~189 m/s. The same magazine pitch. Hold those four and the two rounds index in one magazine, fly the same arc and take the same laying solution. The operator picks an effect, not a configuration.
The launch platform is indifferent to which variant is loaded. It delivers the same 30 bar over the same 3.0 m stroke to any head, and no head carries power or signal lines from the launcher. That indifference is the commercial argument for the line: one bore, one interface, many noses, and the choice of effect taken at the breech.
One structural boundary separates the two rounds. Where it sits is a design variable the bay's own contents settle, and moving it trades bay length against the body behind it.
The bulkhead is the whole of the boundary. Aft of it the round is Goose CS-110 and inherits its structure, its stability and its ballistics without alteration. Forward of it is new work: the bay, what is packed into it, and the mechanism that opens it.
The station of that bulkhead is left to the payload. Push it aft and the bay lengthens at the cost of the forward body; push it forward and the body grows back. Two things are held either way: the round's all-up mass, and the balance the laying solution assumes. Every head on this line is ballasted to one nose-interface baseline so the round flies identically regardless of which head is loaded, and the capture nose is held to that baseline like any other.
What crosses the bulkhead is structure and nothing else. The nose interface on this line is a Ø64.9 mm spigot register, a Ø70 mm shoulder and a three-lug bayonet, and no electrical conductor is routed through it on any variant.
The capture bay is a fixed envelope of mass and volume. Everything the effect needs has to fit inside both, and both are set by the bore the round already has to pass through.
Take the bore at Ø90 mm, allow about 5 mm of hull wall, and the bay's internal diameter falls out at ~80 mm, a cross-section of 50.3 cm². Run that ~180 mm forward of the bulkhead and the bay holds ~0.90 L.
The mass budget is as tight and as simple. The round is 1.6 kg all up. Hull, tail and fins take 0.65 kg of that. What is left for the capture nose, with the envelope, the gas, the valve, the dispersal head and the release all inside it, is 0.90 kg. That one figure governs every decision on the rest of this page. A mechanism that cannot be made to fit inside 0.90 kg and 0.90 L is not a mechanism this round can carry, whatever it does at the target.
| The bay | Figure | What sets it |
|---|---|---|
| Bay length | ~180 mm nominal | The bulkhead station, which the payload settles. |
| Internal diameter | ~80 mm | The Ø90 mm bore, less about 5 mm of hull wall. |
| Cross-section | 50.3 cm² | The internal diameter. |
| Volume | ~0.90 L | Cross-section over the bay length. |
| Mass left for the capture nose | 0.90 kg | 1.6 kg all up, less 0.65 kg of hull, tail and fins. |
| All-up mass | 1.6 kg | Held identical to Goose CS-110 so the two share a magazine. |
The capture bay, figure by figure. Every one of them follows from the bore the round has to leave through and the mass the magazine has to index.
Nine hundred grams is more than half the round. Measured against the volume an envelope has to fill, it is a hard ceiling, and that ceiling decides the effect.
Whatever goes into the bay is accelerated by the same stroke that accelerates the round, and it arrives at the nose bulkhead as a load rather than as a passenger.
The round leaves the tube on 30 bar of shop air over a 3.0 m stroke. Mean acceleration over the stroke is 608 g and the peak 1,159 g, the peak arriving at the very start of the stroke before the round has moved at all. Everything structural on this line is sized against the peak, and the capture bay's contents are no exception.
For the bay the consequence is arithmetic. A 0.90 kg payload under that mean acceleration presses into the nose bulkhead at ~5.4 kN, about 546 kgf, and it holds there for the 28.6 ms the round spends in the tube. A payload that is liquid, or that behaves like one under that load, does a second thing as well. It self-pressurizes. A 180 mm column of liquid at launch acceleration develops ~11.8 bar at its own base.
| Quantity | Figure | Where it acts |
|---|---|---|
| Mean acceleration | 608 g | Over the whole 3.0 m stroke. |
| Peak acceleration | 1,159 g | At the start of the stroke, before the round moves. |
| Time in the tube | 28.6 ms | The length of time the load is held. |
| Inertial load on a 0.90 kg payload | ~5.4 kN · ~546 kgf | Into the nose bulkhead. |
| Self-pressure of a 180 mm liquid column | ~11.8 bar | At the base of the column, during the stroke. |
The launch case the capture nose is worked against. The mean sets the load on the bulkhead; the peak sets the structure; the self-pressure sets the release.
Those two numbers, half a tonne into the bulkhead and ~11.8 bar inside the payload itself, are the design case for the front of this round. They also disqualify an entire family of release mechanisms.
The neatest way to open a bay at speed is the one this round cannot use, and the reason sits in the launch load rather than in the mechanism.
A burst disc opens when the pressure behind it reaches a set value. On a static payload that is an elegant answer: no moving parts, no power, no timing. On this round it is a contradiction rather than a design.
The payload has already reached that pressure on its way up the tube. The ~11.8 bar a liquid column develops at its own base during the launch stroke sits squarely inside the range a burst disc would be set to. Set the disc below it and the bay opens in the barrel. Set it above and the impact has to deliver more pressure than the launch did, and the launch is the harder event of the two.
So the release on Encapsulator CS-111 is a positive mechanical action, held shut through the whole stroke and opened on a decision at the moment the closing geometry calls for it. The medium, the timing and the guidance tier all follow from that one finding.
The release has to be a positive mechanical action. That single line closes off burst discs, pressure diaphragms and every other threshold device on this round, and it is the reason the mechanism at the front of it is mechanical from end to end.
There is a precise word for the mechanism at the front of this round, and it is not the word a defence reader reaches for first.
Canadian Shield does not build fuzes. The mechanism at the front of Encapsulator CS-111 is a standoff release, or a deployment trigger. It opens a bay. It initiates nothing, because there is nothing aboard to initiate.
That is a statement about the hardware before it is a statement about the language. Follow the round forward from the bulkhead and the inventory is short: a packed capture envelope, a stored-gas bottle, a dispersal head, and the mechanical release that holds the bay shut until the moment it does not.
There is a second way to open the same bay. A collapse trigger is a nose that collapses mechanically on contact, the collapse itself letting the envelope go: no initiator, no electrical path, no proximity sensing. It is a mechanism rather than a head and carries no designation of its own, and it is set out on the heads and nose interface page.
Everything the capture nose does happens inside a window set by closing speed, and that window is the hardest constraint anywhere on the round.
Work the geometry from the standoff back. At a 1 m standoff and a 200 m/s closing speed, the envelope has 5.0 ms between the release acting and contact. That is the whole budget. Inside it the envelope has to leave the bay, expand and be in the target's disc before the round arrives.
Filling a 12 L envelope in 5.0 ms calls for about 2,400 L/s of gas. That is airbag class, and it is reachable by the means an airbag reaches it. A stored-gas bottle of ~100 cm³ at ~200 bar holds roughly 20 L of free air. Put it through a choked throat of ~1.04 cm², about Ø11.5 mm, and the flow is there.
The mass closes as well. Bottle, valve and envelope together come to ~0.25–0.45 kg against the 0.90 kg the bay allows, and the margin is what the dispersal head and the release spend.
A chemical medium that expands under its own reaction was the obvious first answer, and the timing arithmetic takes it out of the primary role in one step.
Commercial two-part expanding chemistries work on times of 5–15 s. The window at 1 m and 200 m/s is 5.0 ms. Free-expanding chemistry is between one thousand and three thousand times too slow to close that gap, and nothing in a formulation moves a number by three orders of magnitude.
So the medium is stored cold gas, mechanically let go. It carries a mass penalty against a chemistry that makes its own gas, and the design takes that penalty deliberately: the alternative puts a pyrotechnic gas generant on a round whose whole architecture rests on carrying no energetic material at all.
Chemistry keeps a place on the round one step further down the sequence. Used as an adhesion agent after contact rather than as the expanding medium, it works on the timescale that suits it, and the fast part is left to gas.
A ~100 cm³ bottle at ~200 bar, a choked throat and a folded envelope. No combustion, no gas generant, and nothing that has to be set off to work.
Held shut through 608 g mean and 1,159 g peak, opened on a decision at standoff. No threshold device, no pressure switch, no initiator.
An optional post-contact agent rather than the expanding medium. It runs on seconds, and seconds are there once the envelope is already in the disc.
What 0.90 kg reaches at the target is narrower than the word most capture systems use for it, and it is still a capture. The arithmetic decides which word is right.
Start with the volume. Enveloping a 600 mm quadcopter, in the sense of wrapping the whole airframe, takes on the order of 113 L of foam. At a 30× expansion that is ~3.8 L of liquid, about 4.1 kg of it. The bay carries 0.90 kg. The requirement is ~4.6× over, and no packing arrangement recovers a factor of that size.
So the effect Encapsulator CS-111 is designed for is rotor fouling. The envelope goes into the disc, the disc loses its balance, and the aircraft comes down. On a small multirotor one or two fouled rotors are enough, and the mass budget reaches that comfortably.
Fouling is what makes the standoff geometry matter. The envelope has to be in the disc, not near it, and a metre at 200 m/s is a place, not a moment that can be guessed on the ground. That puts the timing of the release under a person's eye, and it decides the guidance tier.
Goose CS-110 asks for nothing after the muzzle. The capture round asks for exactly one thing, and it is a decision rather than a signal.
The kinetic round is Tier 1, preset on the ground. There is no battery, no motor, no receiver, no servo, no sensor, no indicator and no initiator aboard it. It is aimed, it flies, and it needs nothing after the muzzle.
The capture round asks for one thing more. The release has to act about a metre short of a moving target, and a round set before launch cannot know where that target will be when it arrives. So Encapsulator CS-111 is designed to Tier 2: a fibre paying out of the tube, and a person in the loop holding the one decision that has to be made late.
A fibre is a wire. Nothing in the fleet transmits by radio and nothing on this line guides on a link, and the tier does not change that. It is what the doctrine allows a round to have when a judgement must be made in flight.
The three tiers, and where each program on this line sits, are set out on the guidance page; the framework behind them belongs to technology.
Holding mass, bore, exit velocity and pitch identical across two rounds is an operational decision rather than an aesthetic one. It is what lets a single magazine carry both.
A magazine that holds one effect forces the choice at loading, hours before the cue arrives. A magazine that indexes both leaves the choice at the breech, shot by shot: kinetic where a collision is the right answer, capture where the airframe should come down in one piece.
Holding that open costs the design something, and it is paid at the front of the round. Mass is held at 1.6 kg. The bay's contents are packed and ballasted so the round's balance stays where the laying solution expects it, the same constraint every head on this line is held to. The bulkhead station moves with the payload; the balance does not.
| Goose CS-110 | Encapsulator CS-111 | |
|---|---|---|
| All-up mass | 1.6 kg | 1.6 kg, held identical |
| Bore · obturator OD | Ø90 mm on 63.6 cm² | Ø90 mm on 63.6 cm² |
| Exit velocity | ~189 m/s | ~189 m/s |
| Magazine pitch | One pitch | The same pitch — the two index together |
| The nose | A solid steel slug | A packed envelope, a stored-gas bottle, a dispersal head and a mechanical release |
| At the target | Kinetic collision | Rotor fouling, and the airframe comes down intact |
| Guidance tier | Tier 1, preset | Tier 2, fibre |
| Energetic material | None | None |
| Electrical path at the nose | None | None |
The two rounds side by side. The four rows at the top are held identical by design so the pair index in one magazine; the rows beneath them are the whole of the difference.
A Canadian air-defence layer is sized for Canadian ground, and the capture nose carries an environmental design case to match.
The environmental design case for Encapsulator CS-111 is −30 °C. That figure asks more of a capture round than of a kinetic one. A steel slug is indifferent to the weather. A stored gas, a folded envelope and a mechanism that has to move inside five milliseconds are not.
Cold reaches the pressure in the bottle, the stiffness of the envelope's fold and the friction in the release, and each of those is a design input rather than a footnote. The case is carried through the whole train, from the bottle to the bay door, because it is the ground this line is meant for.
A capture nose ends an engagement without destroying what it caught, and over a whole class of ground that difference is the reason the round exists at all.
Encapsulator CS-111 carries no warhead, no fuze and no energetic material, and neither does the launch chain that puts it up. There is nothing aboard to burst, nothing to fragment and nothing to shower over whatever is underneath.
What reaches the ground is an intact airframe. Whoever needs to know what was overhead, where it came from and what it was carrying has the object itself to work from.
That matters most where an air-defence layer is hardest to justify: over ground with people, plant or traffic on it. A kinetic round is the right answer over open country. Over a yard, a plant or a crowd, an effect that brings the aircraft down whole and puts nothing energetic anywhere in the system is a different conversation with a safety officer. Human safety comes first on every line Canadian Shield builds, and the safety page carries the launch line itself.
No warhead, no fuze, no primer, no propellant, no gas generant and no initiator, on the round or in the magazine. Pneumatic launch keeps it that way from the tube forward.
The airframe comes down whole, so what was overhead can be recovered, examined and handed on.
The same tube, the same drill and the same laying solution. The engagement loop is unchanged; the operator picks the effect at the breech.
Encapsulator CS-111 answers one question well and refuses several others outright. Read both columns before an enquiry.
The first conversation is about the ground, what comes over it, and what has to survive the engagement.
Tell us what sits underneath the airspace, what is coming across it, and what you need left of it afterwards. From there the conversation is the launch chain as a whole: the launch platform, the magazine, the engagement loop and the split between the two effects. The CDNS UAV Platforms hub carries the line end to end; the capture nose is the part of it this conversation turns on.
All CDNS UAV Platforms designs are patent pending; international transfer is export-controlled and subject to Canadian government permits taken per shipment, and nothing on this page is an offer.
