Veil
Soldier-borne mission command · 620 g
When the radio dies, the picture does not. It gets older, visibly, and every symbol tells the soldier exactly how old it is.
Design
Mission
Give a dismount the battalion's picture — and keep it there when he is jammed
A picture that arrives over a network leaves with the network. VEIL is built the other way around: the link is a source of updates, never the source of the picture.
VEIL runs REVENANT CORE on the soldier's own compute. The mission plan, the rules of engagement, a 40 × 40 km terrain and structure model at 1 m posting with a route graph, the last consolidated red track file, and a local classifier all live on a puck at the back of his head. When the link goes, VEIL keeps rendering, keeps dead-reckoning, keeps generating new tracks from its own sensors, and keeps talking peer-to-peer to anything within reach.
The mass is 620 g for the entire worn system — optic, sensors, compute and battery. Not the weight of the glasses with the interesting parts left off. The arithmetic, including the thermal and battery arithmetic that does not flatter us, is below.
Key figures
The whole product
What happens when the radio dies
The link is the cheapest thing on a battlefield to take away. The minute after it goes is the design case, and VEIL does four things in it.
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01
It keeps rendering
Terrain, route, objectives, phase lines, boundaries, ROE overlays and the no-strike list are all resident on the puck. None of them came from a network and none of them leave when it does.
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02
It keeps dead-reckoning
Last-known red tracks continue to propagate on their last-observed course and speed, inside a confidence ellipse that grows as the estimate decays.
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03
It keeps generating
Anything the soldier's own LWIR and low-light sensors see becomes a new local track, classified on the puck, rendered immediately, and hash-chained. Disconnection does not stop him producing intelligence.
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04
It keeps talking
MESH is peer-to-peer with no master. A VEIL within 400 m of another VEIL, a MARROW, a CAIRN or a VIGIL is not disconnected — it is on a small network instead of a big one, merging pictures with whatever it can reach.
| During the blackout | Every observation and every action is hash-chained on the puck against the soldier's own identity key |
|---|---|
| Back in coverage | The whole disconnected period reconciles into the battalion picture in order, signed, with its original timestamps |
| Not a bulk upload | It is a verifiable chain a staff officer, an investigator or a court can walk through |
| The after-action review | Not a reconstruction. A replay. |
| If he never reconnects | The chain is recoverable from the puck itself — the record does not depend on the merge ever happening |
The hard numbers, part one
620 g, itemised — and why 266 is the number that matters
| Optic module | 96 g — 2 × waveguide combiner, 2 × µLED light engine, 40° × 30° binocular |
|---|---|
| Sensor head | 112 g — 2 × LWIR 1024 × 768 12 µm, 2 × low-light CMOS, 1 × global-shutter tracking stereo pair, IMU, magnetometer |
| Shroud, mount, hinge, cabling | 58 g |
| Head-borne subtotal | 266 g |
| Nape puck — compute | 152 g — edge SoC + inference accelerator, 128 GB LPDDR, 2 TB NVMe, thermal spreader |
| Nape puck — battery | 178 g |
| Cable, connectors, MESH antenna | 24 g |
| Nape subtotal | 354 g |
| Total worn | 620 g |
The compute is a counterweight, not a burden
Head-borne mass is 266 g. The other 354 g sits at the nape, behind the head's rotation axis, where it acts as a counterweight rather than as a load.
A bare combat helmet with an NVG mount and a monocular sits with its centre of gravity roughly 22 mm forward of the neutral axis, which is what produces the neck fatigue everyone complains about. VEIL's 354 g at the nape moves the combined centre of gravity 8 mm rearward of a bare helmet with a mount. The soldier is carrying more mass and less moment.
This is why the puck is not on the plate carrier. On the carrier it is dead weight. At the nape it is doing structural work.
The hard numbers, part two
Thermal and battery reality
Both of these are constraints we do not close cleanly. Here is what actually happens, in what order, and what a soldier gets instead.
Thermal
The puck dissipates 8.5 W average and 17 W peak into a 152 g aluminium-magnesium spreader worn against the back of a soldier's neck, under a helmet, over body armour, on a person whose skin is already at 36–38 °C.
| Natural convection | 0.011 m² of exposed fin at a 15 K rise, h ≈ 8 W/m²K → 1.3 W. Nowhere near enough. |
|---|---|
| Conduction into the wearer | Real, but the wearer is at 36 °C — and when ambient is 45 °C the wearer is not a heat sink |
| Forced convection from motion | A walking soldier sees ~1.2 m/s of relative air. 0.02 m² of anodised fin at h ≈ 22 W/m²K and a 20 K rise → 8.8 W. This closes at 8.5 W. |
| Therefore | The design closes only when the soldier is moving, or when ambient is below about 35 °C |
A 3 mm silicone standoff and a fabric cover sit between the fin and the wearer, because the fin surface reaches 65 °C in that condition and it is against a person.
Battery
The temptation is to quote 62 Wh in 178 g. That is 348 Wh/kg, and no ruggedised, fused, drop-rated, safety-cased pack achieves it.
The arithmetic: high-nickel 21700 cells at 250 Wh/kg cell-level × 0.78 pack factor for case, BMS, fusing, fault containment and drop protection = 195 Wh/kg at pack level. 178 g of pack is therefore 34.7 Wh. Not 62.
| Compute + inference | 8.5 W |
|---|---|
| Sensors | 3.1 W — 2 × LWIR, 2 × CMOS, tracking stereo, IMU |
| Displays | 1.9 W |
| MESH radio | 2.4 W, receive-heavy duty cycle |
| Total | 15.9 W |
| Internal pack, full rate | 2.2 h |
|---|---|
| Internal, overwatch mode | 5.7 h — display dimmed, tracker at 1 Hz, 6.1 W |
| On a 150 Wh conformal wearable battery | 9.4 h |
| Hot swap | Under 4 s with one gloved hand; the puck holds state on a 90 s supercapacitor bridge, so a swap is not a reboot |
Specification
Parameters
Design targets, not measured results, unless the line says otherwise.
| Display | Binocular waveguide, 40° H × 30° V, 1080 × 1200 per eye, 90 Hz |
|---|---|
| Emitter | µLED, two-colour (530 nm / 630 nm), 3,000 cd/m² to the eye |
| Colour, stated plainly | Full-colour µLED at this pixel pitch, brightness and mass is not fieldable today. Friendly forces render as an outline convention, not a blue fill. Full colour is on the roadmap; it is not on the product. |
| Day legibility | Legible against a 10,000 cd/m² desert scene behind a 0.6-transmission tinted visor |
| Motion to photon | 18 ms |
| Head tracking | VIO on the stereo pair + 1,000 Hz IMU. 0.3°/min uncorrected drift, re-registered against the terrain model. |
| Night sensors | 2 × LWIR 1024 × 768, 12 µm, 60 Hz; 2 × low-light CMOS to 0.7 mlux |
| Eye safety | Class 1 emitter. Flip-up architecture, so a failed display never occludes an eye. |
| Compute | Edge SoC + inference accelerator, 8.5 W average / 17 W peak, 128 GB LPDDR, 2 TB NVMe |
|---|---|
| Resident mission model | 26 GB per 40 × 40 km area of operations — terrain at 1 m posting, structures, route graph, ROE, plan, last consolidated track file. 77 areas fit on the NVMe. |
| Radio | REVENANT MESH on a conformal antenna; pairs to the soldier's issue radio for long haul |
| Power | 34.7 Wh internal → 2.2 h full rate; 9.4 h on a 150 Wh conformal wearable battery |
| Mount | Standard 3-hole shroud — ACH, IHPS, standard helmet shroud. Flip-up. Quick-release in under 2 s with one gloved hand. |
| Weapon pairing | Rail sight or laser over a short wired or UWB link; boresighted aim cue in the HUD at 9 ms |
| Environmental | MIL-STD-810H, IP68 (2 m / 2 h), −32 °C to +55 °C operating, 40 g shock |
| Autonomy | REVENANT CORE resident; LEDGER chain on the puck against the soldier's identity key |
| Unit cost target | $28,500 per set at 20,000/yr from FORGE-1 |
Concept of operations
Six phases
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Phase 01 — Load out
Ninety seconds at the patrol base
The area of operations loads over a wired link — 26 GB in about ninety seconds. The soldier's identity key is provisioned to the puck and the LEDGER chain opens.
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Phase 02 — Movement
Full rate, or all day on the conformal battery
Route, phase lines and boundaries rendered on the terrain. Blue force from MESH, red force from whatever is reaching him, LWIR fusion at 30 Hz. 2.2 h internal, 9.4 h on the pack he already carries.
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Phase 03 — Contact
One control, one signed track
The rail sight's aim cue appears boresighted in the HUD. The soldier marks a contact with a single control; the mark becomes a signed track visible to the squad, to MARROW, to CAIRN's cue queue and to PALL — in 30 ms if the mesh is up, and locally if it is not.
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Phase 04 — Jammed
The link drops. The picture does not.
It starts ageing, visibly, honestly. He keeps his terrain, his route, his ROE and his own sensors. He can still cue a CAIRN 8 km away if any node between them is reachable, because MESH has no master.
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Phase 05 — Handoff
Authorisation carries an identity
The squad leader hands a target to CAIRN or a route to MARROW directly from the HUD. The authorisation carries his signed identity and is written to LEDGER before the effector acts.
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Phase 06 — Reconcile
The AAR is a replay, not a reconstruction
Back in coverage, the disconnected chain merges in order with its original timestamps. Nobody has to remember what happened. It is signed.
Engineering rationale
Why it is built this way
Compute at the nape
It is the only place on a soldier where 354 g does structural work instead of being a burden. The tradeoff: a hot component pressed against a person, which is why the throttle behaviour is published rather than buried.
CORE local, not streamed
The entire premise of the land domain is that the link is already cut. Everything needed to render the fight — plan, ROE, terrain, track file, classifier — is on the puck before the soldier steps off. The tradeoff: 8.5 W of continuous inference on a soldier's head, which is the source of every thermal and battery constraint on this page.
Two colours honestly
Rather than full colour dishonestly. Green and red, with friendly rendered as an outline convention. The tradeoff: a symbology convention soldiers have to be taught, in exchange for a light engine that is fieldable at 96 g and 3,000 cd/m².
Symbol age on every track
The rendering decision with the highest consequence in the product. A stale picture that says it is stale is a weapon. The tradeoff: a display that shows its own uncertainty looks busier and less confident than one that does not, which is a demo problem and a battlefield advantage.
Flip-up, always
A failed display must never be an occluded eye. This is not a preference, it is a design rule. The tradeoff: a hinge, 58 g of shroud, and a mechanical failure mode we have to qualify to 40 g shock.
Published throttle behaviour
A soldier needs to know what his system stops doing when it gets hot, and in what order. The tradeoff: a customer will benchmark us on a hot range while standing still — the one condition where the design does not close — and we will have to explain it every time.
Program candor
Open engineering risks
- Thermal is the hard constraint and it is unforgiving. A stationary soldier at 45 °C in body armour is the design case that does not close. We throttle. The residual risk is that a customer benchmarks the system on a hot range while standing still and concludes it is slow.
- 2.2 hours internal will be quoted without the conformal battery. It always will be. We publish both numbers everywhere and accept the headline damage.
- Waveguide yield. Two-colour binocular waveguides at 40° × 30° with acceptable uniformity and ghosting are a yield problem, and yield problems are cost problems at 20,000 units a year. This is the largest cost risk in the program.
- Symbol staleness is a training problem before it is a display problem. A soldier who has never operated with a decaying picture will over-trust an eight-minute-old symbol the first time. The convention has to be taught, and taught early, or the honest display becomes a dishonest one inside the wearer's head.
- Head-borne mass creep. 266 g is achievable and 320 g is what it becomes the moment anyone adds a sensor. The budget is defended the same way VIGIL defends its 92 W: by refusing requests.
- Vergence-accommodation conflict and motion sickness. 18 ms motion-to-photon is good; it is not zero. A fraction of the population will not tolerate a see-through binocular display while moving, and we do not yet know how large that fraction is. It should be measured before fielding, not after.
Related
What it commands and what feeds it
Contact
Jam us on your range
The only demonstration of this product that means anything is the one where you cut the link. Bring your electronic warfare team, your ambient temperature and the conformal batteries in your unit's basic load, and watch what the display does over the next forty minutes of disconnection.
Every figure on this page is a design target derived from first-principles analysis, not a measured result. No VEIL system has been built. 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.