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$96 3D-printed rocket that recalculates its mid-air trajectory using a $5 sensor

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Re: $96 3D-printed rocket that recalculates its mid-air trajectory using a $5 sensor

#221

Post by throwup238 »

make3 wrote: post #138
mikkupikku wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I don't think this project is a serious threat as a weapon, it's more interesting if viewed as a politically provocative stunt, to get people thinking about the relationship between technology and war.

I always wonder why rockets are millions of dollars each, that seems insane to me.

It really depends on what kind of rocket you’re talking about. An unguided rocket propelled grenade mass produced with 1960s technology is a few hundred bucks. Stepping up to a simple TOW guided missile using 1970s technology quickly ramps that price up to $5-10k per round with a max range of 3-5km.

Once you add in modern electronics and guidance and reliability that cost quickly skyrockets, going up an order of magnitude at each step of complexity (advanced guided like the Javelin, cruise, ballistic, etc).

Re: $96 3D-printed rocket that recalculates its mid-air trajectory using a $5 sensor

#222

Post by hermitcrab »

lukan wrote: post #100
tamimio wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that’s ok if it’s failing to do the job as intended, learning is acquired, and it looks fun to build, I am in the field and I find it great homemade concept. Realistically, I doubt there’s ANY system out there will be able to counter small weaponized drones that are flown manually let alone with AI, you might have some workarounds, but never a real counter.

"Realistically, I doubt there’s ANY system out there will be able to counter small weaponized drones that are flown manually " Why would lasers not work? Those cheap drones are made from plastic, if you have a laser powerful enough and a target guidance system (like a camera and a PI) - then you would just need enough of them.

The practicalities of using lasers are covered in some depth on the Naval Gazing blog. First part here:

https://www.navalgazing.net/Lasers-at-Sea-Part-1

Re: $96 3D-printed rocket that recalculates its mid-air trajectory using a $5 sensor

#223

Post by regularfry »

dgroshev wrote: post #115
vidarh wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should be sweating, because if the other side can fire 100 rockets for $10k that are close enough to not immediately and obviously be off target, and you don't know whether a more expensive one with actual explosives is hiding within that barrage, you now have 100 targets to try to intercept, and suddenly your costs have gone up dramatically while the other sides costs has barely moved.

100 rockets for $10k is not happening. The price floor is not dictated by the electronics (which did get cheaper), it's dictated by the rest of the system: propulsion, warheads, arming and safety, QA, traceability, climate and shelf life stability. Take a look at Raytheon's manufacturing line: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCCkVAHSzrc That's what it takes to have missiles that are nearly guaranteed to perform to sp…

Without necessarily disagreeing with your point, the driving consideration for Raytheon's production line is arguably not reliability. It's being able to charge the customer for perceived reliability. It's very hard to know from the outside how much of it is theatre, even if earnestly arrived at. There are incentives for these things to be expensive.

Re: $96 3D-printed rocket that recalculates its mid-air trajectory using a $5 sensor

#224

Post by hermitcrab »

pjc50 wrote: post #198
dgroshev wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100 rockets for $10k is not happening. The price floor is not dictated by the electronics (which did get cheaper), it's dictated by the rest of the system: propulsion, warheads, arming and safety, QA, traceability, climate and shelf life stability. Take a look at Raytheon's manufacturing line: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCCkVAHSzrc That's what it takes to have missiles that are nearly guaranteed to perform to sp…

> price floor is not dictated by the electronics (which did get cheaper), it's dictated by the rest of the system: propulsion, warheads, arming and safety, QA, traceability, climate and shelf life stability. I wonder how much of that Ukraine is bothering with. Or Iran. Certainly Hezbollah are building down to a budget.

I wonder how many Hezbollah rocket operators get blown up by their own rockets? A not insignificant number, I suspect.

Re: $96 3D-printed rocket that recalculates its mid-air trajectory using a $5 sensor

#225

Post by wombatpm »

skybrian wrote: post #107
tamimio wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that’s ok if it’s failing to do the job as intended, learning is acquired, and it looks fun to build, I am in the field and I find it great homemade concept. Realistically, I doubt there’s ANY system out there will be able to counter small weaponized drones that are flown manually let alone with AI, you might have some workarounds, but never a real counter.

I don’t know if it will work, but here’s a startup that seems to be building an AI-controlled shotgun: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/9-mothers-corporation Given the war in Ukraine, wanting to build such things is certainly understandable. But still, this is the stuff of nightmares.

David Suaez in Kill Decision had swarms of small single shot drones with the targeting intelligence of ‘00 camera. Identify a face, fly towards it, fire when close. It was an implementation of quantity has a quality all its own.

Re: $96 3D-printed rocket that recalculates its mid-air trajectory using a $5 sensor

#226

Post by mikkupikku »

jeffbee wrote: post #135
mikkupikku wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really terribly new actually, in the past, rapid advances in consumer technology have enabled other sort of weapon guidance systems. For instance, the development of extremely compact television cameras available to consumers directly lead to the development of the Walleye television bomb. It happened when one nerdy guy was fucking around with his new camera and realized that he could automatically track tra…

People made self-guided missiles with 1940s technology, in the 1940s. It can't be too much of a surprise if someone right now can make guided missiles in their garage with 2026 electronics. At this point the "guided" feature is trivial, the "missile" part is doable, and the weapon has probably become the tricky part.

I think the hard part was and will usually continue to be making the whole thing work effectively together with enough performance to actually work in practice. It's a lot of details across a lot of disciplines to get right.

Re: $96 3D-printed rocket that recalculates its mid-air trajectory using a $5 sensor

#227

Post by regularfry »

redgridtactical wrote: post #151
hrmtst93837 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

For a sub-minute flight the drift budget is actually pretty forgiving — a MEMS gyro drifts maybe 1-3 deg/sec, and if you're fusing with accelerometer data you really just need "which way is up" and "am I still pointed at the target." A $5 IMU can hold that for tens of seconds. Where you're right is repeatability. Mil-spec works the same on launch 1 and launch 500 across temperature extremes. Consumer MEMS you'd need…

Hm. Is it, though? If what you wanted to do was produce a large batch of calibrated IMUs, building a rig to do so wouldn't be an enormous undertaking.

Or do you mean to characterise the assembled vehicle?

Re: $96 3D-printed rocket that recalculates its mid-air trajectory using a $5 sensor

#228

Post by hermitcrab »

dw_arthur wrote: post #189
jeffbee wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People made self-guided missiles with 1940s technology, in the 1940s. It can't be too much of a surprise if someone right now can make guided missiles in their garage with 2026 electronics. At this point the "guided" feature is trivial, the "missile" part is doable, and the weapon has probably become the tricky part.

Throwing an aside here that anyone interested in 1940s war technology must check out the old BBC documentary The Secret War (1977) which goes into depth on solving the engineering challenges of the war.

Well worth a watch. I think I watched it on Youtube.

Re: $96 3D-printed rocket that recalculates its mid-air trajectory using a $5 sensor

#229

Post by regularfry »

danmaz74 wrote: post #121
redgridtactical wrote: post #13

The engineering is genuinely impressive for $96, but naming the repo "MANPADS-System-Launcher-and-Rocket" on GitHub is going to attract exactly the kind of attention you don't want. ITAR implications aside, the interesting part is the mid-flight trajectory recalculation on a $5 sensor. That's the same basic problem military guidance systems solve with hardware that costs thousands. The gap between consumer electronic…

More than the electronics, I would be curious about the performance of 3d-printed plastic parts on a rocket. Are they strong enough?

People have been doing 3d printed model rockets for a while now. With no payload they experience higher acceleration than this will.

Re: $96 3D-printed rocket that recalculates its mid-air trajectory using a $5 sensor

#230

Post by dgroshev »

pjc50 wrote: post #198
dgroshev wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100 rockets for $10k is not happening. The price floor is not dictated by the electronics (which did get cheaper), it's dictated by the rest of the system: propulsion, warheads, arming and safety, QA, traceability, climate and shelf life stability. Take a look at Raytheon's manufacturing line: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCCkVAHSzrc That's what it takes to have missiles that are nearly guaranteed to perform to sp…

> price floor is not dictated by the electronics (which did get cheaper), it's dictated by the rest of the system: propulsion, warheads, arming and safety, QA, traceability, climate and shelf life stability. I wonder how much of that Ukraine is bothering with. Or Iran. Certainly Hezbollah are building down to a budget.

Ukraine does bother with all of that when they can afford it. I'd even say that FPV drones are the main exception, and only because Ukraine was so pressed for immediate results and had stockpiles to repurpose. There are only so many old RPG warheads you can reuse with a detonator made of live wires, and maiming your own launch crews because someone made a tiny wrong movement arming their thirtieth drone of the day under artillery fire gets old fast.

Hezbollah is a terrorist organisation, they don't need their contraptions to work reliably. GMLRS serves an entirely different purpose to rockets made of repurposed telephone poles, and is much more useful for a military force.

Also, don't forget the distances. Ukraine is fighting a war in their own country, with direct ground lines of communication to the frontline. On the other hand, you can fit three Ukraines just between Guam and Taiwan.

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