Firestorm prints 12 flight-ready drones aboard a ship at sea

A printer on a ship has to survive more than a bad day in the workshop. During a two-week transit to RIMPAC 2026, Firestorm Labs ran its xCell expeditionary manufacturing platform aboard the USS Essex, through sea states peaking at 5 and waves reaching 12 feet. Inside the containerized factory, the company says it printed more than 1,000 parts and built 12 flight-ready Squall FPV quadcopters.

The drones were not left on deck as a demonstration. Army, Navy and Marine personnel learned to print and assemble them aboard ship, then Marines from the 3rd Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion flew the aircraft in Hawaii as adversary drones during a counter-UAS exercise. The work formed part of the Naval Postgraduate School CAMRE distributed advanced manufacturing network, facilitated by FLEETWERX.

The most consequential repair may have been a small polymer part. Firestorm designed and printed an Apache rotor guard droop stop to keep the main rotor and blades away from the deck during what the company describes as the first Army-Navy at-sea Apache operations. The main rotor is a $500,000 assembly, while a single blade strike costs $230,000 per blade, across four blades. A lightweight printed stop is cheap insurance against a very expensive failure, although the figures and account come from Firestorm’s description of the deployment.

Other parts began with ordinary problems: a missing coupling for connecting a vacuum hose to an inflatable life preserver, gauges for checking deck tie-downs, valve handwheels copied from worn originals, electrical covers and a bracket for mounting Starlink. Firestorm produced three coupling designs for different vacuums and workflows, closing the loop from a sailor’s request to hardware in days rather than through a requisition.

So what does this change in practice? A ship could make some spares, tools and small aircraft at the point of need instead of waiting for them to be flown, shipped or carried through contested waters. xCell fits production equipment into two expandable 20-foot ISO containers, or a single 40-foot equivalent, with industrial HP Multi Jet Fusion polymer printers, environmental controls and semi-automated assembly stations designed to run from generators. The sea trial is a pilot, not a guarantee of fleet-wide production: it shows that the concept produced useful hardware under difficult conditions, while the broader question of qualification and repeatability remains for future deployments.