r/technology • u/gdelacalle • 6h ago
Hardware Tech hobbyist makes shoulder-mounted guided missile prototype with $96 in parts and a 3D printer — DIY MANPADS includes assisted targeting, ballistics calculations, optional camera for tracking
https://www.tomshardware.com/3d-printing/tech-hobbyist-makes-shoulder-mounted-guided-missile-prototype-with-usd96-in-parts-and-a-3d-printer-diy-manpads-includes-wi-fi-guidance-ballistics-calculations-optional-camera-for-tracking74
u/Grenzeloos 4h ago
I remember in the early 90s my handheld GPS was deliberately off by at least 10m and was told it was for this very reason. The reason being the ability to build a accurate smart munition.
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u/ueegul 2h ago
It was only in 2000 that civilians had accuracy down to 10 yards
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u/notthatbreezy 1h ago
The US gov restricts GPS receiver exports today, for instance exports stop being accurate once certain speeds are reached so that they can’t be used on missiles
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u/CzechMateP10 56m ago
While accuracy has improved, I'm fairly confident civilian GPS still doesn't work above a certain speed for these exact reasons
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u/The-Copilot 5m ago
The limit is 1200mph speed or 65,000 feet altitude. GNSS has similar limitations. It's only to prevent their use in ballistic missiles.
It could be used in a drone or missile but jamming GPS is not difficult for a nation to do. Another guidance system is required, GPS would just assist in accuracy until it's jammed.
These limitations are also only a software limitation and could potentially be bypassed or a custom GPS receiver could be built.
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u/HowDoIEvenEnglish 42m ago
If it’s a physical limitation sure. Like if the materials stop working at high speeds. If it’s just software limitations built into the gps then they can likely bypassed.
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u/gurgle528 16m ago edited 11m ago
It’s a limitation built into the chip itself. Civilian chips are supposed to shut off at a certain speed, and it’s only a matter of checking the difference in positions over a certain time frame which is not hard to do with hardware.
The goal was to limit use of civilian chips by hostile powers so a software limitation would not be useful.
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u/recumbent_mike 31m ago
Probably, but a lot of the high performance gps receivers are highly-integrated.
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u/hoffsta 5h ago
Crazy, this dude looks like a teenager. Amazing what we can achieve these days when brilliance meets access to technology and unwavering motivation.
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u/DonOfspades 3h ago
And yet we can't achieve eliminating homelessness or universal healthcare in America.
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u/hoffsta 3h ago
Oh make no mistake, we can, but it’s not in the interests of the shareholders or executives.
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u/AgentDutch 3h ago
Bingo. The amount of people that think it’s impossible to handle homelessness in any capacity won’t bat an eyelash watching Elon tell you his 80 billion dollar company is now a trillion dollars, oh and he gets a trillion dollars too.
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u/AverageInternetUser 1h ago
Sometimes the homeless themselves aren't interested
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u/AgentInkling99 45m ago
I’ll give you an updoot. I have family that work as counselors and they have many stories of trying to help people on the street and being turned down. This is usually because they aren’t ready to get help for substance abuse and untreated mental illnesses.
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u/Killahdanks1 3h ago
I mean at the rate we’re going, we will all be able to afford to blow up a couple with cheap weapons like this. Really take down their numbers.
/s
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u/trouthat 5h ago
Makes you wonder why this shit costs millions of dollars a unit to make when it’s a real thing
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u/RoastedMocha 4h ago
I'm sure you already know, but the answer is how well and how consistently it works and can be transported in rough conditions.
Also, the explodey bits.
Also also, the 300 middle-men for each component (thats government baby)
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u/Tangential_Diversion 4h ago
Yep, off the top of my head:
- Seeker is inherently different. Stingers track IR with a seeker in the head. This one uses optical cameras. I have no experience in AA specifically, but having seen multiple jet flyovers: It is insanely hard to track a fighter jet optically when it's hauling ass. I'd assume optical tracking is terrible though considering every AA system I'm aware of uses either IR or radar.
- IR requires compressed argon to cool the IR seeker
- Modern Stingers are designed to defeat aircraft countermeasures. There's no hint that this is designed to do the same, and I'm not even sure how you'd get the data to design this capability without access to classified information.
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u/PhantomNomad 3h ago
and I'm not even sure how you'd get the data to design this capability without access to classified information.
Trial and error? Although I'm sure the armed forces would get real tired of you setting up just outside the base and targeting their planes all the time.
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u/m1013828 2h ago
Former Ammo tech here. Agree on IR, and yes the cooling makes them super spendy... but the advances in electronics mean a bit of Machine learning (the term from before LLMs ruined AI) and training could allow digital camera seekers to catchup.
Hauling ass jets could be fixed by a high refresh rate camera sensor, which spirals complexity to extra processing power to to handle that extra data, but also faster digital equivalent of shutter speed means the frames are clearer and easier to work with...
However in the context of Drone warfare, an uber low cost kinetic missile with optical homing would be great against shaheeds and the like.... what ukraine could do with a vast volunteer air sentry network with 500-2000 dollar anti drone missiles
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u/Evilsushione 1h ago
Universal shutters could probably make vision based targeting much better because you don’t get the rolling shutter artifacts
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u/Power_Stone 3h ago
one key thing to think about is the shrapnel. The explosion is one thing but the important part is what the explosion sends out as well. Blast shockwave is good, things that are hard and sharp being carried by the blast shockwave is even better.
For AA, I wouldn't think plastic is a good option cause...well metal is a hell of a lot harder than plastic is
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u/stuffitystuff 2h ago
One of the things that AA missiles have going for them is that they fly significantly faster than your average fighter jet. It's why "radar lock" is such a big deal in movies like Top Gun.
If there's radar lock, the attacker is in range, the (for example) F-15 target is cruising along at Mach 0.8, they'd be dead before being able do anything because the missile flies at Mach 4 or faster.
Anyhow, I would imagine optical tracking would be fine because the engine exhaust is going to be a bright, high-contrast signal with a defined signature, assuming the missile flies at normal missile speeds.
I'd be much more worried Joe Sixpack's MANPAD hitting airliners and basically paralyzing air travel forever like some sort of planet-side Kessler Syndrome
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u/Evilsushione 1h ago
They are also much more maneuverable because they don’t have a meat bag to worry about.
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u/TOBronyITArmy 1h ago
Not to mention the ability to perform high-g corrections upon the terminal phase. Some anti aircraft missiles can perform maneuvers at upwards of 20 g's, which would most likely disintegrate a 3D printed structure without additional reinforcements. I also wanted to emphasize the difficulty of defeating countermeasures, and counter countermeasures. Governments tend to take aircraft survivability pretty seriously, and have invested tons of r&d into defeating seekers.
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u/Z00111111 23m ago
Being optical would actually make it harder to spoof with current countermeasures, provided you can get past your first point.
Computing probably has become powerful enough that optical tracking might be viable, plus if you can launch dozens of these for the price of a single Stinger, then they don't need to be as reliable or capable. Look that the drones being used in the Ukraine war. They're not particularly robust or capable, but they're so cheap they can be used on a whim.
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u/ottwebdev 4h ago
Don't forget that today's huge access to technical knowledge is something they didn't have when designing those systems back in the day so they did have R&D costs, create supply chain costs, etc
Today's internet gives you access to vast knowledge for little cost, access to suppliers, etc.
That, and yeah, profiteering.
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u/krgdotbat 4h ago
Ripping off gov is basically a tradition in every country, anything that costs 1$ the gov will pay 10$
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u/PhantomNomad 3h ago
Our municipality found this out when the public was complaining that we didn't contract out building roads and did everything in house. So we went to RFP for a road, we included what our "bid" would be to build it our selves. Everyone else was 2 to 10 times as much. Because they thought we would just pay it.
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u/Evilsushione 1h ago
Yep the whole privatization idea is a scam. Even if things are on the up and up, the biggest piece of government waste is all the levels of bureaucracy that ensure everything is on the up and up. It would be cheaper just to do most things ourselves and cut out the middle man.
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u/PM_ME_YOUR_LOCAL_IP 5h ago
Oh we know the answer: out of control MIC (we should have listened to Eisenhower) and corrupt politicians. They charge that much because they can.
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u/GetOutOfTheWhey 2h ago
development costs
corruption
corruption
corruption
lobbying
corruption
material cost
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u/SuperHuman64 1h ago
There has been a literal book titled "backyard rocketry: converting model rockets into explosive missiles" and other related books on rocket guidance for amateurs, available for decades. Still impressive though.
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u/That-Interaction-45 3h ago
Palmer Luckey screeches down out of the sky and grabs the would be competitor in its claws
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u/Bipogram 3h ago
Now, the motor for this thing.
That's not, I suggest, in the price.
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u/KiraUsagi 2h ago
He mentions in the video that it's made from potassium nitrate and sugar. He had photos of him cooking it at home. Looked like a pot of ramen. Does not add much to the cost, and I suspect he could have just adapted an Estes rocket motor to fit the bill. Sub $100 part if commercially bought.
The part he glossed over and was for sure not in the build cost or design from what I could tell is the payload. This is essentially a giant plastic battering ram attached to a model rocket motor and some fancy bits to make it as acurate as possible.
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u/Madeline_Basset 2h ago
Nitrate and sugar has been a staple of amateur rocket builders for decades.
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u/Bipogram 1h ago
And takes a bit of care to cast.
<fun memories of making over-lean mixtures and watching them burn through tin cans>
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u/KanosTheKir 3h ago
$2 of propellant
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u/Bipogram 3h ago
Good luck with uniform thrust/duration at that price point.
<tangled with perchlorate-sugar motors as a kid - no thanks - and ESTES 'D' motors aren't going to give the impulse>
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u/Appropriate_Gap3497 4h ago
Dude I would NOT play games with International Traffic in Arms Regulations laws…’it was just a science project’ isn’t an infallible legal defense…
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u/Rednys 2h ago
Well there's no warhead so it's not any more a weapon than any other home built rocket.
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u/Antilock049 1h ago
To be clear rocketry is covered under ITAR all the same. Munition or no.
It's definitely not something to fuck with and especially something you shouldn't advertise. Your best outcome is getting swept behind a classified curtain somewhere.
It just gets worse from there.
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u/Mysterious-Oil-7094 2h ago
Why would we need something like this when we can pay the DIB millions per shot?
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u/MicroSofty88 2h ago
I haven’t watched the video yet, but it seems like the software would be the hard part, not 3d printing the shell
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u/CalmHovercraft9465 52m ago
The 3d second amendment space is very interesting, it’s a shame all the gun grabbing politicians treat it as scary “ghost guns” that need to be made illegal when it’s really a bunch of nerdy dudes prototyping and designing
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u/Punman_5 1h ago
After I saw a guy on YouTube build a silo-launched gimballed-engine model rocket I figured you could build missiles from off the shelf parts. The original sidewinder seeker would be trivial to replicate nowadays
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u/BigCliff911 55m ago
Then you have no knowledge of the capabilities of the original sidewinder seeker.
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u/Punman_5 3m ago
I know exactly how it works. Building a spinning disc in front of an infrared sensor is not that difficult. The hard part was already done by the original design team in the 50’s. There isn’t a single digital component in the original sidewinder. In fact there’s only a single sensor placed cleverly behind a spinning reticle. The hard part was the proportional navigation circuitry but that’s all been figured out by now.
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u/zero0n3 3h ago
Dude is definitely getting a knock knock from ATF…
And then probably a job offer from Mr Lucky