The launch platform is ground equipment. An air bank at 30 bar, a fast breech valve and a Ø90 mm tube three metres long take a 1.600 kg round to 189.2 m/s and let it go. No propellant, no cartridge, no chemistry. A person arms every shot.
A launch platform is the ground half of this line. It holds the air, points the tube and lets the round go. It is never counted among the UAVs it launches.
Goose CS-110 is a UAV. The machine that throws it is not. A launch platform is ground equipment: a frame, a bank of compressed air, a valve and a tube, standing on ground the customer chose and worked by a crew the customer trained. Everything that flies on this line leaves from one of these, and the line is on the CDNS UAV Platforms page.
What the platform delivers is one thing: a fixed quantity of compressed air, released fast, behind a cup that fills the bore. Thirty bar acts across Ø90 mm and drives the round three metres up the tube, and at the muzzle the platform's work is finished. It is indifferent to which head is in the breech, and no head carries power or signal lines from it. The round itself is on Goose CS-110.
There is no warhead, no fuze, no primer, no propellant and no initiator anywhere in this system. Human safety comes first, on every line. A partner cue is a permissive: it can never bypass the interlock chain or the arm action, and no automated or remote-only fire path exists.
The pneumatic chain is short on purpose. Air is made, stored, held behind one valve and released into one bore. Every item on it is a standard pressure-system component.
An electric compressor charges the air bank and cycles against the bank's own pressure: it cuts in at or below 27 bar, cuts out at or above 30 bar, and an over-pressure inhibit stops it at 32 bar. A check valve holds the bank charged when the compressor is off, a relief device set at 33 bar stands above it, and a transmitter and a gauge read it. An isolation valve separates it from the breech manifold, and a vent and drain takes the pressure out of the machine for maintenance.
Downstream sits the breech: one normally-closed solenoid valve per barrel, rated at the bank's working pressure, and one valve is energized at a time, so a barrel fires on its own.
Nothing on that chain is a cartridge. One shot is 15.9 L of air at 30 bar, made by a motor on a wire, from a compressed-air system a workshop already understands. That is the argument for pneumatic launch, and it is the argument for depth in the magazine: the round is moulded, and the shot is air.
A charged air bank holds 0.89 MJ, and on this system that is the dominant hazard. The design is arranged around that, not around the thing it launches.
The round carries no chemistry: no warhead, no fuze, no primer, no propellant and no initiator. The energy that throws it is in the bank, and it is in there before anyone is near a tube. Treating the pressure system as the dangerous part of the machine sets the order of every procedure on this platform.
Stored energy also sets the shape of a working day. The tubes do not decide how fast the platform works; recharging the bank does. The hazard register, the exclusion zones and the interlock chain are on Safety on the launch line.
An air bank at 30 bar is a pressure system under provincial law. The requirements that follow are engineering inputs, in the same column as the bore diameter.
The air bank is a certified pressure vessel to TC/CSA/ISO 11119, and a Canadian Registration Number is carried on the vessel and on its relief device. Both are designed against CAN/CSA B51 and ASME VIII, the piping to a stated pipe class, and the installation is inspected when it goes in and again at intervals. The authority having jurisdiction in the province where the platform stands is part of that work.
| Design point | Value |
|---|---|
| Working pressure | 30 bar |
| Relief device set point | 33 bar · 110% of working pressure |
| Over-pressure inhibit | 32 bar |
| Compressor cut-in and cut-out | At or below 27 bar · at or above 30 bar |
| Bore proof test | 1.5× working pressure · 45 bar |
| Commissioning leak check | 5 bar |
| Air per shot | 15.9 L |
| Stored energy, bank charged | 0.89 MJ |
The pressure design points the launch platform is built to, and the set points the control system holds it between.
Standards are named here because the engineering applies them and for no other reason: ASTM A519 for the barrel stock, ISA 5.1 and ISO 10628 for the schematic, the Canadian Electrical Code for the conductors. The regime the platform sits inside is the one a workshop compressor already lives under.
Two components decide what the platform can do. One is a valve wide enough and quick enough to dump a bank into a bore. The other is the bore.
The breech valve is a normally-closed solenoid with a port of at least 95 cm², open in under 5 ms and rated at the bank's working pressure. Anything slower spends the bank into a column already moving; anything narrower chokes it. Normally closed is not a preference either: a de-energized valve is a shut valve, so a lost signal or a pulled stop leaves the bore sealed.
The tube is Ø90 mm on the bore and 3.00 m long, with a wall of about 6 mm in seamless drawn-over-mandrel steel to ASTM A519, proof-tested at 1.5× working pressure. Inside it, the round's obturator cup takes full bore pressure across the whole Ø90 and pushes.
| Barrel and breech | Design point |
|---|---|
| Bore and stroke | Ø90.00 mm × 3.00 m |
| Barrel stock | Seamless DOM to ASTM A519 · AISI 4130 or equivalent |
| Breech port and opening time | ≥95 cm², under 5 ms, normally closed |
| Peak base force, per barrel | 18,191 N, at the start of the stroke |
| Structural design load | 36,382 N · the peak at a safety factor of 2.0 |
| Residual pressure at the muzzle | 9.0 bar, vented at exit |
The barrel group and the breech as the design defines them. Base force is per barrel; the mean over the stroke is 9,546 N.
Peak base force lands at the very start of the stroke, before the round has moved at all, so it is a load on the breech end rather than a shock a softer valve could take out. Where that same peak goes at the round's own base is on Goose CS-110.
The console runs a small, deterministic state machine: safe, armed, firing, and a fault that latches. Nothing in it is discretionary and nothing in it is remote.
SAFE is the resting state. ARMED is reached only when six conditions are made together, and left the moment any one of them opens. FIRING is one commanded event that ends by itself. FAULT latches, and a person resets it at the machine.
Four of the six are hardware permissives wired in series, so any one opens the chain on its own: a dual-channel emergency stop, an area-clear key, a muzzle-cover switch and a pressure-relief-proven switch. Bank pressure proven is a further condition, held in firmware. Nine safety functions sit over the set, a human arm action is mandatory for every shot, and the arm key is re-set each time.
The console and the launcher talk on one CAN 2.0B bus at 250 kbit/s, point to point with no third node on it, terminated at both ends, with a watchdog at 500 ms or less. The console is the only place a shot is commanded from, and a person stands at it. The chain is walked link by link on Safety on the launch line.
The platform aims and the round flies ballistic. Everything that decides where the round goes has already happened by the time the valve opens.
Commissioning starts with both axes driven to absolute-encoder home. A crew then sights one fixed reference twice, through the bore reference and through the cueing optic, and enters both readings into the alignment module, which computes the offset between them and stores it. The laying solutions are then run again and confirmed to repeat.
In operation the cue is three numbers: bearing, range and height. The module solves a point-mass trajectory for a 1.600 kg round leaving at 189.2 m/s on a 0.070 m reference diameter at a drag coefficient of 0.35, adds lead for a moving target, and checks the answer against the mount envelope before anything is asked to move.
The same module carries the fin-alignment acceptance check. Goose's six fins are bonded into the boom lands at 60° ± 0.5° and do not move, so the check confirms a built round rather than trimming a flying one. There is no cam at the muzzle and no trim mechanism on this platform.
The traversing and elevating mount is the whole of the platform's aim. Its envelope is a hard boundary, checked before the drives are asked for anything.
The mount carries the barrel group on a common cradle and drives it in two axes. Both report from absolute encoders, and both are referenced to the stored boresight offset rather than to the frame they are bolted to.
±170° of azimuth, driven and encoded against the stored boresight offset. A solution outside that arc is refused before the drives are given anything to do.
Quadrant elevation from a shallow lay to a steep arc. The quadrant for a given cue comes out of the trajectory solution, and the range table it is solved against is on Goose CS-110.
What sits under the mount is a siting choice: a fixed emplacement, or a cradle on a vehicle. The bore, the pressure and the stroke do not change with it.
An envelope check is a refusal rather than a warning. Where a solved azimuth or quadrant falls outside the mount's limits, the solution is rejected, and the crew re-sites the platform or passes the cue on. Siting is on The engagement.
The platform is built in configurations, and a configuration is named by the frame it stands on and the way it is moved. The chain inside them does not change.
LCH-110-32 is the array launcher: a thirty-two-tube bank on a scissor-elevating cradle, carried on a skid frame with horizontal air receivers along its flank, a control cabinet at one end, a manifold and gauge, screw-jack levelling feet at the corners, lifting and tie-down points, and forklift pockets cut into the base frame. Rigged for a drop, the same load takes webbing through shackles up to one lifting ring.
LAUNCHER LCH-110 puts one large tube on that same skid, with a section of its own below. The pedestal mount is the fixed-site answer: a slewing head on a levelling base carrying a tube pod and a control cabinet, bolted to prepared ground rather than jacked onto it. Round storage is a rack, six rounds to a case.
Every receiver carries the same air marking, 3000 kPa (30 BAR) AIR ONLY. Whichever frame a customer takes, the bore is Ø90 mm, the stroke 3.00 m, the breech normally closed.
The slim upright rods on the receiver deck, and those on the pedestal head, are not radio aerials. Nothing Canadian Shield builds for this line transmits, and nothing in the line guides on a radio link: a Goose CS-110 round carries no receiver to guide, and where a person stays in the loop that loop runs down an optical fibre paid out of the tube.
Where the ground calls for one tube rather than an array, the single-tube launcher is the same platform with the same chain and a different barrel group.
LAUNCHER LCH-110 stands on the skid frame the array launcher uses, with the same receivers along it and the same control cabinet behind. One large tube sits on an elevating cradle worked by a linear ram, with a cable chain carrying the services up to it.
Every wire on this platform belongs to the platform. The round has none, and nothing electrical crosses into it.
Two harness sets are built for the launch platform by Wired Industries: the launcher harness on the machine, and the console and interlock harness at the operator's end. Three-phase power is held apart from the 24 VDC control bus by at least one loom diameter along the whole route, and the two emergency-stop channels run in separate dedicated conduit. That last one is a hardware constraint, not a routing preference.
The round is the other half of that discipline. Goose CS-110 has no electrical system, no battery and no harness, and no conductor is routed through the nose interface, which carries structure and nothing else. What crosses that interface is on Heads and the nose interface.
Detect, track, classify and cue belong to the customer's own systems. The launch platform's boundary is the connector where their answer arrives.
Canadian Shield does not build radar, command and control, or electro-optical sensing for this line. The platform's own sensing is a pressure transducer on the bank and a boresight reference on the mount, and that is the whole of it. A cue reaches the console over the fire-control interface or it is typed in by hand, and either way it is treated the same.
A human arm action is mandatory for every shot, and no automated or remote-only fire path exists on this platform. The connector for a partner system is capped and its conductors are held in reserve.
Holding the boundary at the connector lets the platform sit under an air picture a customer already owns instead of competing with it. The loop from cue to reload is on The engagement.
A launch platform is bought by the people who own the ground, the air supply and the authority to fire it. Reading the right-hand column first saves everyone time.
Bring the site, the power and air already standing on it, and the picture you already hold. Nothing on this page is an offer.
The useful first conversation is about a place. What the ground is, whether there is three-phase power and compressed air on it, who holds the air picture that would cue the platform, and who would hold the arm key. The requirements, the permissive chain and the siting follow from those four answers.
The line is on CDNS UAV Platforms, the round on Goose CS-110, the capture nose on Encapsulator CS-111. The hazard register and the interlock chain are on Safety on the launch line, and the loop from cue to reload on The engagement. Every enquiry is screened, supply is subject to Canadian government permits issued per shipment, and the reply comes in writing, from a person.
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.
