This is the loop a launch platform runs on every shot: a cue taken over a wire, a laying solution checked against the mount, a human arm action, a pneumatic release, then a reload. A person authorizes every shot. What leaves the tube is a carrier, never a munition.
The same six stages run whether the round is Goose CS-110, Encapsulator CS-111 or CS-120 on its own launcher, and the same rule sits over all six: nothing moves without a person's word.
A launch platform runs the same sequence for every shot, whichever round is in the breech. A cue arrives, the mount lays onto it, a person arms the system, the valve fires, the flight is assessed, and the platform reloads for the next one. Each stage is set out in full below, in the order it runs. Six stages, one direction, and one rule that never moves: authority runs downward from a person at every step, never upward from a cue.
Bearing, range and height arrive over a wire, from a fire-control interface or entered by hand.
The mount computes a point-mass solution and checks it against its own travel limits before it moves.
A named person turns a key. The control system alone moves from SAFE to ARMED; nothing on the round changes.
The breech valve opens for under 5 ms and stays open only as long as the stroke needs.
The round is gone the moment it clears the muzzle. What happens at the target is read on the customer's own sensors, not the launcher's.
The tube clears, the breech resets, and the accumulator recharges for the next cue.
The cue is the one thing that reaches the launcher from outside it: three numbers, delivered over a wire, or typed in by a person standing at the console.
Bearing, range and height are the whole of a cue. They reach the launcher's own fire-control interface over a wire, from the customer's own detection and tracking systems, or a person standing at the console enters the same three numbers by hand. What sits on the other end of that wire is never built here: the launcher accepts three numbers and nothing else about the link that carried them.
A cue is a permissive, never a command. It can start a lay. It cannot arm the system and it cannot fire it — those are separate acts, gated separately, and a partner's signal can never reach past the lay into either one. Nothing about a cue arrives over the air: no radio carries it, matching the doctrine that holds across this whole fleet, that nothing aboard transmits by radio.
Once a cue is accepted, the launcher works out where to point itself, leads a moving target, and checks the answer against its own limits before it moves.
The laying solution is a point-mass calculation: given the cue's bearing, range and height, the launcher works out where the tube must point to put the round where the cue said the target would be, and leads the solution forward when the target is moving. The mount finds its own zero from an absolute encoder at power-up, and carries a stored boresight offset that ties its bore reference to its own cueing optic, so the solution it computes is checked against where the tube is actually pointing, not only where the mount thinks it is.
Every solution is checked against the mount's own travel before it is accepted: ±170° in azimuth, −3° to +75° in elevation. A solution outside that envelope is not clipped to the nearest limit — it is refused, and the sequence stops at the lay rather than carrying a bad number forward into the arm.
Loading is mechanical and arming is a person's act, and the two are never the same step.
The magazine feeds a round forward to the breech, and the breech closes around it. Nothing about that step is armed, because there is nothing on a Goose CS-110 or Encapsulator CS-111 round to arm: no warhead, no fuze, no initiator, no propellant of its own. What is loaded is a moulded body and its fins, sitting in a tube.
What follows is not the round changing state. It is the launcher's own control system moving from SAFE to ARMED, and that step belongs to a person, not to the round.
Arming checks six conditions before the control system grants it, and a person turns a key to ask for it each time — the key is re-set after every shot, never left standing. A human arm action is mandatory for every shot. A partner's cue can start a lay; it can never bypass the interlock chain the arm state depends on, and it can never reach the arm key or the valve on its own.
Once arm and lay both stand, fire is a single pneumatic release: a valve, a stroke, and a round already moving before the sound reaches anyone nearby.
Fire is the breech valve opening, on a normally-closed solenoid that stays closed until both arm and lay have been granted. It opens in under 5 ms and delivers the stroke the round in the breech is built for. On the Goose CS-110 and Encapsulator CS-111 chain, that stroke runs 28.6 ms down a 3.0 m tube before the round clears the muzzle. CS-120 fires the same way — arm, lay, then a valve opening — on its own heavier launcher and its own bore.
What is released is compressed air, not a chemical charge: there is no propellant to ignite and nothing energetic in the path the valve opens. Once the round is out, the tube still holds pressure — 9.0 bar of residual air is vented at the muzzle before the breech is asked to cycle again, so the reload never starts against a tube that is still working.
| Stage | What happens | Figure |
|---|---|---|
| Valve open | The breech solenoid opens on command. | under 5 ms |
| Time in tube | The round travels the length of the barrel. | 28.6 ms |
| Residual pressure | Air left in the tube after the round clears the muzzle. | 9.0 bar, vented |
The shot, on the Goose CS-110 and Encapsulator CS-111 chain.
The round leaves the tube already stable, and nothing continues to steer it: the launcher aimed it before the valve opened, and the flight from there holds its own line.
The six fins that keep a Goose CS-110 or Encapsulator CS-111 round flying true are fixed and bonded before the round is ever loaded — there is no trim mechanism to deploy and nothing to move once the round is in the air. They are live from the first metre of flight, holding a static margin of 2.01 calibres nose-first along the arc the lay computed. The launcher did the aiming. The round does the flying, on its own shape, and nothing reaches it afterward: no link, no signal, no correction from the ground.
That is the arc for the two rounds sharing this launcher. CS-120 leaves its own launcher under a fibre payout instead, a wire it carries out with it rather than a fixed fin set — a different tier, set out in full on Guidance on this line.
What limits how soon the next cue can be answered is not the breech or the tube. It is how fast the compressor can put the working pressure back.
Once the round is gone and the residual air is vented, the breech itself is ready again almost at once: the same normally-closed solenoid that opened for the shot returns to its default closed state, fail-safe, and the tube has nothing left in it to clear beyond that vented air. A round moves up from the magazine, the breech closes, and the sequence is ready to run again from the cue.
The real limit on the next shot sits upstream of the breech: the compressor has to put the working pressure back into the accumulator before another stroke can be delivered at the same 30 bar the round is built for. Tubes and breeches are fast; recharging the stored energy that drives them is not, and that is the bottleneck this loop runs against — not a mechanism, but the time it takes to move air.
A single exquisite round is not what this loop is for. A magazine that reloads, on a round simple enough to reload cheaply, is.
The case for this design sits in the loop above, not outside it. Goose CS-110 is an unpowered moulded body with six bonded fins and a steel nose — nothing to charge, nothing to program, nothing that ages on a shelf the way a powered round does. That simplicity is what lets the loop on this page run again and again against the same accumulator and the same tube, cue after cue, rather than treating every shot as a single event to be husbanded.
Depth is the argument this line makes against a single answer that has to be right the first time. A launch chain built to reload quickly and cheaply changes the exchange: it is built to be asked for another shot, not to need one shot to carry all of the weight. Encapsulator CS-111 and CS-120 extend the same magazine logic outward — a capture nose where the target needs to come down intact, a heavier powered tier where the geometry calls for one — without changing what the loop underneath them is built to do.
The loop on this page starts at a cue already formed. Everything upstream of that cue — finding, tracking, classifying, deciding — belongs to the systems the customer already runs.
The launch platform's own sensing is narrow by design: a pressure transducer that reads the accumulator's stored energy, and a boresight reference that ties the tube to the mount's own aim point. It carries no radar, no command-and-control node and no EO/IR sensor of its own for finding a target. Detection, tracking and classification are the customer's own systems, built and operated by the customer, and the decision to cue this launcher is theirs to make.
What crosses into the launcher from those systems is the cue described earlier on this page — bearing, range, height — arriving over a wire as a permissive, never as a command that can arm or fire anything on its own. The launcher's part of the engagement starts at the lay and ends at the reload; everything that decides what gets cued sits on the customer's side of that wire.
The slim rods on the receiver deck and on the pedestal head are not radio aerials. Nothing Canadian Shield builds for this line transmits by radio.
Where a launch platform goes is decided by what the round can do once it leaves the tube, and by how far the mount itself can swing to meet a cue.
A launch platform is sited to the same two things that govern everything else on this page: the mount's own travel, ±170° in azimuth and −3° to +75° in elevation, and the flight the round is built to make once it leaves the tube — the quadrant range table on Goose CS-110's own page, with the drag assumption stated in the same block it comes from. Coverage is planned outward from those two limits, not assumed.
The rest of siting is ordinary ground-equipment planning, carried over from Safety on the launch line: firm, level ground under the skid or the pedestal's levelling base, a clear path for the cue to reach the fire-control interface, and the exclusion zone the charging and armed states require, marked on the ground and not only on a screen.
Two kinds of reader come to this page: the one who has to sign off on the sequence, and the one who has to be able to say, in writing, where it stops.
The conversation starts with a screened enquiry and the systems you already run for detection and tracking. Nothing on this page is an offer.
Bring the sensors and the command chain you already operate, and the ground you would site a launch platform on. Every enquiry is screened before any discussion; supply is subject to Canadian export permits issued per shipment, and export posture is counsel-first.
The line as a whole is on the CDNS UAV Platforms hub. The launcher itself, its pneumatic chain and its configurations are on The launch platform. The interlock chain, the exclusion zones and the hazard register are on Safety on the launch line. Where each guidance tier sits in this loop is on Guidance on this line.
Nothing on this page is an offer, a commitment or a representation to any government body. Patent pending. International transfer is subject to Canadian government permits taken per shipment; export posture is counsel-first.
