WILDFIRE

WILDFIRE, drawn.

A fully parametric OpenSCAD model — monocoque shell, pusher, V-tail, retractable tricycle gear, faired & guarded EO/IR turret — rendered to a dimensioned plan & profile, four orthographic/iso views, a 13-part exploded assembly, a structural half-section cutaway, and a 360° assembly animation — all generated deterministically from one source file. Concept GA; dimensions are targets [TBR]. ↓ GA source (.scad) · ↓ Assembly source (.scad)

Thirteen subsystems, pulled apart.

The same parametric model, driven by an explode factor — every component separated along its own assembly axis. Internal subsystems are concept massing [TBR].

Half-sectioned, down to the frames.

Watch it come together.

The same geometry, realized.

Each photoreal frame is generated from the CAD render itself (image-to-image) — the model keeps the exact geometry and re-lights it as real hardware. Concept visualization beside the technical drawings above.

Every design decision traces to something he said on that stage.

WILDFIRE isn't inspired by the interview — it's a literal engineering readout of it. Twenty design drivers, each anchored to a verbatim quote with a timestamp.

Launch. Strike. Come home. Re-fly. ×50.

A one-way airframe is the "total folly" Palmer warns against. WILDFIRE flies the entire loop 50+ times — the only thing it ever leaves behind is the munition. Here's the full breakdown.

Lasers. Microwaves. Kinetics. At the same time.

Palmer's insight: any single counter-drone effector is beatable cheaply — but forcing a drone to beat all three at once is "really, really hard." WILDFIRE imposes exactly that problem on the enemy's C-UAS designer.

Every sensor, installed at once.

The full ISR · targeting · EW · threat-warning suite, all fitted simultaneously — best-in-class, US-origin or close-allied, MOSA-modular. This is the no-compromise build. The cost-disciplined fielded baseline tiers down to a mission-kit subset (the 4-sensor designator turret alone is a ~$225k quote); full SWaP-C, alternates, and ITAR notes live in the engineering dossier.

The gimbal that comes home.

A 2-axis stabilized multi-sensor turret under the nose — daylight EO, MWIR thermal, SWIR, laser designator/rangefinder and a spot tracker in one ball. On an expendable drone this dies on every shot; on WILDFIRE it is recessed, ring-guarded, and recovered every sortie.

Skilled American workers, amplified by robots — by the thousand.

Palmer's rule is "buildable in a car factory" — by the people who already work there. WILDFIRE's DFM-simple airframe — stamped steel, rivets, <120 parts — drops onto the existing lines of domestic automakers (Ford · GM · Stellantis), where skilled crews and robots build it side by side: automation takes the dull, dirty and dangerous; people do the skilled assembly, operation and judgment. Retool, don't build greenfield. Domestic first; the allied auto base is the fallback. American jobs, at rate.

From preform to flight-ready, on one line.

Retool an existing automaker body-shop line into an 8-station flow — <120 parts, generous tolerances, model-based digital thread. One line clears ~100+ aircraft/day; surge to ≥1,000/day across ~9 lines and ~12–24 steel tool sets. No greenfield arsenal.

1. Material kitting & preform. Cut and stack glass/basalt fabric + thermoset; lay the steel keel/bulkhead hardpoint frames into the preform stack.
2. Wet-compression mold. Robot loads the preform and meters resin into matched heated steel tools; press closes at ~1,000–1,500 t; mold 120–180 s.
3. Cure & demold. In-tool cure; ejector pins release; robot unloads the upper & lower shells to the trim cell.
4. Trim & NDI. 5-axis router/waterjet cuts net edges; in-line machine-vision + ultrasonic NDI flag defects for a human call. Full digital-thread record.
5. Sub-assembly (parallel). Build the steel frame, retractable tricycle gear, ~35 hp heavy-fuel engine + pusher driveline, and fuel system as modules.
6. Shell mate. Bond upper & lower shells over the steel frame and co-bond at the hardpoints — soft shell, hard bones — then adhesive cure.
7. Systems integration. Drop in the avionics/autonomy tray, vision-nav cameras, AGP-EOS-1 gimbal turret, wiring harness, power, and the 25 kg mission-bay rails.
8. Final assembly. Bolt on wet-molded wings, V-tail and pusher prop; fit control surfaces, actuators and gear actuation.
9. Fluids & functional. Fuel and lubricants; verify control-surface throw, gear retract/extend, and an engine ground run.
10. Calibration. Boresight the gimbal/laser, calibrate vision-nav, align the IMU/PNT stack.
11. Acceptance test. Automated checkout + built-in-test, brief tether/taxi, QA sign-off with unit-level traceability.
12. Roll-out & reuse loop. Preserve and ship; recovered airframes return here for inspection and re-fly — capacity on top of build rate.

WILDFIRE, by the numbers.

Concept point design, Rev B.1 — closed at 175 kg MTOW. Figures are engineering targets/estimates; the full traceability, budgets, and risk register live in the dossier.

Reusable beats expendable.

Fury is a teammate, not a rival — WILDFIRE's real competitor is the expendable affordable-mass class: Anduril's Barracuda (and ALTIUS loitering munitions). Barracuda's bet is that "affordable mass" means a ~$150–200k airframe you throw away every shot — airframe, seeker and compute gone per engagement. WILDFIRE keeps the same automaker-line economics but recovers all of it — only the munition is spent — collapsing cost-per-effect from ~$150k/shot to ~$3.2k/sortie. Full comparison + honest caveats in the dossier →

WILDFIRE & Fury — layers, not rivals.

Anduril's Fury (YFQ-44A) is the exquisite high-end of the USAF CCA spectrum — an uncrewed, autonomous ~$25–30M, Mach-0.95, AMRAAM-armed jet (first flight Oct 2025, in production at Arsenal-1). Both WILDFIRE and Fury fly themselves — no pilot aboard either; the human commands from the rear. WILDFIRE is the low-end affordable mass beneath it — ISR, EW, decoy, designation and strike-support at ~200× lower unit cost. They don't compete; they team through a common, government-owned autonomy ecosystem — affordable mass under the exquisite. Full comparison + upgrade path in the dossier →

An honest concept, not a sales sheet.

This package was run through an adversarial engineering review. Here's exactly what closes and what's still an open, managed risk — because that's what a real program looks like.