Defense
An ambitious idea, built to move.
Shield AI High-Fidelity Mockup
Category
- Defense
- Aviation
Expertise
- Appearance Mockups
- Design Visualization & Storytelling
- Mechanical Design & Engineering
Shield AI partnered with Teague to bring the scale and vertical-launch concept of its AI-piloted VTOL fighter jet to events around the world.
CHALLENGE
Making vertical launch visible.
Shield AI’s X-BAT is an AI-piloted VTOL fighter jet designed to launch and recover without a runway. Its defining idea is both strategic and physical: a combat aircraft that can stand vertically, rise from its own launch system, and operate beyond the limits of conventional airfields.
To introduce X-BAT, Shield AI wanted a scaled demonstrator that could carry the authority of the aircraft itself; a substantial physical experience that would give customers, partners, and the public a sense of its size, configuration, and presence.
Teague's challenge was to preserve that sense of magnitude without creating something impossible to exhibit. The demonstrator would need to rise nearly 20 feet, move a 500-pound aircraft model from horizontal to vertical, and hold its own in the largest exhibition halls. Then it would need to come apart, cross borders, and do it all again.
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Explore Teague’s capabilities in show models, demonstrators, and high-fidelity mockups.
APPROACH
Half the scale. Full force.
At this scale, fidelity isn’t about reproducing every detail. It’s about knowing which details make the idea believable.
Teague centered the experience on three things: the aircraft’s size, its vertical launch position, and the movement between the two. Those were the elements that made X-BAT immediately legible, and where proportion, engineering, finish, and logistics had to work as one.
Features that made the experience more convincing were refined. Everything else was simplified.
The demonstrator also had to feel unusually large without becoming impossible to exhibit or transport. Teague landed at 45 percent scale: large enough for the aircraft and Launch and Recovery Vehicle to rise 19 feet, just below the typical height limit of a major exhibition hall, while still breaking down into sections that could travel by standard international freight.
Everything else was considered through that lens. Features that strengthened the experience were developed with greater precision. Details that added weight, cost, or potential points of failure without changing what an audience would understand were simplified.
The result wasn’t simply a smaller X-BAT. It was a carefully edited expression of what makes the aircraft remarkable, built as large as the room would allow and disciplined enough to move around the world.
Five hundred pounds. Vertical in sixty seconds.
As the 500-pound aircraft moves from horizontal transport position into vertical launch configuration, its center of gravity shifts through a wide arc. Teague refined the pivot geometry of the Launch and Recovery Vehicle to keep that movement controlled and stable from beginning to end.
That work made it possible to replace a more complex hydraulic system with a cable-driven winch built from readily available components. The new mechanism is easier to maintain, less dependent on specialized support, and compatible with domestic and international electrical standards.
The engineering is substantial; the experience of it is simple: in approximately one minute, the aircraft rises smoothly into place.
The Numbers Behind the Build
Two people. One tool.
Ready to move.
The X-BAT demonstrator was never treated as a showpiece that happened to ship. Transportation, unloading, assembly, movement, operation, and repacking were designed as parts of the same system.
Teague designed the system so the setup can be completed by two people using a single tool.
The custom crates can be configured for air freight, shipping containers, trucks, and trailers. Ramps store inside the primary crate and connect at fixed positions for unloading. A powered tug travels with the asset so the aircraft and LRV can be moved through a venue once unpacked.
Teague designed the system so the setup can be completed by two people using a single tool, with a third person assisting only with wing installation.
Every one of those decisions protects the moment the audience eventually sees. By the time X-BAT rises, the complexity required to put it there has disappeared.
Solution
Built to be seen. Engineered to keep showing up.
The finished system brings together a 45-percent-scale X-BAT aircraft, a custom Launch and Recovery Vehicle, a cable-driven lift, and a transport architecture designed expressly for repeated use.
The aircraft was formed in tooled fiberglass with removable wings and finished to the standard of a full-scale presentation asset. Teague completed the extensive surface preparation, high-gloss paintwork, final assembly, systems integration, and testing in-house.
A removable blast shield uses individually machined lightweight tiles to recreate the depth and visual rhythm of a thermal-protection surface without the weight or cost of operational materials.
The craftsmanship is visible up close. The engineering reveals itself in motion. The logistics are largely invisible, which is exactly the point.
A showpiece that became a global platform.
After the first demonstrator was completed, Shield AI commissioned two more.
The three systems now give Shield AI a repeatable way to present X-BAT with the same scale, movement, and finish at events around the world.
Each one is built to make an emerging aircraft program feel immediate: not as an image of what may come next, but as a physical presence already taking shape.
