Air · Man-portable strike and recon
Shade
Two in the pack. Eight seconds from pack to airborne.
Mission
SHADE is the squad's own air force.
A 4.1 lb folding quadrotor that a rifleman carries as a secondary weapon, pulls from a pack side pocket, unfolds and throws — eight seconds from stowed to airborne. No launcher, no tripod, no catapult, no GPS lock. It exists so that no dismounted element ever again walks into a building, a treeline or a wadi it has not looked at first.
-R carries a stabilized electro-optical and thermal head and looks. -M carries a 1.9 lb selectable warhead and finishes. Both fly the tasked mission with the radio jammed, because in the environment these are used in, the radio is jammed.
Key figures
Specification
SHADE-R and SHADE-M parameters
Group 2 by employment and sustainment; Group 1 by gross weight. We publish both, because the sustainment pipeline cares about the first and the airspace authority cares about the second.
| Parameter | SHADE-R — recon | SHADE-M — munition |
|---|---|---|
| Base airframe weight | 4.1 lb | 4.1 lb |
| All-up weight | 4.7 lb | 6.0 lb |
| Folded envelope | 12.4 × 6.1 × 3.9 in | 12.4 × 6.1 × 4.6 in |
| Endurance | 52 min | 41 min |
| Operating radius | 12.5 nm (23 km) | 12.5 nm; 22 nm one-way |
| Cruise / dash | 38 / 62 kt | 38 / 62 kt |
| Ceiling | 12,000 ft density altitude | 12,000 ft DA |
| Wind, sustained / gust | 25 kt / 35 kt | 25 kt / 35 kt |
| Payload | 0.6 lb gimbaled EO, 20× continuous zoom, plus 640 × 512 LWIR | 1.9 lb multipurpose warhead |
| Effect | — | Selectable in flight: 25 mm RHA penetration shaped, or 8 m fragmentation radius |
| Acoustic detection | 120 m at 40 dBA ambient | 120 m |
| Comms | 2 W MIMO mesh, 2.4 / 5.2 GHz plus a 900 MHz penetration bearer, frequency hopping | |
| Link range | 12.5 nm line of sight; 2.1 nm urban non-line-of-sight | |
| Autonomy | REVENANT CORE-Lite, resident on the flight controller | |
| Compute | 1.8 W dual-core R-class MCU (deterministic flight and ROE) plus a 2.9 W NPU (perception and ATR), one board | |
| Launch | Hand-launch from a standing start, 8 s from pack. Visual-inertial alignment, no GPS lock required. | |
| Soldier load | 2 aircraft + controller = 11.3 lb | 2 aircraft + controller = 13.9 lb |
| Controller | 1.9 lb handheld, or run directly from VEIL soldier-borne mission command | |
| Unit cost at rate | $19.6k | $27.4k |
| Rate | 40,000 per year combined from FORGE-1 | |
Concept of operations
One rifleman, one aircraft, one decision
The link is treated as an accelerant, never as a dependency. That assumption shapes all four phases.
Four phases
-
Launch
Pull from the pack side pocket, unfold four arms, throw. Eight seconds. Initial alignment is visual-inertial off ground texture, so there is no GPS wait and no launcher to carry or emplace.
-
Look
SHADE-R flies a route or an orbit and streams electro-optical and thermal to the handheld or to VEIL. On link loss it continues the tasked route, completes the collection to onboard memory, and returns. The soldier does not lose the mission because he lost the radio.
-
Designate or strike
SHADE-R designates for SHADE-M, for a CAIRN node, or for indirect fire. SHADE-M prosecutes under an ROE token that names the target class and the geofence and is signed before launch.
-
Terminal integrity
If the link is cut inside six seconds of impact, SHADE-M either completes the attack on its last known good lock or aborts to a pre-designated impact point chosen before launch. It never terminates on a random point of the earth. That behavior lives in the deterministic lane and cannot be overridden by the operator, by the perception stack, or by a software load pushed in the field.
Engineering rationale
Why it is built this way
The whole product is one board-level partitioning decision, made before anything was ever flown.
One board, not two
The conventional way to put meaningful autonomy on a small UAS is two computers: a flight controller that flies the aircraft, and a companion computer that runs perception, target recognition and rules of engagement. Two computers means two boards, two power conditioning chains, two thermal paths, a connector between them and, usually, a second battery.
REVENANT CORE-Lite runs on the flight controller. One board: a 1.8 W dual-core R-class MCU carrying the deterministic flight and ROE lanes, plus a 2.9 W NPU carrying perception and ATR, sharing one power tree and one heat spreader.
That saves 0.9 lb on a 4.1 lb aircraft. On this airframe, 0.9 lb is either eleven minutes of endurance or 0.9 lb of warhead. It is not a software trick. It is a partitioning decision made at board level, and it is the entire reason SHADE carries a full rules-of-engagement engine to 12.5 nm at a sub-1 lb payload penalty.
Program candor
Open engineering risks
Four limits, published as measured rather than as hoped.
Four of them
- Wind. 25 kt sustained is a real limit, not a conservative one. Above it the aircraft flies, but the gimbal will not hold a target and the endurance figures do not apply.
- Thermal throttling above 45 °C. About 30% of ATR frame rate in a sustained hover. The board respin that fixes it is not flying yet.
- Acoustics. 120 m detection at 40 dBA ambient is quiet for the class and it is still audible. We do not claim a silent aircraft. A quadrotor moves air, and moving air makes noise.
- Battery logistics. Forty thousand aircraft a year is a lithium supply chain problem before it is an aircraft problem, and it is on the critical path for FORGE-1 rate.
What it works with
All air systemsDismounted programs
Put two in the pack
Unit trials, VEIL integration and effects data. 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 SHADE 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.