A deployable production cell: feedstock in, proven carrier rounds out, in-country. An allied nation moulds, assembles and proves its own Goose CS-110 airframes on its own floor, from its own feedstock, on dies cut in Canada. Fire control, seekers and guidance electronics stay here.
Every allied counter-UAS stockpile shares one failure mode: it arrives by ship. A transoceanic supply line is a queue, a chokepoint and a dependency, and in a long war it is the first thing that breaks.
The Forward Manufacturing Cell answers that failure mode by moving the factory instead of the freight. Rather than exporting finished Goose CS-110 carrier rounds, Canadian Shield exports a containerized slice of the production stack that makes them: moulding, assembly and proof on the buyer's own floor, fed by the buyer's own feedstock, cut against dies from the division's own 5-axis shop.
The round is cheap by design. What is decisive is the line that pours them out. The cell moves the magazine's source to the magazine's user, and keeps the intelligence of the system at home.
This is the manufacturing argument carried to its conclusion. Manufacturing is where Canadian Shield holds its structural advantage: an owned 5-axis shop that cuts its own moulds and collapses the industry's eight-week mould lead time to shop hours. The cell aims that advantage outward and leaves the tooling art where it was built.
A round that crosses an ocean costs its price plus its passage, and arrives on someone else's schedule. A round moulded an hour from its launcher costs its resin and its royalty.
Five stations, in order, inside containerized modules. Pellets arrive at the first and a serialized round leaves the last, and every station is fixtured so the round comes out the same way on any crew.
Feedstock is the sovereignty argument in material form. A stockpile that is imported can be embargoed, sunk or simply delayed. A feedstock stream collected at home cannot. The materials boundary travels with the cell as process doctrine: recycled content where it is right, qualified resin where structure depends on it. Structural parts are moulded glass-filled nylon, and recycled PET is strictly non-structural.
Skill lives in the tooling rather than in the operator. Fixtures locate, augers meter, and torque is set by the jig, so a trained local crew runs the station and the fixtures guarantee the round. What comes off the bench is a moulded polymer carrier with a dumb mass in its nose. There are no electronics to install, no seeker to align and nothing to arm.
The launcher is pneumatic, and the proof shot is a burst of air into a backstop metres away. No propellant is burned because no propellant exists, in the round, in the launcher or in the building. A round that passes gauge, balance and lane gets its serial. One that fails goes back to the regrind bin at Station 01.
Every proven round is serialized against the cell's production ledger, the same ledger that meters the per-round licence on Canadian Shield's design IP and schedules calibration, consumables and die rotation. For the buyer that ledger is sovereignty made auditable: they can show any inspector exactly what was made, when, and from what. For Canada it is the licence made enforceable. One book serves both flags, by design.
| Station | What happens there | What leaves it |
|---|---|---|
| 01 · Feedstock | Qualified resin pellets, or local recycled PET reclaimed, flaked and dried on the intake line. | Dried, blended feedstock |
| 02 · Mould | Injection and blow moulding shoot the Goose CS-110 body and fin shells on Canadian-Shield-cut dies. | Moulded polymer body shells and fins |
| 03 · Assemble | Body, fins and kinetic nose mass brought together on Canadian Shield fixtures and feed augers. | A moulded polymer carrier with an inert mass in its nose |
| 04 · Prove | Dimensional QA, mass-and-balance, then an indoor proof-fire lane driven by compressed shop air. | A round that passed gauge, balance and lane, or a reject to the regrind bin at Station 01 |
| 05 · Account | Serialization, production-licence accounting, and the schedule for calibration, consumables and die rotation. | A serial on the cell's production ledger |
The launcher is pneumatic. No propellant is burned at any station, because no propellant exists in the process.
The cell exports the low-tech, non-explosive part of the system, and nothing else, in any configuration, for any customer.
What travels with a cell.
What stays in Canada.
The dies are the fourth thing that stays. Moulds wear by design, and a worn die goes home to be re-cut on the same 5-axis machines that made it. The buyer runs the press. Canada keeps the tooling art. That split is deliberate and it is permanent.
Nothing in the fleet transmits by radio and nothing guides on a link. There is no radio and no GPS in any Canadian Shield design, and on the round the cell moulds that is literal: no battery, no motor and no onboard guidance electronics. The CDNS UAV Platforms page carries the round and its launch chain, and Technology carries the guidance doctrine across all four domains.
The round the cell makes is an inert moulded carrier, and everything that makes it a weapon system stays in Canada. The fence is what makes the transfer possible.
Every figure on this page shows the cell as designed, station by station: feedstock, mould, assemble, prove, account.
The pad, the container row, the aisle and the proof lane come out of one 3D model, drawn at true metres.
The cell is commissioned as one capital program on the buyer's floor: containerized stations, fixtures, presses, the proof lane and the ledger, standing up as a single line.
The power that matters at the far end of the line is compressed shop air. It drives the proof-fire lane, and it is the same air that launches the Goose CS-110 in service. Nothing at the proof bench burns.
The crew is local, and the cell is designed for that. Skill lives in the tooling rather than in the operator, so a trained crew runs the stations and the fixtures guarantee the round. Calibration, upgrades and process support run through the service line for the life of the cell.
Containerized heavy plant is known ground for this group. A self-contained, containerized industrial platform built to work in the field is, in engineering terms, a rig, and the group has spent three decades designing and operating mobile horizontal-directional-drilling rigs up to 1,000,000 lb. What is new is what the rig makes, not that it is heavy mobile plant.
A cell makes the low-tech, non-explosive end of the Goose line: moulded polymer airframes, and the shop-air pneumatic launchers that fire them.
What comes off the line is a complete Tier 1 round: polymer body, fins and inert nose mass, moulded on the buyer's floor and assembled around the shop-air pneumatic launcher. The Goose CS-110 is a moulded airframe of 1.6 kg with no battery, no motor and no onboard guidance electronics. Its path is computed before launch, and nothing guides it in flight.
The absence is what makes the round exportable, and what makes it cheap. There is nothing on board to jam, spoof or shock-harden, and nothing that has to survive the launch pulse. Depth of magazine is a manufacturing property, and the cell is how an ally gets it.
A new airframe in the family is a new mould family rather than a new factory. Because the dies are cut on machines Canadian Shield owns, a fin change or a wall-thickness fix is a re-cut insert and a shot, not a supplier qualification cycle.
A cell is controlled technology. International transfer requires Government of Canada permits, issued per shipment.
Every enquiry is screened before any discussion. The first exchange establishes who is asking, on whose authority, and for what capacity. Controlled Goods Program status is disclosed to qualified enquiries.
The export posture is counsel-first. Counsel reads the destination, the end use and the order before anything technical moves.
Permits are issued by the Government of Canada, per shipment, against that specific order.
Capacity, feedstock, siting, crew, and the audit the host's inspectors will want to run. Government and ministries carries what a screened enquiry gets back and how access to a controlled brief escalates from there.
The order matters, because the fence and the permit decide the shape of everything after them. The export boundary is drawn at the airframe and the launcher rather than at a customer's request.
Nothing about a cell crosses a border without a permit. Nothing on this page is an offer, and this site carries no prices.
The cell is a capital program: commissioned once, on one floor. What follows it recurs, and a buyer should plan for it from the first meeting rather than the first re-tool.
Containerised stations, fixtures, presses, the proof lane and the ledger, commissioned as one capital program on the buyer's own floor. It stands up airframe production in-country, and only that.
Dies and moulds wear by design and are re-cut in Alberta on Canadian Shield's own 5-axis machines. Fixtures, augers, launcher seals and qualified resin are specified to the cell and supplied through it.
A per-round production licence on the design IP, accounted at Station 05 on every serial the cell proves, alongside calibration, upgrades and process support for the life of the cell.
A cell that is not re-tooled stops making rounds, and moulds are the wear item. The re-cut runs on machines in Alberta, so a host plans magazine depth against die life rather than against a shipping schedule.
It is also why a cell stays supported. Every cell in service is attached to the same shop floor that cut its first dies, and that connection is what funds the calibration, the process support and the next revision of the tooling. Manufacturing carries that floor: approximately 60,000 ft² of facility, the owned 5-axis machines, and the six stages from design to a finished round.
At home, Canadian Shield's case is that a nation should own its drone supply chain and be able to audit it. The cell hands that exact argument to the buyer, about themselves.
An allied nation running a cell owns its magazine's source: feedstock it collects, rounds it moulds, proof it witnesses, and a ledger it can open to its own auditors and to its allies. There is no transoceanic queue, and no surge-time bidding war for someone else's stockpile.
Dependence does not disappear. It narrows, deliberately, to the things that should stay Canadian: the dies, the design IP and the doctrine. What travels is the ability to make simple things in defensible volume, which is precisely what a partner under drone attack runs out of first.
For an industrial-participation lead, the content is measurable on the host's own floor: a moulding hall, an assembly line, a QA and proof bench, a crew trained to run them, and a feedstock stream the host already collects or can stand up. For the host's auditors, it is the ledger. Sovereignty sets out how Canadian Shield defines control and recoverability across design, software, data, manufacturing, supply chain, service and configuration.
A cell suits a particular buyer and a particular definition of the work. Both are named here so an enquiry opens on the right side of the fence rather than after it.
The fence holds in every direction. A cell makes carriers, and a carrier is not a munition: no warhead, no fuze, no energetic material anywhere in the process and none in the round it produces. What is exported is the ability to mould a simple thing in volume, prove it, and account for it.
If you plan industrial capacity, allied supply or counter-UAS magazine depth, what is worth settling first is what a cell would contain and how far a permit would have to reach.
Tell us the capacity you have to place, the feedstock the host already collects, and the audit the host's inspectors will want to run. The reply names what a cell would contain, what would be made on your floor, what would stay in Canada, and what a Government of Canada permit would have to cover.
Every enquiry is screened before any discussion, and the export posture is counsel-first. Government and ministries is the door for a ministry or an agency. Manufacturing is the shop floor a cell is cut from. The CDNS UAV Platforms page carries the round itself.
The Forward Manufacturing Cell is an engineered, patent-pending system, and it is controlled technology: international transfer requires Government of Canada permits and the export posture is counsel-first. Nothing on this page is an offer, a commitment or a representation to any government body.
