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Comment on Tech hobbyist makes shoulder-mounted guided missile prototype with $96 in parts and a 3D printer — DIY MANPADS includes Wi-Fi guidance, ballistics calculations, optional camera for tracking

UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

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Notably absent… the explosives.

But sure, if you are wondering how folks out in Yemen or Gaza managed to retaliate against their oppressors for so long, this is a textbook example of how and why. What’s being proposed is collection of technology we’ve had since at least the 1960s that’s slowly made its way into civilian circulation.

Also…

Khojayev’s just-launched prototype has no effectiveness track record

I mean, we’re seeing what “just-launched prototypes with no effective track record” have accomplished on the Ukraine-Russia front-lines and it’s a decidedly mixed bag.

I think a harder question to answer is “Who would be interested in putting one of these into practical use?” And that gets to the real value-add of a Stinger MANPAD. Namely, the humans willing and practiced enough to use it.

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FauxLiving@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
It’s not a MANPAD really.

The sensor package has no IR sensor (or radar unit) and no way to proximity fuse.

It has GPS, accelerometer and barometric pressure. It’s more like a rocket powered artillery shell than an anti-air weapon.

Or, given the lack of explosive, it’s a high speed burrito delivery device.

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- UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  
  it’s more like a high speed burrito delivery device.
  
  See, now you’ve got my interest.
  
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  - FauxLiving@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    future Taco Bell vs future Del Taco during dinner rush:
    
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    captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    And as we all know, Taco Bell won the Franchise Wars.
    
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    HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    aww i wanted Taco Time
    
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sudoshakes@reddthat.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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I synthesize energetics. I can make a primary explosive that is stable enough for cap usage with a solo cup. I can synthesize secondaries like RDX above (one of the more complicated common ones) in short order with a basic chemistry set and the internet to order basic reagents. None are controlled substances.

It is trivially easy to make effective shapes charges and energetics at home.

Synthesis is federally legal in the US so long as you do not assemble into a device or transport. You can do both with an SOT as an FFL.

If I wanted to, I could make a shaped charge that was point imitated and base detonated for the above projectile and it would punch through about 1.5 feet of homogeneously rolled steel.

The limit to threat is not the access to explosives, as the chemistry and processes are published freely online as easy to replicate. The drone parts and control surface actuation is by far harder and I say this as someone who has a professional background in computer science and software engineering.

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- UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  
  It is trivially easy to make effective shapes charges and energetics at home.
  
  Safely?
  
  If I wanted to, I could
  
  You’ve got enough information to try to execute the above formula. Okay. And you’ve still got all your fingers after attempting this… more than zero times?
  
  The drone parts and control surface actuation is by far harder and I say this as someone who has a professional background in computer science and software engineering.
  
  Absolutely. We invented gunpowder centuries before we invented airplanes.
  
  That said… as an anecdote, I had a friend who had a janitorial position. Used a bunch of bleach to clean a particularly stubborn toilet and dumped a bunch of bleach into the bowl. His coworker came in behind him and proceeded to piss in said boil, creating a toxic miasma that forced them to exit the restroom quickly and heavily ventilate it before returning.
  
  “I could cook up some blasting caps with the trash from a frat party” is a theoretically believable claim.
  
  “Every time I clean up a frat party, I add a dozen shaped charges to my inventory” is not.
  
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  - sudoshakes@reddthat.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Safely? Yes.
    
    Keep the reaction stirring under ice and if you see the temp rice above 15 C you dump the whole thing in a water bucket or you get a runaway exothermic reaction that is never good with a high explosive forming crystals in the solution.
    
    If you are stupid, don’t ventilate, or are stupid stupid it will light your shed on fire and potentially kill you.
    
    That’s why you work at lab scale, and why you always keep your reactions under the temp limits with acids added slowly.
    
    Basic chemistry safety covers all the bases here.
    
    My preferred blasting caps are nickel guanidine based. I can play with the crystal morphology to produce small more friction inert powder and it is an extremely simple synthesis.
    
    You can use reloading press combined with highly suggested lexan sheet as a blast shield and wooden block to gently press the powder into caps. China sells packs of 1000 electrical ignition assemblies for $40 that you can then set off with a COTS or a clacker.
    
    I cannot emphasize enough that working at small scale and knowing what you are doing are important, but in faster time than it takes to print the parts for that drone you can absolutely complete the reaction, do some recrystalizstion, dry your product,and be ready to mix with plasticizer.
    
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  - sobchak@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    
    I had a friend who had a janitorial position. Cleaning a particularly stubborn toilet and dumped a bunch of bleach into the bowl. His coworker came in behind him and proceeded to piss in said boil, creating a toxic miasma that forced them to exit the restroom quickly and heavily ventilate it before returning.
    
    Lol, I’ve done that before in my apartment. Guessing it’s the same thing as an ammonia-bleach reaction.
    
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    HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    urea-bleach but close enough.
    
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- FauxLiving@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  
  The drone parts and control surface actuation is by far harder and I say this as someone who has a professional background in computer science and software engineering.
  
  www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrzxSOtj33s
  
  The model rocket community has this one sorted.
  
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  - sudoshakes@reddthat.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Oh the ones from BPS space are even more impressive with adjust on the fly tracking to 3D points and launched from a VLS he made himself.
    
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- YellowParenti@lemmy.wtf ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  RDX on youtube if you prefer visuals apparently i can get 2.5L of nitric acid @ 70% for $220. Seems pretty straight forward.
  
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- redsand@infosec.pub ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I don’t know why I feel the need to let everyone know the US trained birds to guide bombs in WWII. It seems relevant.
  
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eleitl@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Plastic explosive triggered by electrodetonator is quite safe.

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- UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Oh, I know this one!
  
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riskable@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
You don’t need explosives. It has a spot in the front for a camera. One of the new microcontrollers with AI accelerators can do face recognition extremely quickly. It would be possible to use it as an assassination tool.

Even if you changed nothing about the design, the speed and mass of the thing hitting a person in the face could kill.

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- chaogomu@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  As the bps space YouTube channel has shown, reliability is paramount in any launch, especially a guided launch.
  
  That and people duck when shit flies at them, unless it’s supersonic, which again, as bps space has shown, control of a supersonic flight is extremely difficult to get right.
  
  This is a guy who landed a hobby rocket like a tesla booster.
  
  But at $100 a pop, you could have backups. (or payloads)
  
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- UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  
  It would be possible to use it as an assassination tool.
  
  Khojayev’s just-launched prototype has no effectiveness track record
  
  :-/
  
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- ICastFist@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Why kill only one when you can do a whole blast and get a multi-kill?
  
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NotAnonymousAtAll@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

Notably absent… the explosives.

xkcd.com/651/

Not my area of expertise, so please tell me if the idea is complete garbage. With that being said: Theoretically, could the LiPo Battery that’s already in there anyway be turned into an explosive payload by intentionally overheating and puncturing it on impact?

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- UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  
  Not my area of expertise, so please tell me if the idea is complete garbage.
  
  Turning a laptop battery into a weapon is a non-trivial endeavor. The absurdity of TSA was more their attempt to police based on weak science than the real danger of an airplane full of lithium battery powered devices.
  
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  - NotAnonymousAtAll@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Not really an answer to you, just writing it here in case anyone else interested is still reading along:
    
    I looked up some numbers and apart from the practical challenges of making a battery “go boom” in a controlled way it seems like the energy density to even make this a hypothetical option just isn’t there. Even the best LiPo batteries don’t quite reach 1 MJ/kg while gunpowder has ~3 MJ/kg, and numbers only go up from there for more modern chemical explosives.
    
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RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
You can deploy a lot of $96 semi-effective hardware and improve it vs something that might be thousands or even tens or hundreds of thousands to deploy.

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- UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  
  You can deploy a lot of $96 semi-effective hardware
  
  Khojayev’s just-launched prototype has no effectiveness track record
  
  :-/
  
  I mean, time will tell. To date, this particular iteration of technology has a 0% success rate in doing anything but farming clicks.
  
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  - lightnsfw@reddthat.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    We got another scary 3d printer headline for dumbass politicians to use as justification for regulating them!
    
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    FauxLiving@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    There isn’t much there that can’t be done with PVC and bent aluminum sheeting.
    
    Hamas famously uses water pipes for their rockets (no idea about the propellant, payload or control systems though)
    
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  - Bad_Ideas_In_Bulk@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    It also has a 0% failure rate.
    
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    UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Not according to Wayne Gretzsky
    
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dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I’d build and use one of these if I could get the explosives to go with it and the address of a CEO.

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- captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  The United States has a variant of the AGM-114 Hellfire missile that replaces the explosive warhead with six scimitar blades. Because fuck That Guy, the whole That Guy and nothing but the That Guy.
  
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  - Blackmist@feddit.uk ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Which would come as a surprise to hundreds of dead Iranian schoolgirls.
    
    Turns out the military under Trump is more a “fuck that town in particular” affair.
    
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    captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    You know, I’m still struggling to believe the story I’ve been told about that. “The US bombed an elementary school.”
    
    For my entire life, the US has demonstrated precision munitions. The AGM-114 Ginsu is an air-to-ground laser-guided rocket that can kill an individual passenger in a car. We can fly a Tomahawk cruise missile into a specific window of a building. I’ve seen a bridge in Iraq bombed seconds after the last car crossed. Not saying GI Joe is a paragon of virtue, I’ve seen the pictures from Abu Ghraib, but…That shit sounds a lot more like Israel than us.
    
    Even in the “no kill like overkill” “We don’t target coordinates, we target grid squares” “enemy fire is coming from that way, destroy that way” United States, that shit sounds a lot more like Israel than us.
    
    We’re certainly attacking Iran because Israel wanted us to.
    
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  - dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Yeah I’ve seen those. The mind that thinks up these things aye.
    
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WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I have this idea: Scientists some time ago, discovered they could knot light into loops.

Would it be possible to make a curved laser for laser artillery?

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- UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Certainly possible. But you’re still stuck on the r^2^ problem of diminishing returns at a distance. Light doesn’t like staying in a tight beam. The vortex loop is typically not much bigger than the wavelength. I don’t see much of a solution for transmitting energy long distances through air.
  
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  - WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    So it would basically be a Warhammer Lascannon, fuck.
    
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Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Anyone know what the $2 propellant is?

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- burrito@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_candy
  
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  - Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Thanks!
    
    That doesn’t seem to fit in the budget though??
    
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MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Atomize * some propelant, boom, explosive.

* english choose the dumbest word for “zerstäuben”.

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- UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  
  Atomize* some propelant, boom, explosive.
  
  The trick is to get the atomized propelant to “boom, explosive” at the target and not in your backpack.
  
  Also, you probably want a “boom” sufficient to accomplish whatever demolition you’re planning, which - again - raises the stakes regarding what’s in your backpack.
  
  There’s a classic little film called “The Wages of Fear” that explores the hazards of amateurs transporting high explosives over long distances.
  
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  - eleitl@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    There are plenty of very safe HEs.
    
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    chaogomu@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Tannerite comes to mind. It explodes from a high impact, and little else. I’m not sure what sort of yield you’d get. That stuff mostly just makes a pop and smoke.
    
    I have heard of people using it on stubborn tree stumps, but that’s several pounds of the stuff.
    
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  - MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    I mean, spray the leftover fuel into the oxygen-filled head only on target? It wouldn’t stay atomized for long anyway.
    
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    UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    
    Wouldn’t that work?
    
    Idk, you wanna find out?
    
    Listen, if you’ve got the specs for military ordinance and want to say “We’ve done this a thousand times, it works fine” that’s one thing.
    
    But it’s very much another to just wave your hands and announce “you know, the boom-boom juice goes here and the detonator goes there and it’ll probably be fine”… It’ll probably do something.
    
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- frongt@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Does that literally mean “make dust”? I think “powderize” might be a better translation in this context, if it’s a solid, or “aerosolize” if it’s a liquid. I’ve never been a big fan of the word “atomize” in any case.
  
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  - FauxLiving@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    
    I’ve never been a big fan of the word “atomize” in any case.
    
    Mate, I’ll have you know some of my relatives are made of atoms
    
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- chaogomu@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Atomize, from the original Ancient Greek adjective atomos, meaning “uncuttable” or “indivisible”.
  
  Seems pretty apt to me. You have rendered it into its smallest constituent pieces through physical means, any further reduction requires chemical processes, or high energy physics. Coincidentally, a simple spark provides both.
  
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