Air · Autonomous cruise missile family
Poltergeist
One airframe. Three ranges. The mission decided on the flight line.
Mission
The suffix is the range in nautical miles. Nothing else about the round is fixed at the factory.
POLTERGEIST is a family of low-cost, additively manufactured autonomous cruise missiles built on one common 13-inch bus. Seeker, effect and fuel are traded by the crew at the flight line in eighteen minutes with a torque wrench and a laptop. One stock number covers ISR, decoy and strike, which means the round in the magazine is always the round the mission needs — not the round somebody guessed at six months ago.
The airframe is 214 parts including the seeker, against roughly 1,900 for a legacy cruise missile, and 4.1 touch hours to assemble. It flies at 200 feet or at 25,000, it navigates without GPS, and twenty-four of them fly as one flight sharing a single track picture over REVENANT MESH.
Key figures
Specification
Three configurations of one missile
The three suffixes are three fuel-plug lengths on a common bus. Every other difference in the table follows from that one decision.
| Parameter | -150 | -500 | -1200 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Range | 150 nm | 500 nm | 1,200 nm |
| Length | 8.9 ft | 12.4 ft | 15.8 ft |
| Span, deployed | 5.1 ft | 7.4 ft | 9.6 ft |
| Body diameter | 13.0 in | 13.0 in | 13.0 in |
| Launch weight | 310 lb | 640 lb | 1,180 lb |
| Traded payload | 35 lb | 110 lb | 220 lb |
| Fuel | 78 lb | 240 lb | 520 lb |
| Propulsion | 55 lbf turbojet | 120 lbf turbojet | 240 lbf turbofan |
| Cruise / dash | 0.55 / 0.72 M | 0.60 / 0.75 M | 0.65 / 0.80 M |
| Endurance | 38 min | 2.1 h | 4.4 h |
| Unit cost at rate | $68k | $155k | $340k |
| Primary structure | Laser powder-bed AlSi10Mg, 4 printed parts, no fasteners in the primary load path |
|---|---|
| Wings | Printed continuous-carbon-fiber, deploy on release |
| Total part count | 214 including the seeker |
| Assembly labor | 4.1 touch hours |
| Cruise altitude band | 200 ft AGL to 25,000 ft |
| Terminal CEP | Under 2.0 m, seeker dependent |
| Navigation | Inertial, terrain-referenced and scene matching. GPS optional, never required. |
| Autonomy | REVENANT CORE on a 40 W node, full mission model resident |
| Datalink | REVENANT MESH, round to round. Operates fully mesh-denied. |
| Launch | Tube, rail, ground box, air (WRAITH mission bay, SPECTER hardpoint, C-130 palletized), sea (STYX mission deck) |
| Storage | 10 years sealed. No periodic maintenance, no propellant re-certification. |
| Rate | 12,000 per year combined from FORGE-1 |
| Section | Options |
|---|---|
| Nose / seeker | EO/MWIR with onboard ATR, passive terminal · mmW radar, active terminal · wideband passive RF homing, anti-radiation · ISR nose with SIGINT receiver and EO, no terminal guidance |
| Effect | Multi-mode blast-frag, 22 / 60 / 120 lb by airframe · tandem shaped charge · inert ballast for decoy and ISR · submunition dispenser, -1200 only |
| Fuel plug | Sets the suffix. -150, -500 and -1200 are three plug lengths on the same bus. |
| Build standard | Expendable — printed primary structure, one stock number across ISR, decoy and strike, qualified to 4.4 h. · ISR-R, recoverable — wrought machined spar and carry-through, qualified to 40 flights, ram-air parafoil recovery to a guided point. A separate stock number, deliberately: reuse is a material decision, not a fit. |
Concept of operations
Inventory, not variants
A magazine of POLTERGEIST is a magazine of one thing. What it becomes is decided after the tasking arrives, not two quarters before it.
Four phases
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Magazine
A ship, a battery or a hardened site holds N identical sealed canisters. There is no ISR inventory and no strike inventory. There is inventory.
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Configure
Six ISR noses with inert ballast, twelve EO/ATR noses with 60 lb blast-frag, six passive-RF noses for the emitters. Eighteen minutes each, in parallel across three crews. Every configuration is signed into LEDGER as it is built.
-
Fly as one
Twenty-four rounds launch as a single flight and share one fused picture over REVENANT MESH. ISR rounds go first and high, strike rounds follow low. If six are shot down, the remainder re-derive the target assignment among themselves — no operator, no ground station, no reachback.
-
Mesh denial
When MESH is jammed, each round falls back to its own resident mission model and its own pre-signed authorization. It does not loiter waiting for instructions and it does not prosecute anything outside its token. That is the entire REVENANT thesis expressed in a $68,000 airframe.
Engineering rationale
Why it is built this way
Three decisions, and the price we agreed to pay for each one.
Modularity at the flight line, not the factory
Factory modularity buys a cheaper production line. Flight-line modularity buys a magazine that adapts faster than resupply can. In a fight where tasking changes daily and sealift takes weeks, that is the difference between having rounds and having useful rounds. The tradeoff: keyed connectors, self-identifying modules and a signed manifest cost weight and unit price — about 9 lb and roughly $4,000 a round. It is the cheapest capability on the missile.
Printed primary structure
Four printed parts carry the entire primary load path, with no fasteners in it. That collapses part count to 214 and assembly to 4.1 touch hours, which is what makes 12,000 rounds a year credible on one line. The tradeoff: laser powder-bed aluminum has materially more scatter in high-cycle fatigue than wrought. On a one-way weapon with a 4.4 hour maximum life that is acceptable and we have qualified to it. It also sets the build standard: the strike round is printed, one-way, and cheap enough to spend. The ISR-R fit is a different airframe — wrought machined spar and wing carry-through, qualified to 40 flights — recovered under a ram-air parafoil to a GPS/INS-guided point with a crushable nose. Same tube, same ejector, same 13-inch bus. You do not reuse a printed airframe qualified to 4.4 hours; you build the reusable one out of the material that supports reuse.
One bus diameter
Thirteen inches across all three ranges means one tube, one ejector, one handling fixture and one set of ground support equipment for the whole family, on any launcher from a WRAITH bay to a STYX deck. The tradeoff: the -1200 is aerodynamically compromised by a diameter chosen for the -150 — about 6% of cruise lift-to-drag against a clean-sheet long-range round. A logistician who stocks one tube instead of three will forgive 6%.
Program candor
Open engineering risks
Four things we know are wrong, or unproven, or both.
Four of them
- Additive fatigue scatter. Acceptable for a one-way weapon, disqualifying for a reusable one — which is why the recoverable ISR-R fit does not use the printed load path. Two build standards, one bus. The strike round is never sold as reusable.
- The flight-line trade is only as good as the crew. Keyed connectors and signed manifests stop most errors. A determined crew can still build a bad round. The mitigation is that the ledger will say precisely who built it.
- The -1200 unit price is the softest number we publish. A 240 lbf turbofan inside a $340,000 all-up round is aggressive. Propulsion is 44% of that cost and it is where the estimate will move.
- Low-altitude penetration in complex terrain. Terrain-referenced navigation at 200 ft AGL in a mountainous littoral is where cruise missiles die. Our test data is over CONUS terrain that is easier than the terrain we advertise for.
What launches it and what finds the target
All air systemsEffects & munitions
Talk to the program
Seeker performance, terminal accuracy and effects data are discussed in a cleared facility. Start here and we will arrange it.
Every figure on this page is a design target derived from first-principles analysis, not a measured result. No POLTERGEIST has been built or flown. Where a number here is later measured and comes out worse, we will publish the measured number. No export-controlled information is published on this site.