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Welcome to the April DEFCAD Newsletter!

The first project we'd like to share is the Marsupial MK18 from Cipher_CBK of BLC, which is a classic bufferless, fully integrated upper and lower system for the AR-15 platform. Designed to be as accessible as possible from within the US parts market, the project also manages heat and stress better than most others of its kind. This is what the first stages of 3D printable maturity in our platforms begins to look like. The MK18 represents an extraordinary degree of customization and is overall as compatible with other designs as is conceivable.

Next up we have a great dietary mistake! Yes, the inevitable union of the enormous xYeezySZN and The Gatalog's internetpizza. Though utterly derivative, they call their project the The Regular 10/22. While the Ruger 10/22 design may be one of the most widely-used and repeated designs in our space, The Regular is another. Perhaps it pretends to some original and artistic difference protectable by law. But you don't have to pretend, homie. It's ok to be regular.

Finally, Void3D released The Hive, which is the production version of his earlier STL experiments. Void is well known in the DIY suppressor space, and his designs remain some of the most complex and aesthetically valuable.

It turns out the Supreme Court's "ghost gun" ruling accidentally paved the way for the next generation of 80 percent pistols.

The founders of Defense Distributed and the best 80 percent producers in the game bring you G80 - The first legal commercial successor of Polymer80. Outrageous design. Violence in Compliance. Polymer and Steel: A Lover's Discourse.

Our first run sold out at our NRA 2025 debut. Now selling to LEGIO and DEFCAD members exclusively.

The month's biggest news in law enforcement activity had to be ATF's multistate takedown of a Discord network dedicated to making 3D NFA items. Without a doubt this is the biggest move ATF has made against 3D gun development since the stunning, multi-agency raids on The Gatalog last year in New York.

These are the times that try men's souls, not to mention their ethics. And to our collective shame, when opinion divided within The Gatalog enterprise, some began to openly accuse the arrested developers of cooperating with federal investigators. Settling this dispute required no less a figure than John Elik, famed inventor of Guncad's great moral emblem and "personality hire" at Florida LawShed.

The Elik Solution is simple and direct, and I can't see him ever regretting it.

DEFCAD search has been able to improve so much faster lately thanks in large part to the work of one man. His name is The Shittinator, and he's the developer of the new GunCAD Index, a beautiful exercise in commercial open source software.

Thanks to the GunCAD Index open-source API, we've turbocharged identifying, tagging and updating the latest 3D2A releases from across the Internet. Work that previously would have required dozens of employees and months of time can now be done instanty thanks to community effort.

DEFCAD is now proud to officially announce we are, by far, the GunCAD Index's largest financial sponsor. Though Mr. Shittinator's thanks is not needed, it was kind of him to announce it nevertheless. Let's keep up the good work!

While applied DIY defense may often mean simply refining the venerable 10/22, we at DEFCAD have been sharing the Good Word of the Drone and the cyberpunk arms race to all who will listen. Last month we mentioned the manipulation of bullet designs to be anti-drone, and this month we take a look at directed energy weapons.

Tech Ingredients is a popular electronics experimentation channel that already produced an anti-drone targeted laser system earlier this year. Now they've just released a wide-beam microwave approach for dealing with the problem of "swarms of cheap drones." They note that their approach (frying the on-board communication systems) is not available against fiber optic drone systems (which have a tether to directly send commands), but not every defense system is meant to be effective in every situation.

The video is not meant to be an instruction set for how to recreate their experiment, which they have for various legal reasons left obscured. But with the rate of LLM development, I'm sure we'll all be able to fill in the gaps by the time we're on the contact line.