We Designed a European Air-Breathing Missile From Scratch. Here's What We Can Tell You Without Violating ITAR.

Archeron Technologies AB, Lund, Sweden March 2026

The Problem

Europe has one air-breathing beyond-visual-range missile in production. One. It is a remarkable piece of engineering, arguably the most capable weapon in its class anywhere in the world, but it is made by a single consortium, for a small number of customers, on a production line that answers to two governments. If you are a European nation that wants a throttleable air-breathing missile and you are not in the club, you don't get one.

The United States has none in this class. Their next-generation programs have been in development for years. China and Russia have their own. The technology is understood. The physics is published. The engineering is hard but not mysterious. And yet the industrial base to build these systems is vanishingly small, and the barriers to entry are not primarily technical. They are institutional, regulatory, and financial.

We wanted to know: could a small team, starting from first principles, produce a credible system-level design for a throttleable solid-fuel ducted rocket? Not a sketch. Not a PowerPoint. A real engineering package, the kind of documentation that could actually be handed to a manufacturing partner and turned into hardware.

We did it. This is what we learned.

What We Built (and What We Can't Show You)

Over the past year, our team produced a complete preliminary design package for a Meteor-class throttleable solid-fuel ducted rocket / ramjet vehicle. The documentation set comprises:

• 17 engineering specification documents totaling several thousand pages

• 5 custom PCB designs, fully production-ready with complete schematics and board layouts, covering power management, propulsion control, flight computer, fin actuator drives, and a software-defined radio datalink terminal

• A 1-D propulsion cycle model coupling intake thermodynamics, gas generator burn rate physics, combustor stoichiometry, and nozzle performance across the full Mach/altitude flight envelope

• A custom AESA radar seeker design built from European GaAs MMIC foundry components, with a full RF link budget, detection range analysis from the radar equation, and radome electromagnetic design

• A complete guidance, navigation, and control algorithm specification including navigation filter, guidance law, and three-loop autopilot with gain scheduling

• A procurement-ready bill of materials with 47 unique component types, roughly 460 pieces per vehicle, 94% sourced from non-US suppliers, with country-of-origin verified to the factory level

• A master wiring harness schematic defining every cable, connector, pin assignment, and wire gauge in the vehicle

• First-principles analyses for aerodynamic loads, hinge moments, thermal management, and propulsion sensor selection

We are not going to publish the technical content. The legal frameworks governing missile technology (ITAR, the Swedish Krigsmateriellagen, the EU Dual-Use Regulation, and the Missile Technology Control Regime) exist for good reasons, and we take them seriously. What we can do is share the thinking behind the design, the engineering philosophy that guided our decisions, and the conclusions we've drawn about the state of European defense technology.

Why a Ducted Rocket?

The argument for air-breathing propulsion in beyond-visual-range air-to-air missiles is simple and has been understood since the 1970s. It comes down to one chart: speed versus distance.

A conventional solid-rocket missile accelerates hard for a few seconds, reaches a peak speed that looks impressive on paper, and then spends the rest of its flight decelerating. By the time it reaches a target at long range, it may be subsonic. It has no energy left to maneuver. The target can turn and outrun it.

An air-breathing missile, specifically a throttleable ducted rocket, does something fundamentally different. It sustains thrust throughout the flight. It can cruise efficiently at moderate power to maximize range, then sprint at maximum thrust in the terminal phase. It arrives at the target with energy to spare. The practical consequence is a no-escape zone that is many times larger than a solid-rocket weapon of the same weight and size.

This is not new physics. It is not speculative. The one European system in production has proven this decisively in service. The question is not whether the concept works. It's whether anyone else can build one.

Architecture Philosophy: Design for the Supply Chain You Actually Have

The single most consequential decision we made was not about propulsion or guidance. It was about sourcing.

We designed the entire electronics suite, every PCB, every sensor interface, every power rail, around a strict component sourcing hierarchy: European first, Japanese second, everything else flagged and justified. We excluded Chinese-origin components entirely and flagged every American-origin part with an explicit dependency analysis and, where possible, an alternative.

This was not an ideological exercise. It was an engineering constraint driven by a simple observation: if you are building defense hardware in Europe and your bill of materials depends on components that can be embargoed by a foreign government's export control decision, you do not have a supply chain. You have a hope.

The result surprised us. For the vast majority of the electronics (microcontrollers, gate drivers, power MOSFETs, sensors, transceivers, passives) European and Japanese industry provides excellent coverage. Companies like STMicroelectronics, Infineon, NXP, Renesas, Murata, Rohm, Sensonor, and Melexis make components that are fully competitive with American equivalents for embedded defense applications.

The gaps are narrow but critical. Two categories proved stubbornly US-dependent: wideband software-defined radio transceivers (where one American company dominates the integrated military-grade market) and high-capacity FPGAs (where European alternatives exist but lack the logic density required for real-time waveform processing). These are not unsolvable problems, but they require European semiconductor investment that does not yet exist at the necessary scale.

The deeper problem is passive components. Most engineers assume that specifying a Japanese capacitor brand means getting a Japanese product. It doesn't. The major ceramic capacitor manufacturers, including the Japanese ones, operate factories in mainland China. A reel of capacitors bought from a European distributor may ship from Wuxi or Fukui depending on which production line had capacity that month. Guaranteeing non-Chinese origin for passive components requires factory-code constraints at the purchase order level, adds 5-15% cost, and demands procurement discipline that most organizations don't have. We documented the specific procurement language required, identified which factories produce which part numbers, and mapped the entire passive supply chain. This is unsexy work. It is also the work that determines whether your "European" missile actually is one.

The Electronics: Five Boards, One Philosophy

We replaced every proprietary or export-restricted electronic component in the reference architecture with custom PCB designs using commercial off-the-shelf parts. The original design called for a bespoke rad-hard ASIC for propulsion control and a proprietary datalink terminal from a major defense prime. We replaced both with designs built around commercially available microcontrollers, gate drivers, and RF components.

The philosophy was simple: design each board as an autonomous subsystem with a well-defined digital interface, so that any board can be redesigned independently without cascading changes through the rest of the system. The propulsion controller talks to the flight computer over a standard industrial bus protocol. The fin actuator drives are identical hardware, differentiated only by a wiring configuration that sets their identity. The datalink terminal is a self-contained SDR that could, in principle, be reprogrammed for entirely different waveforms.

This modularity is not just good engineering practice. It's a deliberate risk management strategy. When you're designing a system that may take years to reach production, you need the ability to swap out any component that gets discontinued, embargoed, or redesigned by the manufacturer. Every board in our design can absorb a component change without requiring a full vehicle redesign.

We pushed every design through to completed board layouts. Full schematics. Routed PCBs. Stackup specifications. Impedance requirements for controlled traces. Component placement with thermal management annotations. This is the unglamorous detail work that separates a conceptual design from a buildable one.

Propulsion: The Physics Is Public, The Engineering Is Not

The thermodynamics of a ramjet are undergraduate-level physics. Conservation of mass, momentum, and energy through a duct. Oblique shock theory for the intake. Rayleigh flow for heat addition. Isentropic expansion through a nozzle. Any aerospace engineering student can set up the governing equations.

What makes a throttleable ducted rocket difficult is not the physics. It's the coupling. The gas generator burn rate depends on chamber pressure, which depends on the valve position, which depends on the guidance demand, which depends on the flight condition, which changes the intake pressure recovery, which changes the combustor stoichiometry, which changes the thrust, which changes the flight condition. Everything talks to everything else, and it all happens at Mach 3+.

We built a parametric cycle model that captures these couplings across the full flight envelope. It's a steady-state equilibrium model, adequate for hardware sizing but not for transient dynamics, and it produced the key outputs needed to size every component in the propulsion system: the gas generator grain, the valve flow area, the nozzle throat, and the thrust-versus-Mach table that the guidance law uses for energy management.

The ignition system for a boron-loaded gas generator is its own engineering challenge. Boron is an extraordinary fuel with nearly three times the volumetric energy density of hydrocarbons, but it forms a refractory oxide layer that resists ignition. The ignition sequence is a carefully staged cascade designed to strip this oxide layer before the main grain lights. Getting this right requires propellant characterization testing that no amount of simulation can replace.

The Seeker: Why We Designed Our Own

The conventional approach to seeker procurement for a new missile program is to buy one from an established radar house. We explored this and concluded it was the wrong approach for our situation, for three reasons.

First, seeker vendors control the interface. If you buy a seeker, you accept their data format, their update rate, their power requirements, and their mechanical envelope. Your flight computer becomes a slave to their ICD. For a small company trying to iterate quickly on system-level trades, this is a design constraint that propagates everywhere.

Second, the lead times are brutal. A custom seeker from a major vendor is a multi-year procurement with minimum order quantities that assume you're building hundreds of units. For a company that needs a handful of prototypes, this is a non-starter.

Third, and most importantly, we wanted to understand the RF engineering. A missile is, at its core, a sensor platform attached to a propulsion system. If you don't understand your own sensor, you don't understand your product. We chose to design a custom active electronically scanned array from foundry-level components, using a European GaAs MMIC process with established military heritage. The result is a design where we control every interface, understand every trade-off, and can iterate without waiting for a vendor's product roadmap.

This was the hardest part of the entire project. RF design at millimeter-wave frequencies with dozens of coherent channels is genuinely difficult. Calibrating amplitude and phase across that many elements is a test campaign measured in months, not days. We make no claim that our design is production-ready. It's a preliminary design that would require significant development and testing. But it's a real design with real component selections, real link budgets, and real performance predictions derived from the radar equation, not hand-waving.

What We Learned About European Defense Industry

The single biggest takeaway from this project is that Europe's technical capability far exceeds its institutional willingness to use it.

The components exist. The manufacturing base exists. The engineering talent exists. What doesn't exist is the institutional framework to let small companies contribute to defense technology at the system level. The defense procurement process in every European country is optimized for large prime contractors with decades of track record, established security clearances, and the financial capacity to absorb multi-year development programs with uncertain funding.

A startup cannot build a missile. Not because the engineering is impossible (we've demonstrated that a small team can produce a credible system-level design in a year) but because the certification, testing, qualification, and production infrastructure requires the resources of a large organization. Static firing test stands. Propellant mixing facilities. Environmental qualification chambers. EMI/EMC test ranges. Flight test ranges. These are not things you bootstrap in a garage.

The path from design to hardware runs through partnership with an established defense industrial entity, a government research institute, or both. In Sweden, the natural partner is FOI (Totalförsvarets forskningsinstitut). In France, it's ONERA or DGA. In the UK, it's DSTL or QinetiQ. These organizations have the facilities, the clearances, and the institutional knowledge to evaluate and advance a design like ours.

Why We're Talking About This

We're publishing this post because we believe the European defense technology ecosystem has a structural problem that's worth discussing openly. The current model, where a tiny number of prime contractors hold monopoly positions on critical capabilities and small companies are locked out by procurement processes designed for incumbents, is not producing the pace of innovation that the current security environment demands.

We are not the only small team capable of doing serious defense engineering. There are companies across Europe with deep expertise in propulsion, RF, embedded systems, and control theory that are effectively excluded from missile system development because there is no on-ramp. The design work exists. The talent exists. What's missing is a mechanism to connect them to programs.

Our documentation package is available for review by qualified parties under appropriate legal and security frameworks. We welcome engagement from government defense research organizations, established defense prime contractors, and institutional investors with relevant experience and clearances.

If you have the infrastructure to turn designs into hardware, we'd be willing to talk.

Archeron Technologies AB is a Swedish defense technology company building sovereign hardware and software for defense and intelligence. Our platform, Atlas Intelligence, powers distributed autonomous sensing for contested environments (Argus) and corporate/organized crime intelligence for domestic security (Halo). Our air-breathing propulsion and missile electronics work represents one domain within a broader focus on systems that sense, fuse, decide, and act. Built and controlled in Europe. For inquiries, contact tim@archeron.tech.

This post has been reviewed for compliance with applicable export control regulations. No controlled technical data, as defined under ITAR (22 CFR §120.33), the Swedish Krigsmateriellagen (SFS 1992:1300), or EU Regulation 2021/821, is disclosed herein.