01 — Architecture
How the system is divided.
The autonomy stack runs in two places. SAI executes on the airframe — sensor fusion, navigation, and decision within authorized envelopes, at the latency the physics demands. Zalmoxis runs at the ground station — mission planning, fleet awareness, rules of engagement, and the operator’s authority to hold, divert, or abort.
SAI handles the milliseconds.
Zalmoxis holds the authority.
02 — SAI
Strigoi
Autonomy
Intelligence.
SAI is the on-board brain. Edge inference, running inside the airframe. It sees, decides, and acts inside the milliseconds where the link to the ground may not be available.
It earns its authority within the envelope Zalmoxis sets. Outside that envelope, it doesn’t act.
Capabilities
01
Sensor fusion
Combining EO/IR and radar inputs into a single situational picture, on board, in real time. The aircraft does not wait for the ground to interpret what it is seeing.
02
Edge inference
Models run on the airframe. No round trip required. Sufficient compute to keep decision latency in tens of milliseconds rather than the hundreds a satellite link would impose.
03
Operation under degraded comms
Designed to continue executing the mission within authorized envelopes when the link to the ground is jammed, intermittent, or denied. Falls back to the most conservative action when uncertain.
04
GPS-denied navigation
Inertial, visual, and terrain-relative positioning. Tested against the operational reality that GPS is the first thing a competent adversary takes away.
05
Mission re-planning on board
When conditions change — weather, threats, asset availability — the aircraft can re-plan within the rules Zalmoxis has issued, without requiring an uplink.
06
Continuous training
The training pipeline behind SAI runs continuously. The 200-million-step milestone we shared in April 2026 was a checkpoint, not a finish line.
03 — Zalmoxis
Mission
command.
Sovereign.
ZXS · C2 platform
Zalmoxis is the ground side of the architecture. It is what an operator sees, what a commander uses, and what holds the rules the aircraft must operate within.
Mission planning. Fleet awareness. Geofencing. Rules of engagement. Authority to abort. Deployed on customer infrastructure — operational data does not leave it.
Capabilities
01
Mission planning & tasking
Define the mission, the route, the rules. Push it to a single aircraft or a fleet. Modify in flight.
02
Fleet situational awareness
One operational picture across Strigoi, Corvus, and Vultur. Track, plan, and re-task across the family of platforms from a single console.
03
Geofencing & rules of engagement
Authority is expressed as boundaries the aircraft must respect — not as policy text but as enforced engineering constraints, verifiable before launch.
04
Operator authority & abort
Hold, divert, or recover any asset under Zalmoxis command at any point in the mission. Abort is a first-class operation, not a fallback.
05
Sovereign deployment
Zalmoxis runs on infrastructure the customer owns. No telemetry leaves the customer’s network. Source-available to government clients.
06
Multi-platform
One C2 platform, every Kalkan asset. Designed so the operator’s mental model does not change between aircraft.
04 — Together
The architecture is the answer.
Where SAI lives
On every Kalkan airframe.
One inference stack across Strigoi, Corvus, and Vultur. Trained on representative scenarios, hardened against the operational conditions European forces will actually encounter. Updated through verified releases the customer can audit.
Where Zalmoxis lives
Inside the customer’s perimeter.
Deployed on infrastructure the customer owns. Source-available under government licence. The C2 platform is part of the customer’s sovereign stack — not a service it depends on Kalkan to provide.
The principle
The aircraft executes.
The operator commands.
The architecture makes the boundary explicit.
Further
For more, talk to us directly.
The full technical surface of the autonomy stack is not on this page, and won’t be. For procurement and partnership enquiries, we provide deeper material under NDA.