VOLLEY investigates provider-hosted control of individual payload departure conditions: relative velocity, direction and timing supplied at release, before a spacecraft has to carry mobility of its own.
The host owns coarse orbital state and resources. The deployment system owns the relative release condition. The spacecraft owns everything after contact ends. VOLLEY is the trade between those three.
Navigation, attitude authority, permitted manoeuvres, recoil recovery and campaign reserves stay in host accounting.
Relative Δv, direction, timing, retention, tip-off and repeatability are the deployment-system job.
No continuing stationkeeping, collision avoidance or formation control is implied after separation.
These are real spacecraft and upper-stage operations, not renders of VOLLEY. They establish useful context for retained orbital platforms and multi-satellite separation campaigns; they do not demonstrate provider compatibility with this project.
The useful precedent is the host: power, navigation, attitude and post-primary-mission operations can remain with a controlled stage.
Sequencing, reorientation and safe separation are already launch-vehicle mission problems. VOLLEY asks what changes if departure conditions become deliberately programmable.
The mission idea survived. The mechanism did not. S4 has now earned a clean-sheet functional reference, but detailed CAD still has to wait for release-cell falsification and installed-burden evidence.
The project began by naming the distribution problem. In 2023 the host changed to a spent upper stage; by mid-2025 the coilgun gave way to a linear synchronous motor because commanded velocity, not simply ejection, was the product.
POEM reframed the mission around a retained, controlled upper stage rather than a dedicated free-flyer.
Detailed Fusion geometry, but no committed STEP export and known disagreement with analysis stations.
More visual detail did not mean more reproducibility. Gen4 is useful history, not a current numerical authority.
Script-built geometry and the manuscript comparator. It is reproducible, heavy, and intentionally frozen with its failures.
Calculated release velocity at the frozen reference point.
The 3U dispenser mass comparison fails.
Peak acceleration at the frozen model point.
Electrical-to-payload efficiency in the frozen ledger.
The stage became part of the machine. Contact/release physics and accommodation remain unresolved; trim is suspended.
A valuable architecture experiment, not the selected clean-sheet reference. Its results and failures remain in the comparison.
Motor-charged mechanical accumulator, independent latch, short guided pusher and local catcher. Functional allocation only; component geometry remains unselected.
Payload energy at the S4 4.569852 m/s study point for 4 kg.
Ideal constant-acceleration stroke at 10 g.
Ideal terminal payload power at 10 g; stored energy avoids making this a host-bus pulse by definition.
Installed mass, release dynamics, repeatability, catcher loads and provider accommodation can still reject it.
This is the actual committed STL geometry for the frozen comparator, loaded directly from the repository. It is here to inspect an existing machine, not to imply the clean-sheet reference already has detailed geometry.
Nominal Gen5 render. Loading the interactive geometry when supported.
Inspect CAD files and provenanceThis browser view is intentionally simple: a 500 km circular host and a tangential release in a two-body model. It is for intuition, not evidence. The checked repository calculations remain the authority; they are still model evidence.
Finite host recoil and assumed release authority.
Propagation, remaining manifest mass and propellant allocation.
Full position/velocity target and release-time search for one payload.
44 accepted tested campaigns; P113/E5 remain open.
The illustrative base box passes at each conditional event. Doubling it makes 20 of 64 first-event corners fail. Full campaign feedback remains open.
48 cases satisfy the analytical acceleration and contact screen. The constant-force ideal is not an unloading-spring design.
Twelve-turn electrical reclosure, nominal winding CAD and the 10.28 J remaining reference-shot loss budget.
Not every defect deserves a billboard. The ones that changed the machine or withdrew a claim do.
Freeze coupon bands for accumulator force-displacement, preload repeatability, latch shock, pusher friction, exit velocity/tip-off and catcher load.
Compare independent cells, banks and the shared path using real structure, actuators, controls, energy, envelope and failure consequences.
Add the missing mission uncertainty and settling physics, then freeze detailed geometry only if the reference survives.
What the host, deployer and spacecraft each own.
How the mechanism changed and what broke along the way.
Mission studies, run sheets, provenance, figures and kill criteria.
Reference-cell falsification, installed burden, P92 closure, scaling and test article.
Mission, CAD, validation, build readiness, reviews and programme records.