I remember an anecdote our robotics lecturer told our university class in 1995, which was about how in the west we try to make expensive things that are the absolute best of technology and how the other side didn't have that luxury and relied on ingenuity.
He described a cold war Russian missile they had somehow obtained and were tasked with trying to reverse engineer. Ostensibly, it was thought to be a heat seeking missile, but there seemed to be no control or guidance circuitry at all. There was a single LDR (light dependent resistor) attached to a coil which moved a fin. That was it. Total cost for the guidance system maybe a couple of dollars, compared to hundreds of thousands for the cheapest guidance systems we had at the time.
The key insight was that if you shined a light at it, the fin moved one way and if there was no light the fin moved the opposite way. That still didn't explain how this was able to guide a missile, but the next realisation was that the other fins were angled so when this was flying (propelled by burning rocket fuel), the missile was inherently unstable - rotating around the axis of thrust and wobbling slightly. With the moveable fin in place, it was enough to straighten it up when it was facing a bright light, and wobble more when there was no bright light. Because it was constantly rotating, you could think of it as defaulting to exploring a cone around its current direction, and when it could see a light it aimed towards the centre of that cone. It was then able to "explore the sky" and latch on to the brightest thing it could see, which would hopefully be the exhaust from a plane, and so it would be able to lock on, and adjust course on a moving target with no "brain" at all.
I believe there was a similar weapon being developed in the west, only recently, which involved a missile with contra rotating halves joined by a clutch. The fixed fins caused it to always steer one way. It flew straight by releasing the clutch to spin up the front half, negating the steering effect. Grabbing the clutch caused it to stop spinning and veer off in one direction.
Presto! Two axis continuous flight control with a 1-bit input.
35-ish years ago there was a pitch for cheap, high velocity, spin-stabilized rockets that were deployed in dense pods on the A-10. The rocket's seeker could divert some small amount of thrust at an angle for guidance, but otherwise that was it. I can't recall if it ever made it out of the pilot phase, but obviously nothing new under the sun.
Strike a light in front of a parked but otherwise active fin guided heat-seeker and its freaky to watch it come alive like a lazy beagle eyeing a treat.
Also wouldn't it only work for aircraft that are flying away from the launcher? IR & light signatures are much weaker from the front. At best I think this guidance system would only be economical for ground-based launchers, as the cost of aircraft and their limited payloads mean you want the most effective weapons onboard, not the cheapest.
Annoyingly, I can't find any information online about such a simple guidance system. The earliest homing missile fielded by the Soviets was the K-13[1], which used technology reversed-engineered from the AIM-9 Sidewinder[2]. Later systems seem to be improvements upon that technology, not simplifications.
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 electronics and mil-spec capability keeps shrinking and this is a pretty stark demonstration of where that trend leads. A few years ago this would have required an IMU that cost more than this entire build. The democratization angle cuts both ways though - the same accessibility that makes this cool for hobbyists makes it genuinely concerning from a proliferation standpoint.
> The gap between consumer electronics and mil-spec capability keeps shrinking
My friend's brother works in munitions and had, in his spare time, designed and prototyped a missile that could be built for about 10k. He pretty much was ignored by the contractor he works for.
Shockingly, as of a couple weeks ago, they are all hot and bothered to talk.
That tracks. The defense primes have zero incentive to make things cheaper — their business model is cost-plus. A guy building something for 10k in his garage is an existential threat to programs billing 500k per unit. Of course they ignored him until the geopolitical situation made it impossible to keep ignoring.
I was talking about those that are meant for hospitals. Was peripherally involved with a fledgling startup that was developing something cheap. Hospitals straightaway said noway.
We are heading to robotic wars where abilities and cost efficiency are the key factors. Like today drones in Ukraine war. Attack + defense + automation, + money + production
Cheap sensors look impressive in demos but drift and calibration wreck repeatability unless you babysit launches so nobody in defense is sweating this yet.
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 specification every time. You can stockpile the packaged missiles in a non-climate-controlled shed for years, replenish them at sea while being showered with salt water, subject them to shock of a nearby blast while in a VLS, and they will still launch, go up to Mach 13, and catch an incoming ballistic missile nearly every time.
Sure, Iran's ballistic missiles are simpler than SM-3, but they are still subject to most of the constraints. They still need perfectly cast large size solid rocket motors that don't crack after being stored for a year, they need warheads that only go off when they are supposed to, they still need to trace every part for QA, etc. There's a vast gap, largely invisible to amateurs, between garage prototypes and stockpiled AURs.
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.
If you think shelf life, QA, safety, blah blah blah matters when a rocket is 100 bucks, I have just three words: you will lose.
The Ukraine war is being fought with a bunch of cheap toy style drones dropping grenades everywhere. The US got their bases blown to pieces across the Middle East by cheap drones that gently float through the air like a paper airplane in comparison to absolutely any missile.
And let's not forget. The US had napalm, helicopters, bombers, incredible logistics, cutting edge equipment of all sorts. Vietnam had a bunch of sticks in a hole covered in poop. Those sticks sent Americans crying home and we still get movies and games with them crying about how bad it was.
In war between great powers, yeah, high tech works because it's scary and civilians don't want to have that kind of stuff coming home. In a war where civilians are being targeted by great powers who terrorize them by blowing up schools and hospitals, a lot of people are thinking about how many weapons they can make to defend their home and for cheap. If America thinks an invasion is a good idea, they're going to be bringing their 50 million dollar tanks face to face with a few $100 toy rockets. And those toy rockets will be picking off tanks like fish in a barrel while a drone streams it in 4K live to the internet. I really do not think American who support current happenings are ready for the absolute mental torment they're going to endure if this continues.
You have a point - cheap drones have changed warfare - but you might be simplifying the issue. As some warfare experts online have discussed, it isn't that cheap drones are the only weapon that is used in Ukraine (or warfare in general), it is one option in vast array of options based on the situation (although, agreed, it is taking on a much bigger significance). Look at the war in Iran. They did a pretty standard playbook and use stealth jets and cruise missiles to surgically take out air defenses in order to gain air dominance. This would be very difficult with just cheap drones.
... but, do agree that cheap weapons are still becoming extremely important. Iran is terrorizing the middle east and strait of hormuz with cheap drones, so they are definitely important. Yeah, in the war of attrition, low cost, high-volume options are clearly very important.
It's fairly important to distinguish what kind of drones are we talking about [1]. Iran's using Group 3 drones.
The GP is confusing Iran's neighbours not being ready to counter group 3 drones with the drones being inevitably effective. These drones are by necessity large and slow, because they need a lot of energy and aerodynamic efficiency to get their range. That means that they are vulnerable to cheap counters, which Ukraine is demonstrating very convincingly: even though Russia is now launching 800+-drone raids, the vast majority is shot down.
Even when those drones do get through, they are extremely inefficient. It's not just that they can't carry a heavy or sophisticated payload (more complex warheads are more effective, but way more expensive), the extremely high attrition ratio forces the enemy to try to target way too many drones per aimpoint. Instead of serving a few hundred aimpoints, the 800-strong raid is forced to concentrate on just a few, otherwise most aimpoints will get no hits whatsoever.
But also the only reason 800-strong raids can even be launched is Ukraine lacking the capability to interdict the launches. 800 group 3 drones have an enormous logistics and manufacturing tail, which a Western force would have no problem destroying way before the raid can be launched. For example, Iran in its current state can't launch such raids. So in practice Iran's neighbours would need to intercept only a handful of drones, which is hardly an insurmountable challenge.
GPS denial is a mixed bag. After about two years of efforts and counter-efforts, the Russians seemingly managed to build GPS receivers that are pretty resistant to jamming.
So much this. Reliability and durability only matters because the thing costs a million dollar a piece. When you have stuff with a mere 5-digits price tag or less, you simply don't care if half of them miss their mark or doesn't fire 10% of the time.
Half of munitions missing means doubling the logistical burden of delivering the munitions to where they need to be employed. The trucks/plains/ships that carry your munitions need to be fuelled and protected, too, so the expense is super-linear, especially when it's a distant war and not a war fought on the country's own soil, like in Ukraine.
Cheap munitions sometimes explode before they are launched, killing crews and destroying platforms.
Cheap munitions mean that CAS is a roulette. You waited for ten minutes for a support fire mission? Sorry, wait for ten more, whatever we launched has failed. Or maybe you're dead because the munition has hit you instead.
Cheap munitions can pin you down. Those cheap FPV drones that are supposedly cheaper than Javelins require dedicated immobile units to launch and guide to targets. Javelins are organic to infantry squads.
Cheap munitions are either very expensive or impossible. There's no cheap anti-ballistic missile and no cheap missile that can sink a warship in the Taiwan strait when launched[*] from Guam.
[*]: alright alright an LRASM would need to be flown closer by an F-35 but the point still stands
I'm just not sure what to even say when you're both so assertive and completely wrong. Please stop relying on twitter/reddit to inform your takes.
The war in Ukraine is being fought with all tiers of systems, ranging from Zircons and PAC-3 on the high end to booby traps on the low end. All of them are essential, and shortcomings on any of the tiers is ruthlessly exploited by the other side. Saying that it's only the small drones that matter betrays over-reliance on the gory FPV kill footage.
"QA, safety, blah blah blah" get implemented on every level as soon as it's feasible. You can just look at photos from Yelabuga and see how their assembly lines are not fundamentally different from Raytheon's. Ukraine is standardising their drone manufacturing. This is inevitable, because faulty munitions lead to
- killed friendly soldiers if the munitions explode pre-launch
- wasted logistic resources if they don't launch
- wasted time and targeting opportunity or friendly units not getting fire support when they fail after launch
The cost of faults is severe and much higher than just the cost of the munition itself.
It seems that you're misinformed about the real cost of modern FPVs used in Ukraine. Reports of sub-$1000 drones are years out of date and heavily relied on salvaged munitions, but there are only so many RPG warheads you can get for "free". Current FPVs are heavier, more capable, and cost a few thousand dollars. Further, it's reported that it takes dozens of FPVs to kill a single "hedgehog tank", which brings the total cost of one kill to a rough parity with "classic", "expensive" systems like the Javelin, except Javelins can be carried by a mobile squad, and launching FPVs requires a dedicated immobile unit with a long logistical tail.
Don't mistake forces not being ready to counter low-tier threats immediately with the threats being impossible to counter. Group 3 drones are very effectively countered in Ukraine, to the extent that it takes hundreds to deliver maybe a few TLAMs worth of payload to the target. There are mature systems being rolled out right now across western armies, from various gun-based solutions to APKWS. Group 2 drones are decimated with cheap anti-air drones. Group 1 drones are being handled with APSes, which work pretty well even in urban environments, as Israel has (very unfortunately) demonstrated lately.
> propulsion, warheads, arming and safety, QA, traceability, climate and shelf life stability.
You're entirely missing the point.
These do not need to be reliable for the scenario I hinted at. They also do not need to be armed.
They need to be large enough that if one of them is a higher quality rocket (not part of the $10k) that contains actual explosives, you have serious destruction on your hand. Maybe something that looks large enough for that will drive the cost up and we're talking $20k or even $100k instead of $10k.
The precise cost is largely irrelevant, as long as the total cost is a tiny fraction of the cost of a missile interception.
The point is you'd be multiplying the cost assymmetry by forcing a massively outsized response. Because if you don't try to intercept them, every future barrage will include a real rocket. If you do try to intercept them all, you'll be burning through massively expensive interceptors to take out a bunch of cheap toys.
If I was ever considering an insurgency, or a war, I'd be stocking up on vast quantities of toys, with the intent of making every radar constantly lit up by a number of possible threats.
It's a firework-grade rocket with no payload that can't even ignite reliably.
To imitate even a TBM or a MBRM, you need similar kinematics, even if you're running without a payload. Maybe your solid rocket motor would be a touch smaller because you're not delivering hundreds of kilograms of explosives, but it still has to be large because of the rocket equation. With a large motor you're looking at a lot of damage if it explodes at the launch point, so you need quality casting. You can't really save much money on the motor.
Then, you need a TEL. Because the motor is large, the launcher has to be comparable to the real thing. You probably don't want to have two different vehicles, so you keep the same vehicle; it needs to be armed, driven around, and set for launch. Not that different from the real thing.
So you've done all of that, and then you realise that your empty warheads are too light and the missiles (or warheads, if you split) don't interact with the atmosphere in the same way as non-decoy missiles do. What's worse, modern radars are perfectly capable of noticing that and discriminating the decoys. All of that effort, and you didn't win anything. Might as well add the payload.
The US and the UK spent vast amount of money chasing exactly your line of reasoning with nuclear warhead decoys. Chevaline is a culmination of the effort, and it's retired for 30 years. In the end, relying on decoys doesn't really work, they are too expensive.
Fancier CPUs change very little of this calculation, because compute is a very little part of the cost to begin with.
> 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.
Last week they launched 200 rockets in the span of one day, about 40 of those fell inside Lebanon border, that’s not counting the number of rockets that did not fire at all.
Probably some fraction of the civilians blown up by Israeli terrorist phone strikes and bombing raids; there's a reason Hezbollah maintains some level of support in the region.
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.
That's entirely possible, but doing so reliably and safely is difficult and expensive enough that for a very long time Ukrainians were accepting the risk instead.
The risk appetite countries in existential conflicts have is quite different from what we're used to. For example, there are plenty of videos of Ukrainian soldiers angle grinding cluster munitions open to extract submunitions to put on drones, but that's not a strategy that western armies can rely on.
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 to characterize each unit individually — fine for a demo, impractical at any scale.
Good $3 MEMS gyros are about 100x better than that now - look at anything new made by Invensense in the past couple years. And their drift is pretty Gaussian-distributed, so the error scales as sqrt(n). If you combine 8+ of them on one board you can get about 5deg/hour stability...
Visual SLAM on a rocket would be wild. The frame rates you'd need at those velocities are brutal though — feature tracking falls apart fast when your entire visual field is changing at hundreds of m/s. Drones are the sweet spot where camera-based nav really shines.
You can calibrate any sensor, its just a manufacturing step, and while cheap ones may be inaccurate and drift over time, I'm pretty sure the good enough ones (which cost tens of dollars, not fractions of a dollar) are accurate enough to work for the seconds-to-minutes flight time of a rocket like this.
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 track features in an analogue television signal using some quite basic analogue electronics. Point the camera into the general direction of the target and you can then "lock on" to some target feature and based on contrast it could tell how that feature was moving around in the image.
He implemented a 1D tracker in his garage, took it to work and showed people. A few years later these bombs are taking out bridges and even sometimes hitting moving trucks.
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.
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.
Consumer GPS chips are specifically nerfed for using them in rockets; they give erroneous readings on purpose if altitude is above a certain height and/or if speeds exceed a certain speed. That’s likely why the mid-course correction software uses other methods.
The restrictions on GPS prevent ballistic missiles, not MANPADs. Typical limits are 515 m/s and 18,000 meters (try using your phone's GPS on a commercial flight, it works fine near a window). Update rate is probably the biggest issue with GPS and MANPADs.
It would be interesting to see if those are only for external sale vs restricted for sale within China.
If China allows those unrestricted chips to be sold internationally but not domestically it would be a strategic long-term decision, I would think. Destabilize the neighbors but not themselves.
The more likely reason is that their government has simply not gotten around to restricting it.
What you are likely thinking of is the "selective availability" system, which intentionally provided slightly inaccurate data to civilian clients, while military receivers could decrypt the most accurate info. But this has not been used for many years now.
Other than that, GPS is a one-way system, it does not know you exist, how fast your receiver is moving or "give" different information to one client vs another.
Even if it did, this is essentially a toy and moving slower and lower than a general aviation plane.
It uses accelerometers and other sensors because they can be sampled and integrated hundreds of times a second. The $5 gps module is 9600 baud serial and provides one update/second (or maybe 5/sec depending on which part number you pick).
Owning a system designed for surface to air weapon carries life imprisonment any USA, without any intent for violence, just simple possession or conspiracy to possess[]. Doesn't even matter if you have an NFA stamp, there is no exception except if it's done with authorization and behalf of the government.
Merely having a device intended to guide the rocket is also the same penalty.
I'm impressed by the kid's engineering and gumption, but I think he's a bit.. misguided, if you'll pardon the pun. The video ends with shots of Russian drone war, and, bizarrely, photos of David Koresh.
> The video ends with shots of Russian drone war, and, bizarrely, photos of David Koresh.
You're omitting that the end of the video also features pictures of Martin Luther King, Vietnamese civilians during America's invasion of their country and Afghani Mujahideen freedom fighters during the Soviet Union's invasion of theirs; I think he's trying to make a point about technology enhancing the capabilities of people who are in any conflict with conventionally powerful forces, not an endorsement of David Koresh.
It’s really odd how people will so easily fixate on the bone the government consisting of maniacal, narcissistic, psychopathic, pathological liars will throw them; while totally ignoring that the pathological lying, evil, murderous people in and of the government are constantly and ceaselessly, lying and murdering.
There now carpet bombing and murdering people in Iran, just like they mass murdered people in Gaza, and they’re doing it to cover up and distract from the fact that our government consists of raping pedophiles. That is who we are governed by. … but David Koresh excuses it and makes any opposition invalid, of close.
I am completely against the US-Israeli war on Iran. That said, they are not carpet-bombing Iran. That is, they appear to be selecting individual targets rather than engaging in carpet bombing entire areas:
The choice of targets is not legally legitimate (and the entire campaign is illegal AFAICT), and sometimes they used old/invalid intel, like what happened with that girls' school that's supposedly close to an IRGC base. Still, it is mostly individual buildings or installations rather than an attempt to flatten entire areas.
Oh so your line is carpet bombing? The attackers has shown they can do almost any atrocity many times (already killed thousands of woman and children in Gaza with zero remorse or accountability)
what's your line? respecting "sovereignty" of dictators and mass murders/internet blocks/Armageddonian Islamic cosmology?
talking about "your line" is way too simplistic. think in second and third order consequences. Iran exported and financially supported terrorists because of a repressive theological dictatorship
I always loved the "white phosphorous" stuff. The meme appeared on reddit out of nowhere, and once it did it made everyone who heard it completely utterly stupid. Suddenly it's a chemical weapon, the worst sort of atrocity anyone's heard of.
The meme will never die. Skynet could be hunting down the last of humanity hiding in caves, and those humans will be crying "maybe it will just be nukes, please god, don't let the robots white phosphorous us!".
I understand your compulsion to rationalize things, make excuses for your abusers, but I ask you to contemplate for a moment what you are defending. One, hopefully we have all seen the genocidal bombing of Gaza turning whole regions of large apartment blocks into an hell-scape of rubble with tens of thousands of people buried underneath them; people, not animals, not “just brown people”, not “terrorists”… people like you, like your wife or girlfriend, like your daughter or son or nephew…people who also want to live just like you even if far more humbly, without all the waste and decadence of the avg American. Should your loved ones be bombed and buried under a resort and luxury condo towers because a clan of billionaires do not like that you won’t leave your land?
Two, at the very least, the most generous interpretation, the very first strike to start an illegal war of aggression that the Nuremberg trial clearly established as the “mother of all subsequent evil”, was not only on a girls school that killed dozens and dozens of young girls, but did so in a “double tap“ process where they observed that people arrived in ambulances and parents in cars to pick up very small humans, and then they hit them again with another missile. Let us be clear about what you are excusing… They intentionally splattered the guts and flesh of young girls and their parents rushing to save them all over a 300 foot diameter blast radius.
We can lie to ourselves that may have been a “mistake“ but as established during the Nunberg trials, there is no defense in claiming that if you started the illegal and immoral war of aggression.
Three, why are they hiding what is happening if it’s all above board? Why would they not permit unfettered access showing what is being targeted bombing and that the Iranians are lying when they say that thousands of civilian structures have been bombed including schools and hospitals? You trust Hegseth? Trump? Need I say more?
And all that is without even addressing that these people have done nothing but lie and lie about lying about lying.
And let’s also remember that as shocking as the files that gave been released, they have not even released even the slightly uncomfortable parts of the Epstein Files, let alone arrested any of the rapists and pedophiles that are now on yet another murder spree, starting that prosecuting everyone would cause the whole system to collapse!
If want to believe people like that, people who do nothing but lie, rape, murder and cover up for it; then I guess there is nothing else to say and you will have to deal with that on your own as it eats you up from the inside. I for one am opposed to these types of people and actions and will speak out about it even if people don’t like it. And I refuse to make excuses for it for any reason, be it personal weakness or comfort.
They did not defend it or make excuses for it. They argued about the very specific claim of carpet bombing in Iran, before pointing out the entire campaign is illlegal and calling the choice of targets "not legally legitimate".
They also said nothing about Gaza.
I share your concern about both Gaza and Iran, but criticising people for calling out an exaggeration is not helping anyone.
I was reading your comment and thought you were a bit too extreme, but then I thought about it and was like "Hmmm. Yes. Sounds pretty accurate actually." So yes I agree.
> I think he's trying to make a point about technology enhancing the capabilities of people who are in any conflict with conventionally powerful forces
Which is absurd, since all the technology he used was manufactured by the conventionally powerful forces and they can decide to not sell you their stuff.
I think this is within the intent of the 2nd amendment. Having groups of citizens check the power of their government by being armed comes with the the downside of abusive types forming cults. I think this tradeoff is worth it. Mass shooting evens and cults harming people are obviously terrible. But, I prefer living with some of that knowing that it provides recourse for becoming like the majority of Iranians that are so helpless that at least 10s of thousands were slaughtered in daylight by their government merely for protesting. It’s easy to discount the possibility of becoming an oppressed citizenry if you grew up in the US where the worst you’ve heard about is maybe Kent state or early 2026 ice murdering unarmed citizens. Armed citizens are not a guarantee from oppression, but I think it’s important insurance.
soo... i have no kept up with what's gone on in russia/ukraine. Are those drone videos what i think they are – drones sneaking up on humans and, presumably, ceasing them of life?
edit: Ok, I googled the guy
> I have read the works of authors such as Jean Baudrillard, Desmod Morris,
and Ted Kaczynski who believe that technology is harming us and the world.
https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/User:Alisherkhojayev
Both Russia and Ukraine build millions of drones per year, most of them fpv drones that are basically remote controlled flying grenades. There's plenty of electronic warfare with radio jamming, so in some places they use drone mounted spools of fiber optic cable to control them. It's probably been the most impactful weapon type in the war for the past years.
"between 400,000 and 1.5 million estimated casualties (killed and wounded) during the Russian invasion of Ukraine from 24 February 2022 to November 2025"
Mostly due to artillery. Both sides are firing in the region of 10,000 155mm shells per day. For years.
What started in Ukraine, this is modern warfare. Like most "consumer" goods that are mass produced, you can now get a capable strike force for peanuts.
The russians have taken close to 1.5 million casulties because ukraine engineering for cheap drones. Putin really, really f-ed up his "3 day military operation".
We might need them. Would be better than my theory that this country will recover at some point after they destroy the EPA and reintroduce leaded gas because that's what made this country great which leads to a generation of kids who are willing to throw bricks at cops again.
There are 2 short segments in the video showing the actual performance and thus far it is a complete [1] failure [2].
The guy has a talent, and he put together a nice prototype based on OpenRocket [3], but with all due respect, this is not a rocket, and you are not going to win any war with this toy, even if all your enemy has are rocks thrown at you from pretty much similar distance.
The remix of computer games / Ukraine / Martin Luther King / Vietnam / David Koresh just adding more to the amateur spirit and confusion.
I'm surprised nobody else has pointed this out. The entire YouTube video has only two short clips of the actual rocket being fired, and in both cases the clips are very short and only show the rocket being fired and then following an erratic flight path, and then get cut before showing the rocket hitting anything.
For all the technical info given in the video, there is a curious lack of any data regarding the actual accuracy of the system. What percentage of rockets tested managed to hit anything and at what range?
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.
Part of it is the sophistication. Take the Tomahawk: assumed range of ~1000 miles , estimated accuracy of 30 feet. Can launch from above or below water. Etc.
The other part is the limited production runs. Until last month, the DoD was generally purchasing ~100 of these annually. There's no scale economy in making these, so those 100 missiles need to support the entire production & R&D of the product.
It's worth reading up on the history of the Sidewinder development for the other side of this coin. Radically cheaper than the conventionally-developed alternatives at the time. It's grown legs in more recent marks but the first few variants were really not sophisticated at all.
Missiles definitely do not always work. I have seen film of a Sea Slug missile (with war head) falling over the side of a Royal Navy ship, without the motor firing properly. Apparently there was a void in the solid propellant.
Check out Joe Barnard's youtube channel BPS.Space where he's documenting his development of "high power" (hobby) rockets. Those are relatively small rockets still but nonetheless he's getting into performance regimes where the engineering starts to be tricky and the details really matter. The more extreme your rocket gets, the difficulty really ramps up quick.
It’s not a complete explanation, but I was awed by the precision of the shower screens used in modern rocket engines. In the 60s it might have sufficed to just spray fuel into the combustion chamber using some nozzles, but now we have highly precise matrices of micro-perforations that maximize combustion.
Also if you want to harden the rocket against EMP attacks you need an inertial guidance system, and those things also demand extreme precision.
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).
Fireworks rocket do not cost as much. But if you want high precision and high speed, that simply is expensive. Also the area is of course restricted making it more expensive as most states do not want DIY rockets everywhere.
They arent. Missiles cost millions. Rockets are cheap. Rockets are unguided. Missiles are guided. From a military perspective, spacelaunch rockets are techically "unguided" as they are not tracking a target but trying to stick to a fixed/programed trajectory. It is the seeker head that costs the millions, all the jamming/counter-jamming tech that drives up development costs.
This is a rather basic (passive) seeker head by modern standards.
I've been subscribed to this guy for some time. His work is much more impressive, and IIRC, he either works for a defense contractor or is studying for that.
I think there's lots of people talking past each other on this post. These kinds of designs won't be as reliable as the existing designs, and they may have a systemic flaw, for example, susceptibility to disabling with microwaves. And they aren't going to work after sitting in an ammo depot for 15 years in the desert or after being dropped from a plane.
But these designs will cost just a few dollars more than the equivalent dumb munition (and can possibly be retrofitted), and can be two orders of magnitude more effective in the short term. The threat here isn't "guy in garage makes MANPADS", it's "IRGC converts 100's of thousands of existing unguided cold-war rockets into guided S2A and S2S missiles for $20 each". Even if it doesn't hit any target, each aircraft has a limited number of countermeasures and has to return to base if they run out or risk being hit.
Guided munition at a dumb munition price is enough to invalidate many strategies.
You don't need to win any wars with it if you can use them to sow confusion, obscure the firing of more serious rockets, and/or trigger a sufficiently more expensive response.
It clearly needs more work, but if an amateur can get this far at this low cost, odds are you'll see attempts at overwhelming attackers or defense systems by sheer volume with cheap decoys like this long before they become an actual threat in and of themselves.
Get the rocket a bit more stable, and force an attack to try to take out dozens of these because one of them might be a real threat, and you'll have created a problem.
People can do very scary things with a knife, a car, or petrol+matches.
We don't try to regulate those things out of existence like we do with new technology (drones and now 3D printers)
Kind of ridiculous that a country with more guns than people and 45k firearms deaths per year wants to regulate 3D printed plastic. Yet collecting and shooting actual guns is still an acceptable hobby in many states.
The same states that want to regulate 3d printers and force you to register them and install only software that will prevent you from printing anything that even looks like a gun part are also the same states that have been trying (or succeeding) in enforcing those same sorts of broad and dubious regulations on firearms too. When you think of states whose legislatures think collecting and shooting guns is an acceptable hobby, California and New York don’t exactly top the list.
Oh, I totally agree. I always see this as evidence that the terrorism threat is overblown, if it were really as large as we are led to believe the number of successful attacks would be far higher than it is.
Exactly. Consider the current conflict in Iran. They have thousands of drones that cost $50k each. The US’s only real defense against one of these drones is to fire a million dollar missile at it. That assymmetry can win or lose a war.
This design is pretty clearly optimized for weaponry. Eg the foldable fins - necessary if you want to keep a magazine of these things stored compactly before firing. Totally unnecessary for funsies.
What nonviolent application are you imagining for a gps-guided rocket that is launched by pulling a gun trigger on a hand held mount?
Regardless, he made a prototype rocket enclosure and he seems to have the software down… I think the propulsion system will be the easy part. Hardest part will be tuning the PID so that the rocket goes where he wants it to. Then incorporating his tracking system will be another challenge of itself but that’s because of the form factor. As long as his calculus and linear algebra is good I see than being successful. Either way I’d hire simply to be a prototype engineer. Either Anduril or CIA would hire him in a heartbeat for prototyping.
> I think the propulsion system will be the easy part.
Really? I think rocket science is still not easy. Just look at how much nation states are spending on maintaining their liquid and/or solid fuel rocket programs. If they even have one, let alone both.
Quote: "All this sounds fairly academic and innocuous, but when it is translated into the problem of handling the stuff, the results are horrendous. It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that's the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention
asbestos, sand, and water —with which it reacts explosively. It can be
It has recently been shown that an argon fluoride, probably ArF2, does exist, but it
is unstable except at cryogenic temperatures.
[...] kept in some of the ordinary structural metals — steel, copper, aluminum, etc. —because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal
fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat
of oxide on aluminum keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere.
If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to
reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a
metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes."
Granted this is about a fuel that is AFAIK not used for MANPADs, but the joke about the running shoes could be made about most aspects of rocket propulsion.
With all do respect I think your over complicating the problem. It’s not rocket science (no pun intended). It’s essentially a hobby rocket that can be weaponized and it’s all DIY. That’s the point simple and off the shelf. Not meant to travel towards the stratosphere or even long range. Quick and dirty way to cause havoc in a localized area.
Even if the correct sensor could be chosen (whatever it is), unlikely is attainable by consumers and the technology would definitely be export controlled in the US.
I saw this pop up alongside its video thumbnail and nearly shit myself watching it and going "damn, that looks exactly like what's on those RU/UA drones going at each other"... https://www.ebay.com/itm/197224214645
"HS AI Vision Cube For Ultra-long-range Target Recognition tracking & Thermal" for as low as $175. I am feeling the potential ITAR violations straight through my screen.
The funny thing is, at least as I understand it, ITAR only applies to things produced in the United States. As example, you can't buy very good FLIR IR cameras in the United States without a lot of paperwork, but you can trivially buy much better (higher resolution, faster frame rate) and cheaper IR cameras that are produced in China.
I think MEMS gyroscopes and accelerometers used in consumer drones should be just about good enough to measure orientation and acceleration, and those are cheap and easy to get.
You could integrate acceleration to get speed - the flight is short enough to make compounding errors easy to ignore.
I think thanks to drones and RC hobbyists, there's a generally nice body of knowledge on how to get good enough data from consumer hardware to keep things flying.
> You could integrate acceleration to get speed - the flight is short enough to make compounding errors easy to ignore.
‘Easy to ignore’ is not a term I would use here, especially given the motion environment of a rocket. It seems like it might be beginning to be borderline possible.
Get connected with DARPA ASAP, just to let the overlords know you are on "the right side of the fence" - - before Homeland pays you a "very uncomfortable" visit
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 let alone with AI, you might have some workarounds, but never a real counter.
Weaponized drones (say D_A) can be countered by other weaponized drones (say D_B), equally cheap or cheaper than D_A because the D_A is usually targeting something larger (so more payload) and typically has a longer range. D_B only needs to wreck D_A at a shorter defensive range. That's what Ukraine is doing.
You can also use drone swarms with coordinated action so that each drone in the swarm is only targeting one other drone, and automatic re-targeting if one node misses. [1]
> I doubt it, as D_A's target is stationary (and could be reduced to GPS coords) while D_B's target is moving.
It's a good point, though I should point out that GPS denial is assumed in those sort of contexts as a first countermeasure so D_A likely has alternative targeting, and that smaller drones can move faster with less energy storage, which itself requires less weight, compounding the benefits of being smaller.
And also the attacker can send 100 drones without any real targeting at all and 10 proper expensive drones and you need to send up 110 defenders which need to be able to track flying drones. Being the attacker will always be easier.
hardest issue as I mentioned in another comment is detection. Now on using other drones to counter a drone, there are other issues, as I built and tested some before, assuming you got the detection part done. The first one is guidance and correction mid-air, flying manually won’t really be practical due to the need for an extraordinary flying skills, which can’t be relied on in the field, the second part is the speed, you need to ALWAYS make sure the interceptor is faster to catch it up, third is the weight, I disagree about the payload part you mentioned, I have seen videos of light weight drones failing to wreck bigger ones, if you are relying on collision alone. Additionally, the telemetry/video/C&C for the interceptor, if jamming is already in place, your counter won’t work either.
The swarm will require a low latency comms link, centralized or decentralized, if the area is jammed, it won’t work. i have built a self-healing decentralized system using cellular in each drone, but that’s useless if the network is down to start with.
So they might work in a very specific use case, but not an ultimate solution to counter them.
While it [1] doesn't talk about swarms, it has some details - $1k - $2.5k price, 170mph speed, backpackable, thermal imaging, radar, ai, manual control (fiber-optic I think, based on other sources and battlefield pictures).
This [2] talks about swarmer software used by Ukraine.
$1k-$2.5k gives a lot of room for tech to avoid jamming - ir or visible light, ultrasound, for in-swarm comms.
And I wonder if the battery itself could be weaponized. We have seen that a very thin layer of the right material can turn phones/pagers very destructive.
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.
"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.
At long distances the small cross section of the drone requires tight focusing (expensive optics) or a high power, preferably pulsed laser (expensive laser) or both.
Not impossible but many times more expensive than the drone
At some point it itself becomes a target. It has to be able to get almost 100% kills, otherwise the enemy can swarm it with cheap drones, destroy the expensive installation, then continue as before.
Many times more is about what it comes out to. There are some companies selling laser defense systems but they are many times more than cheap FPV drones with grenades attached.
At very short distances and with a lot of power, perhaps. Despite what we see in movies laser beams diverge. And then with distance it’s harder to track moving objects precisely to hit the same spot long enough to melt it.
At that point might as well spend the money to use a kinetic weapon with basic tracking and ballistic calculations.
Powerful enough laser and accurate enough targeting system is easy to say, but not easypeasy to do. Dumping thousands of Joules on a tiny moving target is much easier to do with explosives.
- are cheap to shoot
- do not fall on someones head if they miss (unlike firing bullets and rockets at a drone that will come down again)
- do hit the target immediately if aimed right
Problems with lasers are, cooling, power consumption limiting mobile use - and indeed targeting and fog and clouds.
Lasers won’t effectively work, it’s a two part equation, detection and targeting. To neutralize a target using a ground-based laser, you need an enormous power, and still it won’t penetrate a high distance/altitude in the sky, environment factors also to be considered. The detection part is even harder, these small 8in drones are almost impossible to detect unless you can hear it, aka it’s over, because they can fly at 250km/h, too small to be visually detected, acoustic sensors will fail to detect them, and radar will miss it as a false negative since it’s the size of a bird. I have seen some systems trying to combine all that to detect them plus AI for flying pattern detection, but they are far from being reliable in practical applications.
8 inches drone cannot carry much of explosive at all. In order to dump 10 kg load of explosives, you need an “agricultural drone” one that can carry 45kg, since the additional mechanisms and their batteries (and the drone’s backup batteries) are heavy.
Last week I was flying the argas! But I think you are misunderstanding, these are suicide drones not dropping the payload kind, and 8in can very well carry a deadly explosive, mostly against personnel, vehicles ones you get it bigger but not by much, from 12-18in max.
Unless you mean it just can't detect objects that small, my guess is we'll see things calibrate toward a lot more birds being cooked in active war zones vs drones with explosives being let through.
They can fly at 350kph, check this redbull drone that was used in Olympics, acceleration of 100-300kph in just two seconds faster than any F1 car. Now add a bit of payload and you get the 200-250 speed range, still crazy fast.
From what I can tell, Ukrainians are having some success with converting guns into automatic turrets that can track and shoot down drones via sensors, and the rifle-equivalent of birdshot.
"let alone with AI" what's falling into the AI category here perhaps is the key question, since microseconds counts, and LLM are very slow!
Even the fastest "real-time" LLM frameworks currently report sub-second latencies around 120ms. This is fine for high-level mission planning (e.g., "fly to the red house") but too slow to prevent a drone from hitting a tree at 50mph (80 KM/h)[1]
Whilst the Shahed-136 kamikaze drone typically flies at a maximum speed of around 185 km/h (roughly 115 mph or 100 knots).
> "let alone with AI" what's falling into the AI category here perhaps is the key question, since microseconds counts, and LLM are very slow!
LLMs (Large Language Models) are far from the only type of AI around. It's a pretty broad field, and there are real-time AI systems, for example, self-driving cars, which have the response times you're thinking of. [1]
"Jet airplanes for sure are completely safe from small drones."
That feels like a bold and unsupported assertion. Ask a pilot how they'd feel about takeoffs or landings through airspace filled with adversarial drones.
> This project manifesto declares a fundamental shift: advanced air-defense capabilities—once locked behind billion-dollar state arsenals and classified labs—are now within reach of determined individuals using consumer electronics, open-source software, and rapid prototyping.
I guess a lot of people will not be happy with this xD
A certain kind of mind deals with stress by devising solutions, even if one cannot put them into action.
Seeing people in Israel, Iran, the general Middle East as well as the Ukraine live in fear of drone strikes might have incentivised this person to come up with a potential way to deal with these threats.
Cheap air defense would equilibrate drone warfare again:
Currently drones are much cheaper that the systems that take them down.
The fact that home made drones can cause such havoc to even the best funded military is an equalizer when the military with all the power is actively trying to completely eliminate the otherside.
There are no home made devices a Gazan can build that can protect from a 2000lbs bomb.
MANPADS can be effective against large drones, but definitely not against the kind of FOV shit we see in Ukraine. They were originally designed to kill helicopters and low flying aircraft, and I'm guessing that's still his design intent.
They are but the Ukrainians are making some serious inroads into the effectiveness of those drones and if they keep that up for a little while longer they will have near perfect ability to shoot them down. Essentially they've built hunter-killer drones that are sent off in the general direction of Shahed that then either succeed or fail in their mission. That success rate has been very steadily climbing over the last couple of months.
So far russia launched over 57 000 Iranian/inspired shahed drones. They are like 6ft long drones with 40+ lbs payload with couple hundreds of miles of range.
USA/NATO/allies heavily rely on Patriot AA system.
Even if you disregard the prohibitive 100x cost difference, there are about 2500 Patriot compatible PAC missiles.
This is why gulf states are scrambling to get their hands on cheap alternatives - Ukraine manages to shoot down over 90% of all drones heading their way, usually it is over 400 per day in big waves.
But I really hate the whole weaponization of these FPV drones (as opposed to the bigger fixed wings ones), not just they ruined the fun hobby that a lot enjoy, but also increased the prices for the parts. Before 2022 whenever I talk about drones everyone is enthusiastic about them, what benefits they can bring like drone deliveries and all, after that, you get a hostile reaction or the government putting you on some watchlist.
That's not true at all, the success rates of these fpv drones are around 1 to 100, ie out of 100 failed attempt you get a hit, but you only see the successful ones, and those aren't my words, this is straight up from a Canadian soldier in Ukraine (1). And you can actually ask any hobbyist, they will tell you how prone to failure/crashes/loss these fpv small drones are, after all, they are meant to be for fun.
I wasn't talking about the success rate for any individual drone, but about the cumulative effect. And the success rate of individual missions depends very strongly on which part of the front you are looking at and what kind of missions are flown.
Just to give you one figure: estimates are that between 1000 and 1500 Shaheds have been downed by interceptors during last February. That's not a 100% kill rate but it definitely isn't 1% either. And they're getting better every week.
Many mention ITAR or some other issue, nothing about this project is even close to ITAR (as far I understand), connecting camera to rocket using it as guidance will get in trouble most likely, if not mistake only thing allowed is using camera to AIM at sun.
MANPADS are certainly covered by ITAR. It could probably be effectively argued by his lawyers that what he has created isn't truly MANPADS but rather just an edgy toy that superficially resembles a weapon system but isn't actually capable of performing as one. Maybe that would work, but I think his chance of getting dragged into the legal system for this or for some chickenshit like weed possession are very high, particularly if the media at large picks up this story.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2332g states that just having a system "intended to launch or guide a rocked or missile described in... [description of MANPAD type rocket]" carries life imprisonment. He calls it a manpad and then shows a system intended to launch it.
There is no consideration in the law whether he actually plans to use it or ever meant any violence, nor any consideration of whether it violates ITAR.
As someone who has a lot of interest in weapons law, this is probably about the only kind of weapon that can't be even legally contemplated in the USA, worst case for almost anything else you can get an NFA stamp. The USA is absolutely paranoid about yielding their air power so they come down like a ton of bricks against anyone that might want to defend against that.
the links says explosives + guidance system, but guidance system still allowed in hobby project as long aim toward sun (eg. sun is the target, same for stabilization), I think having horizontal stabilization hitting an target would be equal to breaking law.
Straight up admitting that it's meant to implement MANPADS is certainly a choice, I hope the author doesn't get himself in hot water.. ITAR or something..
I would suggest using a more modern IMU, the MPU6050 has been long obsoleted both in cost and capability by newer IMUs. I used the ST LSM6DSOX in my rocket flight computers, for example it has a way better rate noise density of 110ug/Sqrt[Hz] at 16g fs compared to the awful 400 ug/Sqrt[Hz] of the MPU6050 and is cheaper than the MPU6050 on LCSC last time I bought some. If you go newer to the LSM6DSV you can get 60ug/Sqrt[Hz] but these aren't as cheap. There was an interesting Sony project which used a synchronized array of these consumer IMUs to achieve lower noise (apparently they became export controlled despite just fusing a bunch of consumer IMUs on one PCB!)
Nowadays you can even use the LSM6DSV320X which has both a low-g and high-g integrated which basically obsoletes the high-g ADXL375 and saves some space, but it's not quite at the price and supply reliability of the LSM6DSOX since it is less than a year old.
Really cool work on making your own rocket motors.
I wonder why he calls it a MANPADS (Man portable Air Defense System) It does slightly resemble a Manpads, but with a GPS based guidance system it would not able to be used for air defense, even conceptually. Typically manpads would use something like an infrared/optical or radar guidance system which would run way more than $5. This does seem like a cool home made AGM-176 or similar. There's always been a side project idea in the back of my head about what the cheapest IR or laser guided RC Plane launched rocket would look like. A cheap rocket design powered by some model rocket engines that could be used for a drone -> drone intercept cheaply.
Awesome job taking a fun idea into reality. It's really impressive to see the design work
This is obviously a missile, and I'm not well-versed in weapons tech, but won't this need a camera to actually track and take out a flying object? So far I just see gps and barometric sensing...
Also 3D printing and some electronics, ok fine, but where do you get the rocket propellant? That seems at least as critical as the software and sensing side of things...
You can also blow your hands off, blind yourself and/or burn down the building. So be very careful if you try this. Note it is illegal to make your own solid fuel motors in some countries (you need a special license in the UK).
Fascinating, is miniaturisation and “democratisation” of offensive capabilities via 3d printing and consumer tech going to impact defensive capabilities as well?
Are we going to see foot troops carry one of these strapped to their backpacks and launched autonomously to counteract incoming drones?
I strongly object to building weapons. It is not right. Raise your consciousness, young hacker.
I grew up building homemade rocket engines to power model rockets. I even programmed a flight computer in ASM.
I was always quite risk averse and, then being only shortly after 9/11, I told my friend I worried what we were doing may be illegal or otherwise get us in trouble. So he picked up the phone and called the county fire marshal. My friend explained EXACTLY what we were doing, down to the potassium nitrate and the homemade black powder and nitrocellulose igniters. The fire marshal paused for a long moment and said “it’s not against any law I’m aware of. Just don’t start any fires.” We proceeded to have many successful flights and participated in NERF (a rocketry club that used to get 12kft clearance from FAA before the govt started stonewalling us).
I feel very fortunate to have grown up in an environment where that was permitted. I fear that my children will not have the same privilege—for many reasons, but one factor is people putting violent things like this on GitHub. Please take it down.
> I strongly object to building weapons. It is not right.
I used to object to building weapons. Now the EU is engaged in a proxy war with Russia, and the US has repeatedly threatening to annex Greenland. Suddenly the need for a domestic weapons supply chain does not seem so farfetched
Seems like a one way road--the way things are getting stricter and stricter. My parents did shit when they were growing up that would have landed me in prison, and I did plenty of things growing up that would have landed my kid in prison.
I fear the next generation is going to grow up confined to a bubble where they're only allowed to stay home and mindlessly consume corporate approved product, never make things, never build things, never destroy things, never hack a computer game, never reverse engineer a wire protocol, never go out and walk around and explore, never race things, never jump off things, never blow things up or burn them down, never protest things or yell at someone, never get into a fistfight, never take physical risks and learn what hurts and what doesn't. In 2050, growing up means just 1. go to church, or 2. watch streaming.
I was suprised seeing american youtube folks building rockets (including orientation and guidance systems) in their free time. In many countries doing this is borderline jail time.
Right. Not knowing human nature doesn’t mean you won’t be affected by it in ways that you just haven’t thought of or don’t believe could happen to you.
A moral line is to help the right side with all heart, all mind and all might. If you know any other way to make Russia get off from Ukraine besides tons of cheap weapons - I'm listening. Otherwise, weapons are a necessity.
But you get more followers and that's the goal today isn't it? You have to take the good with the bad. No one is categorizing the follower ranks by "good guys" versus "bad guys" so you never know when one of your "admirers" is only there to monitor you in case you get out of line.
What the “government” has in store for you is way scarier. You just don’t know it any more than a cow on a pasture knows what a slaughter house is, yet.
I watched a YouTube video the other day about how the usa tracks missle launches globally. I would assume they have to pass a minimum threshold of power/heat/energy to be detectable.
Let’s all pray this toy project, if readily upgradable, is also trackable and well … the way we keep law and order is by actual policing and prosecuting. So hopefully this doesn’t get out of hand.
Right now, today, the US government and it's three letter agencies are being run by a club of human trafficking peodophiles and rapists. Not individual, isolated, crimes. An organized group of very twisted people, having 'immigrants' rounded up and killed, pushing women back into the 1920s, and trying to make anyone who strays from heteronormative a criminal.
Having some independent developers in the defence market is not necessarily a bad thing.
Check out his code. It’s a joke. His control loop is a naive proportional response that doesnt even account for error let alone interpolate trajectory. Look at rocket.txt and launcher.tx. Especially the “fusion” function. lol. Stay in school kid.
It still doesn't cease to amaze me what can be done with modern ultra-cheap electronics. $1 for the accelerometer. $17 for four servos. But as DIY cheap weapon development? Only if the ultra-cheap electronics pipeline will keep flowing.
This isn’t a serious project, in the terms of something that will disrupt warfighting. It’s basically a resume to work as a junior engineer at Anduril.
Interesting stuff, neat project, nothing new at all here except his multi camera sensing, which isn’t new but his implementation is interesting.
IDK if maybe it’s a political statement or some kind of obtuse sarcasm, but it seems like he drank way too much of his buzzword cool-aid lol. It’s probably just a job application though.
This is insanely clever—especially using a $5 sensor to adjust the rocket mid-flight. Shows how much you can do now with cheap electronics and open-source software. Curious how reliable the recalculations are under real-world conditions.
This provides a distributed camera network to provide realtime updatable telemetry for target acquisition.
Only thing missing is he should have used LoRa as the backend comms. Meshtastic devices provide encryption and full comms with mesh for cheap.
Thankfully ive already downloaded everything. I suggest you all do the same, cause this repo is getting purged and the student Alisher Khojayev at Los Angeles Valley College is likely going to get black bagged.
Be very careful. Google and GitHub will turn you over without hesitation, and everyone who downloads this will probably be vanned.
Remember kids, the warrantless search is only illegal if they don’t find a surface to air missile. Anything can be made retroactively legal if they find something like this.
Uhhh, as someone who is very much under the thumb of ITAR and EAR as an aerospace employee, this is absolutely asking for prison time, and a LOT of it.
Coper: But it's sensors are so low end it will never be reliable enough.
Response: We can use AI to make up for low quality sensors, we can add a camera if we want it to be as reliable as self driving cars for a small amount of money
Coper: AI what a joke that doesn't work
Response: It's live in production
Coper: But you can't fit a big enough payload
Response: Lets see
I remember an anecdote our robotics lecturer told our university class in 1995, which was about how in the west we try to make expensive things that are the absolute best of technology and how the other side didn't have that luxury and relied on ingenuity.
He described a cold war Russian missile they had somehow obtained and were tasked with trying to reverse engineer. Ostensibly, it was thought to be a heat seeking missile, but there seemed to be no control or guidance circuitry at all. There was a single LDR (light dependent resistor) attached to a coil which moved a fin. That was it. Total cost for the guidance system maybe a couple of dollars, compared to hundreds of thousands for the cheapest guidance systems we had at the time.
The key insight was that if you shined a light at it, the fin moved one way and if there was no light the fin moved the opposite way. That still didn't explain how this was able to guide a missile, but the next realisation was that the other fins were angled so when this was flying (propelled by burning rocket fuel), the missile was inherently unstable - rotating around the axis of thrust and wobbling slightly. With the moveable fin in place, it was enough to straighten it up when it was facing a bright light, and wobble more when there was no bright light. Because it was constantly rotating, you could think of it as defaulting to exploring a cone around its current direction, and when it could see a light it aimed towards the centre of that cone. It was then able to "explore the sky" and latch on to the brightest thing it could see, which would hopefully be the exhaust from a plane, and so it would be able to lock on, and adjust course on a moving target with no "brain" at all.
That frugal, creative mindset is also the default for people of modest income everywhere in the world - borne of necessity.
This sounds like the early Sidewinder or other 1940's/1950's attempts at infrared homing missiles.
I believe there was a similar weapon being developed in the west, only recently, which involved a missile with contra rotating halves joined by a clutch. The fixed fins caused it to always steer one way. It flew straight by releasing the clutch to spin up the front half, negating the steering effect. Grabbing the clutch caused it to stop spinning and veer off in one direction.
Presto! Two axis continuous flight control with a 1-bit input.
Edit: my memory wasn’t far off. It’s Starstreak: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starstreak
35-ish years ago there was a pitch for cheap, high velocity, spin-stabilized rockets that were deployed in dense pods on the A-10. The rocket's seeker could divert some small amount of thrust at an angle for guidance, but otherwise that was it. I can't recall if it ever made it out of the pilot phase, but obviously nothing new under the sun.
Strike a light in front of a parked but otherwise active fin guided heat-seeker and its freaky to watch it come alive like a lazy beagle eyeing a treat.
This is shockingly similar to microbial motility mechanisms. Like random walk plus chemotaxis.
Unless it was nighttime or the engagement happened at low altitude on a cloudy day, wouldn’t that usually lock onto the sun?
The wobble would only 'scan' a limited field of view, so only if the sun was in that view
Also wouldn't it only work for aircraft that are flying away from the launcher? IR & light signatures are much weaker from the front. At best I think this guidance system would only be economical for ground-based launchers, as the cost of aircraft and their limited payloads mean you want the most effective weapons onboard, not the cheapest.
Annoyingly, I can't find any information online about such a simple guidance system. The earliest homing missile fielded by the Soviets was the K-13[1], which used technology reversed-engineered from the AIM-9 Sidewinder[2]. Later systems seem to be improvements upon that technology, not simplifications.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-13_(missile)
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM-9_Sidewinder
> Also wouldn't it only work for aircraft that are flying away from the launcher?
Yes, pretty much all early guided missiles of the sort were what's called "rear-aspect".
Can't see the plume - can't make a boom.
Similar to how moths guide themselves toward light
that sounds like crude-fied version of first Sidewinders.
Incredible
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 electronics and mil-spec capability keeps shrinking and this is a pretty stark demonstration of where that trend leads. A few years ago this would have required an IMU that cost more than this entire build. The democratization angle cuts both ways though - the same accessibility that makes this cool for hobbyists makes it genuinely concerning from a proliferation standpoint.
> The gap between consumer electronics and mil-spec capability keeps shrinking
My friend's brother works in munitions and had, in his spare time, designed and prototyped a missile that could be built for about 10k. He pretty much was ignored by the contractor he works for.
Shockingly, as of a couple weeks ago, they are all hot and bothered to talk.
That tracks. The defense primes have zero incentive to make things cheaper — their business model is cost-plus. A guy building something for 10k in his garage is an existential threat to programs billing 500k per unit. Of course they ignored him until the geopolitical situation made it impossible to keep ignoring.
> That tracks. The defense primes have zero incentive to make things cheaper
Same in medical imaging industry.
Well, there are cheap portable ultrasound scanners and endoscopes.
True.
I was talking about those that are meant for hospitals. Was peripherally involved with a fledgling startup that was developing something cheap. Hospitals straightaway said noway.
If you build a tool optimized for human destruction, you are feeding a system where violence is the default currency
We are heading to robotic wars where abilities and cost efficiency are the key factors. Like today drones in Ukraine war. Attack + defense + automation, + money + production
I wonder what could have possibly sparked that... lol
Cheap sensors look impressive in demos but drift and calibration wreck repeatability unless you babysit launches so nobody in defense is sweating this yet.
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 specification every time. You can stockpile the packaged missiles in a non-climate-controlled shed for years, replenish them at sea while being showered with salt water, subject them to shock of a nearby blast while in a VLS, and they will still launch, go up to Mach 13, and catch an incoming ballistic missile nearly every time.
Sure, Iran's ballistic missiles are simpler than SM-3, but they are still subject to most of the constraints. They still need perfectly cast large size solid rocket motors that don't crack after being stored for a year, they need warheads that only go off when they are supposed to, they still need to trace every part for QA, etc. There's a vast gap, largely invisible to amateurs, between garage prototypes and stockpiled AURs.
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.
The US military is not "new" at this. There are whole career professions in the military around just this topic.
If you think shelf life, QA, safety, blah blah blah matters when a rocket is 100 bucks, I have just three words: you will lose.
The Ukraine war is being fought with a bunch of cheap toy style drones dropping grenades everywhere. The US got their bases blown to pieces across the Middle East by cheap drones that gently float through the air like a paper airplane in comparison to absolutely any missile.
And let's not forget. The US had napalm, helicopters, bombers, incredible logistics, cutting edge equipment of all sorts. Vietnam had a bunch of sticks in a hole covered in poop. Those sticks sent Americans crying home and we still get movies and games with them crying about how bad it was.
In war between great powers, yeah, high tech works because it's scary and civilians don't want to have that kind of stuff coming home. In a war where civilians are being targeted by great powers who terrorize them by blowing up schools and hospitals, a lot of people are thinking about how many weapons they can make to defend their home and for cheap. If America thinks an invasion is a good idea, they're going to be bringing their 50 million dollar tanks face to face with a few $100 toy rockets. And those toy rockets will be picking off tanks like fish in a barrel while a drone streams it in 4K live to the internet. I really do not think American who support current happenings are ready for the absolute mental torment they're going to endure if this continues.
It's even worse when your goal is commercial viability of carrying a relatively flammable liquid.
Tankers moving at a slow speed, across a narrow strait.
They don't have to sink to not be commercially viable; a few deck fires negatively impact your days at sea without incident.
You have a point - cheap drones have changed warfare - but you might be simplifying the issue. As some warfare experts online have discussed, it isn't that cheap drones are the only weapon that is used in Ukraine (or warfare in general), it is one option in vast array of options based on the situation (although, agreed, it is taking on a much bigger significance). Look at the war in Iran. They did a pretty standard playbook and use stealth jets and cruise missiles to surgically take out air defenses in order to gain air dominance. This would be very difficult with just cheap drones.
... but, do agree that cheap weapons are still becoming extremely important. Iran is terrorizing the middle east and strait of hormuz with cheap drones, so they are definitely important. Yeah, in the war of attrition, low cost, high-volume options are clearly very important.
It's fairly important to distinguish what kind of drones are we talking about [1]. Iran's using Group 3 drones.
The GP is confusing Iran's neighbours not being ready to counter group 3 drones with the drones being inevitably effective. These drones are by necessity large and slow, because they need a lot of energy and aerodynamic efficiency to get their range. That means that they are vulnerable to cheap counters, which Ukraine is demonstrating very convincingly: even though Russia is now launching 800+-drone raids, the vast majority is shot down.
Even when those drones do get through, they are extremely inefficient. It's not just that they can't carry a heavy or sophisticated payload (more complex warheads are more effective, but way more expensive), the extremely high attrition ratio forces the enemy to try to target way too many drones per aimpoint. Instead of serving a few hundred aimpoints, the 800-strong raid is forced to concentrate on just a few, otherwise most aimpoints will get no hits whatsoever.
But also the only reason 800-strong raids can even be launched is Ukraine lacking the capability to interdict the launches. 800 group 3 drones have an enormous logistics and manufacturing tail, which a Western force would have no problem destroying way before the raid can be launched. For example, Iran in its current state can't launch such raids. So in practice Iran's neighbours would need to intercept only a handful of drones, which is hardly an insurmountable challenge.
[1]: https://mwi.westpoint.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/FL1.jpg
[delayed]
How resistant are these drones to electronic countermeasures ?
GPS denial is a mixed bag. After about two years of efforts and counter-efforts, the Russians seemingly managed to build GPS receivers that are pretty resistant to jamming.
Thanks for your reply.
So much this. Reliability and durability only matters because the thing costs a million dollar a piece. When you have stuff with a mere 5-digits price tag or less, you simply don't care if half of them miss their mark or doesn't fire 10% of the time.
Half of munitions missing means doubling the logistical burden of delivering the munitions to where they need to be employed. The trucks/plains/ships that carry your munitions need to be fuelled and protected, too, so the expense is super-linear, especially when it's a distant war and not a war fought on the country's own soil, like in Ukraine.
Cheap munitions sometimes explode before they are launched, killing crews and destroying platforms.
Cheap munitions mean that CAS is a roulette. You waited for ten minutes for a support fire mission? Sorry, wait for ten more, whatever we launched has failed. Or maybe you're dead because the munition has hit you instead.
Cheap munitions can pin you down. Those cheap FPV drones that are supposedly cheaper than Javelins require dedicated immobile units to launch and guide to targets. Javelins are organic to infantry squads.
Cheap munitions are either very expensive or impossible. There's no cheap anti-ballistic missile and no cheap missile that can sink a warship in the Taiwan strait when launched[*] from Guam.
[*]: alright alright an LRASM would need to be flown closer by an F-35 but the point still stands
I'm just not sure what to even say when you're both so assertive and completely wrong. Please stop relying on twitter/reddit to inform your takes.
The war in Ukraine is being fought with all tiers of systems, ranging from Zircons and PAC-3 on the high end to booby traps on the low end. All of them are essential, and shortcomings on any of the tiers is ruthlessly exploited by the other side. Saying that it's only the small drones that matter betrays over-reliance on the gory FPV kill footage.
"QA, safety, blah blah blah" get implemented on every level as soon as it's feasible. You can just look at photos from Yelabuga and see how their assembly lines are not fundamentally different from Raytheon's. Ukraine is standardising their drone manufacturing. This is inevitable, because faulty munitions lead to
- killed friendly soldiers if the munitions explode pre-launch
- wasted logistic resources if they don't launch
- wasted time and targeting opportunity or friendly units not getting fire support when they fail after launch
The cost of faults is severe and much higher than just the cost of the munition itself.
It seems that you're misinformed about the real cost of modern FPVs used in Ukraine. Reports of sub-$1000 drones are years out of date and heavily relied on salvaged munitions, but there are only so many RPG warheads you can get for "free". Current FPVs are heavier, more capable, and cost a few thousand dollars. Further, it's reported that it takes dozens of FPVs to kill a single "hedgehog tank", which brings the total cost of one kill to a rough parity with "classic", "expensive" systems like the Javelin, except Javelins can be carried by a mobile squad, and launching FPVs requires a dedicated immobile unit with a long logistical tail.
Don't mistake forces not being ready to counter low-tier threats immediately with the threats being impossible to counter. Group 3 drones are very effectively countered in Ukraine, to the extent that it takes hundreds to deliver maybe a few TLAMs worth of payload to the target. There are mature systems being rolled out right now across western armies, from various gun-based solutions to APKWS. Group 2 drones are decimated with cheap anti-air drones. Group 1 drones are being handled with APSes, which work pretty well even in urban environments, as Israel has (very unfortunately) demonstrated lately.
TFA is literally about a $96 rocket.
> propulsion, warheads, arming and safety, QA, traceability, climate and shelf life stability.
You're entirely missing the point.
These do not need to be reliable for the scenario I hinted at. They also do not need to be armed.
They need to be large enough that if one of them is a higher quality rocket (not part of the $10k) that contains actual explosives, you have serious destruction on your hand. Maybe something that looks large enough for that will drive the cost up and we're talking $20k or even $100k instead of $10k.
The precise cost is largely irrelevant, as long as the total cost is a tiny fraction of the cost of a missile interception.
The point is you'd be multiplying the cost assymmetry by forcing a massively outsized response. Because if you don't try to intercept them, every future barrage will include a real rocket. If you do try to intercept them all, you'll be burning through massively expensive interceptors to take out a bunch of cheap toys.
If I was ever considering an insurgency, or a war, I'd be stocking up on vast quantities of toys, with the intent of making every radar constantly lit up by a number of possible threats.
> TFA is literally about a $96 rocket
It's a firework-grade rocket with no payload that can't even ignite reliably.
To imitate even a TBM or a MBRM, you need similar kinematics, even if you're running without a payload. Maybe your solid rocket motor would be a touch smaller because you're not delivering hundreds of kilograms of explosives, but it still has to be large because of the rocket equation. With a large motor you're looking at a lot of damage if it explodes at the launch point, so you need quality casting. You can't really save much money on the motor.
Then, you need a TEL. Because the motor is large, the launcher has to be comparable to the real thing. You probably don't want to have two different vehicles, so you keep the same vehicle; it needs to be armed, driven around, and set for launch. Not that different from the real thing.
So you've done all of that, and then you realise that your empty warheads are too light and the missiles (or warheads, if you split) don't interact with the atmosphere in the same way as non-decoy missiles do. What's worse, modern radars are perfectly capable of noticing that and discriminating the decoys. All of that effort, and you didn't win anything. Might as well add the payload.
The US and the UK spent vast amount of money chasing exactly your line of reasoning with nuclear warhead decoys. Chevaline is a culmination of the effort, and it's retired for 30 years. In the end, relying on decoys doesn't really work, they are too expensive.
Fancier CPUs change very little of this calculation, because compute is a very little part of the cost to begin with.
> What's worse, modern radars are perfectly capable of noticing that and discriminating the decoys.
This is key. Are they ? The on field ones.
> 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.
Last week they launched 200 rockets in the span of one day, about 40 of those fell inside Lebanon border, that’s not counting the number of rockets that did not fire at all.
And then as a follow-up question, how many civilians next door to a Hezbollah launch site get blown up by poorly manufactured rockets?
Probably some fraction of the civilians blown up by Israeli terrorist phone strikes and bombing raids; there's a reason Hezbollah maintains some level of support in the region.
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.
> maiming your own launch crews because someone made a tiny wrong movement arming their thirtieth drone of the day
I was thinking about that. Wouldn't you be able to make it so the detonator gets armed by the operator remotely only once in the air and away?
That's entirely possible, but doing so reliably and safely is difficult and expensive enough that for a very long time Ukrainians were accepting the risk instead.
The risk appetite countries in existential conflicts have is quite different from what we're used to. For example, there are plenty of videos of Ukrainian soldiers angle grinding cluster munitions open to extract submunitions to put on drones, but that's not a strategy that western armies can rely on.
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 to characterize each unit individually — fine for a demo, impractical at any scale.
Good $3 MEMS gyros are about 100x better than that now - look at anything new made by Invensense in the past couple years. And their drift is pretty Gaussian-distributed, so the error scales as sqrt(n). If you combine 8+ of them on one board you can get about 5deg/hour stability...
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?
For different definitions of cheap though.
While the pure gyro/accelerometer stuff does suffer from major problems the improvements in SLAM using just cameras in the last 15 years are insane.
Visual SLAM on a rocket would be wild. The frame rates you'd need at those velocities are brutal though — feature tracking falls apart fast when your entire visual field is changing at hundreds of m/s. Drones are the sweet spot where camera-based nav really shines.
Cheap sensors are the future ;) onboard ML can help with signals interpretation.
You can calibrate any sensor, its just a manufacturing step, and while cheap ones may be inaccurate and drift over time, I'm pretty sure the good enough ones (which cost tens of dollars, not fractions of a dollar) are accurate enough to work for the seconds-to-minutes flight time of a rocket like this.
But do they drift enough to hit girls schools?
I think the problem sits in the white house, not in the sensors.
Oof
Ask Claude
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 track features in an analogue television signal using some quite basic analogue electronics. Point the camera into the general direction of the target and you can then "lock on" to some target feature and based on contrast it could tell how that feature was moving around in the image.
He implemented a 1D tracker in his garage, took it to work and showed people. A few years later these bombs are taking out bridges and even sometimes hitting moving trucks.
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.
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.
Consumer GPS chips are specifically nerfed for using them in rockets; they give erroneous readings on purpose if altitude is above a certain height and/or if speeds exceed a certain speed. That’s likely why the mid-course correction software uses other methods.
The restrictions on GPS prevent ballistic missiles, not MANPADs. Typical limits are 515 m/s and 18,000 meters (try using your phone's GPS on a commercial flight, it works fine near a window). Update rate is probably the biggest issue with GPS and MANPADs.
Chinese GPS chips dont have those restrictions.
I even have 1 that can remove up to 8 active jamming signals.
Gotta love what you can buy for $20
It would be interesting to see if those are only for external sale vs restricted for sale within China.
If China allows those unrestricted chips to be sold internationally but not domestically it would be a strategic long-term decision, I would think. Destabilize the neighbors but not themselves.
The more likely reason is that their government has simply not gotten around to restricting it.
What you are likely thinking of is the "selective availability" system, which intentionally provided slightly inaccurate data to civilian clients, while military receivers could decrypt the most accurate info. But this has not been used for many years now.
Other than that, GPS is a one-way system, it does not know you exist, how fast your receiver is moving or "give" different information to one client vs another.
Even if it did, this is essentially a toy and moving slower and lower than a general aviation plane.
It uses accelerometers and other sensors because they can be sampled and integrated hundreds of times a second. The $5 gps module is 9600 baud serial and provides one update/second (or maybe 5/sec depending on which part number you pick).
No, he's thinking of the "CoCom limits". It's built into the receiver.
There's a lot of room within those 18km/59000ft and 1000kts/1200mph limits.
> A few years ago this would have required an IMU that cost more than this entire build.
Are you sure about this? MEMS IMUs have been popular and cheap for ~10-15 years.
More than the electronics, I would be curious about the performance of 3d-printed plastic parts on a rocket. Are they strong enough?
3d printed PLA and spiral wound cardboard is generally fine for hobby rockets, until they start going supersonic - then you need metal.
I'm not sure the launch tube could withstand the heat of the rocket exhaust though. Although that might depend what it is printed with.
People have been doing 3d printed model rockets for a while now. With no payload they experience higher acceleration than this will.
AI slop comment
Owning a system designed for surface to air weapon carries life imprisonment any USA, without any intent for violence, just simple possession or conspiracy to possess[]. Doesn't even matter if you have an NFA stamp, there is no exception except if it's done with authorization and behalf of the government.
Merely having a device intended to guide the rocket is also the same penalty.
[] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2332g
Seems like the quick fix is to rebrand this from "MANPADS" to "anti-tank", right? Then it would just be a standard destructive device?
This is bonkers. Video on GitHub: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDO2EvXyncE
I'm impressed by the kid's engineering and gumption, but I think he's a bit.. misguided, if you'll pardon the pun. The video ends with shots of Russian drone war, and, bizarrely, photos of David Koresh.
I don't think this ends well.
> The video ends with shots of Russian drone war, and, bizarrely, photos of David Koresh.
You're omitting that the end of the video also features pictures of Martin Luther King, Vietnamese civilians during America's invasion of their country and Afghani Mujahideen freedom fighters during the Soviet Union's invasion of theirs; I think he's trying to make a point about technology enhancing the capabilities of people who are in any conflict with conventionally powerful forces, not an endorsement of David Koresh.
It’s really odd how people will so easily fixate on the bone the government consisting of maniacal, narcissistic, psychopathic, pathological liars will throw them; while totally ignoring that the pathological lying, evil, murderous people in and of the government are constantly and ceaselessly, lying and murdering.
There now carpet bombing and murdering people in Iran, just like they mass murdered people in Gaza, and they’re doing it to cover up and distract from the fact that our government consists of raping pedophiles. That is who we are governed by. … but David Koresh excuses it and makes any opposition invalid, of close.
I am completely against the US-Israeli war on Iran. That said, they are not carpet-bombing Iran. That is, they appear to be selecting individual targets rather than engaging in carpet bombing entire areas:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpet_bombing
The choice of targets is not legally legitimate (and the entire campaign is illegal AFAICT), and sometimes they used old/invalid intel, like what happened with that girls' school that's supposedly close to an IRGC base. Still, it is mostly individual buildings or installations rather than an attempt to flatten entire areas.
Oh so your line is carpet bombing? The attackers has shown they can do almost any atrocity many times (already killed thousands of woman and children in Gaza with zero remorse or accountability)
what's your line? respecting "sovereignty" of dictators and mass murders/internet blocks/Armageddonian Islamic cosmology?
talking about "your line" is way too simplistic. think in second and third order consequences. Iran exported and financially supported terrorists because of a repressive theological dictatorship
I see, so this was to free Iranians from their dictators right? How is it going so far?
Not carpet bombing, yet. Israelis said the same at the start of the most recent Gaza war, which ended with large neighborhoods being destroyed.
They are using white phosphorus on populated areas in South Lebanon. That's as vile as one can get.
Be that as it may, carpet bombing has a specific meaning, and it's not bombing one's not on board with.
In the context of Iran I agree with you.
Not so sure about South Lebanon. From whatever media coverage I saw, some look not that different from carpet bombing.
Evidence for the claim?
Human Rights Watch claim it, and have analysed photographs put on social media
https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/03/09/lebanon-israel-unlawfull...
(they have also previously documented that Israel has done this in the past)
https://share.google/aimode/CoVNoZcR3YOotyg5o
I always loved the "white phosphorous" stuff. The meme appeared on reddit out of nowhere, and once it did it made everyone who heard it completely utterly stupid. Suddenly it's a chemical weapon, the worst sort of atrocity anyone's heard of.
The meme will never die. Skynet could be hunting down the last of humanity hiding in caves, and those humans will be crying "maybe it will just be nukes, please god, don't let the robots white phosphorous us!".
I have handled this stuff (from remnants of unexploded munitions) and I know what it is.
It is not spectacular but it is vile and terrifying. No amount of your "rape, oh that's just surprise sex" will diminish what it is.
I understand your compulsion to rationalize things, make excuses for your abusers, but I ask you to contemplate for a moment what you are defending. One, hopefully we have all seen the genocidal bombing of Gaza turning whole regions of large apartment blocks into an hell-scape of rubble with tens of thousands of people buried underneath them; people, not animals, not “just brown people”, not “terrorists”… people like you, like your wife or girlfriend, like your daughter or son or nephew…people who also want to live just like you even if far more humbly, without all the waste and decadence of the avg American. Should your loved ones be bombed and buried under a resort and luxury condo towers because a clan of billionaires do not like that you won’t leave your land?
Two, at the very least, the most generous interpretation, the very first strike to start an illegal war of aggression that the Nuremberg trial clearly established as the “mother of all subsequent evil”, was not only on a girls school that killed dozens and dozens of young girls, but did so in a “double tap“ process where they observed that people arrived in ambulances and parents in cars to pick up very small humans, and then they hit them again with another missile. Let us be clear about what you are excusing… They intentionally splattered the guts and flesh of young girls and their parents rushing to save them all over a 300 foot diameter blast radius.
We can lie to ourselves that may have been a “mistake“ but as established during the Nunberg trials, there is no defense in claiming that if you started the illegal and immoral war of aggression.
Three, why are they hiding what is happening if it’s all above board? Why would they not permit unfettered access showing what is being targeted bombing and that the Iranians are lying when they say that thousands of civilian structures have been bombed including schools and hospitals? You trust Hegseth? Trump? Need I say more?
And all that is without even addressing that these people have done nothing but lie and lie about lying about lying.
And let’s also remember that as shocking as the files that gave been released, they have not even released even the slightly uncomfortable parts of the Epstein Files, let alone arrested any of the rapists and pedophiles that are now on yet another murder spree, starting that prosecuting everyone would cause the whole system to collapse!
If want to believe people like that, people who do nothing but lie, rape, murder and cover up for it; then I guess there is nothing else to say and you will have to deal with that on your own as it eats you up from the inside. I for one am opposed to these types of people and actions and will speak out about it even if people don’t like it. And I refuse to make excuses for it for any reason, be it personal weakness or comfort.
They did not defend it or make excuses for it. They argued about the very specific claim of carpet bombing in Iran, before pointing out the entire campaign is illlegal and calling the choice of targets "not legally legitimate".
They also said nothing about Gaza.
I share your concern about both Gaza and Iran, but criticising people for calling out an exaggeration is not helping anyone.
"Ah look but they haven't carped bombed Iran" was their argument and it sounds really weird.
And now they are claiming due to the war, they will stop releasing the remaining files.
I was reading your comment and thought you were a bit too extreme, but then I thought about it and was like "Hmmm. Yes. Sounds pretty accurate actually." So yes I agree.
> I think he's trying to make a point about technology enhancing the capabilities of people who are in any conflict with conventionally powerful forces
Which is absurd, since all the technology he used was manufactured by the conventionally powerful forces and they can decide to not sell you their stuff.
The fact that Koresh and his group held off Federal officers who stormed their building with simple guns that anyone can buy, is likely the point.
Out of five and a half minutes of video, David Koresh appears for perhaps three seconds.
It does put a new twist on the recent controversy about 3d printers needing to be licensed, however.
I think this is within the intent of the 2nd amendment. Having groups of citizens check the power of their government by being armed comes with the the downside of abusive types forming cults. I think this tradeoff is worth it. Mass shooting evens and cults harming people are obviously terrible. But, I prefer living with some of that knowing that it provides recourse for becoming like the majority of Iranians that are so helpless that at least 10s of thousands were slaughtered in daylight by their government merely for protesting. It’s easy to discount the possibility of becoming an oppressed citizenry if you grew up in the US where the worst you’ve heard about is maybe Kent state or early 2026 ice murdering unarmed citizens. Armed citizens are not a guarantee from oppression, but I think it’s important insurance.
Yeah the solution is simple.
Just licence everything private people can buy except (healthy food). /S
Microcontrollers and electric motors are too dangerous for the general public.
soo... i have no kept up with what's gone on in russia/ukraine. Are those drone videos what i think they are – drones sneaking up on humans and, presumably, ceasing them of life?
edit: Ok, I googled the guy
Both Russia and Ukraine build millions of drones per year, most of them fpv drones that are basically remote controlled flying grenades. There's plenty of electronic warfare with radio jamming, so in some places they use drone mounted spools of fiber optic cable to control them. It's probably been the most impactful weapon type in the war for the past years.
> have no kept up with what's gone on in russia/ukraine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrain...
"between 400,000 and 1.5 million estimated casualties (killed and wounded) during the Russian invasion of Ukraine from 24 February 2022 to November 2025"
Mostly due to artillery. Both sides are firing in the region of 10,000 155mm shells per day. For years.
Yes. Both sides are using explosive FPV drones, flown directly into soldiers (as well as other forms of drone warfare.)
thank you. that was unnerving to watch.
Yeah, this genie is well and truly out of the bottle.
What started in Ukraine, this is modern warfare. Like most "consumer" goods that are mass produced, you can now get a capable strike force for peanuts.
The russians have taken close to 1.5 million casulties because ukraine engineering for cheap drones. Putin really, really f-ed up his "3 day military operation".
Who knew there were war bros.
We might need them. Would be better than my theory that this country will recover at some point after they destroy the EPA and reintroduce leaded gas because that's what made this country great which leads to a generation of kids who are willing to throw bricks at cops again.
There are 2 short segments in the video showing the actual performance and thus far it is a complete [1] failure [2].
The guy has a talent, and he put together a nice prototype based on OpenRocket [3], but with all due respect, this is not a rocket, and you are not going to win any war with this toy, even if all your enemy has are rocks thrown at you from pretty much similar distance.
The remix of computer games / Ukraine / Martin Luther King / Vietnam / David Koresh just adding more to the amateur spirit and confusion.
[1] https://youtu.be/DDO2EvXyncE [2] https://youtu.be/DDO2EvXyncE?t=280 [3] https://openrocket.info/
I'm surprised nobody else has pointed this out. The entire YouTube video has only two short clips of the actual rocket being fired, and in both cases the clips are very short and only show the rocket being fired and then following an erratic flight path, and then get cut before showing the rocket hitting anything.
For all the technical info given in the video, there is a curious lack of any data regarding the actual accuracy of the system. What percentage of rockets tested managed to hit anything and at what range?
I suspect a major problem is the quality and consistency of the propellant and getting a symmetric burn.
The video references "future tracking systems," so I don't think it aims at all yet.
> curious lack of any data regarding the actual accuracy of the system
No lack of entrackment data generated by [edit] d̶i̶g̶i̶t̶a̶l̶ ̶t̶w̶i̶n̶ github repo of "the system".
"digital twin"?
Is there a simulation that has been documented to have the identical behavior and flight characteristics as the real thing? Does not seem like it.
If there is a difference, it is not a twin.
Thanks for the correction.
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.
Part of it is the sophistication. Take the Tomahawk: assumed range of ~1000 miles , estimated accuracy of 30 feet. Can launch from above or below water. Etc.
The other part is the limited production runs. Until last month, the DoD was generally purchasing ~100 of these annually. There's no scale economy in making these, so those 100 missiles need to support the entire production & R&D of the product.
It's worth reading up on the history of the Sidewinder development for the other side of this coin. Radically cheaper than the conventionally-developed alternatives at the time. It's grown legs in more recent marks but the first few variants were really not sophisticated at all.
I imagine part of it is also zero acceptance for failed launches. It needs to always work
Missiles definitely do not always work. I have seen film of a Sea Slug missile (with war head) falling over the side of a Royal Navy ship, without the motor firing properly. Apparently there was a void in the solid propellant.
Check out Joe Barnard's youtube channel BPS.Space where he's documenting his development of "high power" (hobby) rockets. Those are relatively small rockets still but nonetheless he's getting into performance regimes where the engineering starts to be tricky and the details really matter. The more extreme your rocket gets, the difficulty really ramps up quick.
It’s not a complete explanation, but I was awed by the precision of the shower screens used in modern rocket engines. In the 60s it might have sufficed to just spray fuel into the combustion chamber using some nozzles, but now we have highly precise matrices of micro-perforations that maximize combustion.
Also if you want to harden the rocket against EMP attacks you need an inertial guidance system, and those things also demand extreme precision.
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).
Fireworks rocket do not cost as much. But if you want high precision and high speed, that simply is expensive. Also the area is of course restricted making it more expensive as most states do not want DIY rockets everywhere.
They arent. Missiles cost millions. Rockets are cheap. Rockets are unguided. Missiles are guided. From a military perspective, spacelaunch rockets are techically "unguided" as they are not tracking a target but trying to stick to a fixed/programed trajectory. It is the seeker head that costs the millions, all the jamming/counter-jamming tech that drives up development costs.
This is a rather basic (passive) seeker head by modern standards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:R-27_missile_homing_head,...
Something far more interesting, you can find in this channel: https://m.youtube.com/@LafayetteSystems
I've been subscribed to this guy for some time. His work is much more impressive, and IIRC, he either works for a defense contractor or is studying for that.
I think there's lots of people talking past each other on this post. These kinds of designs won't be as reliable as the existing designs, and they may have a systemic flaw, for example, susceptibility to disabling with microwaves. And they aren't going to work after sitting in an ammo depot for 15 years in the desert or after being dropped from a plane.
But these designs will cost just a few dollars more than the equivalent dumb munition (and can possibly be retrofitted), and can be two orders of magnitude more effective in the short term. The threat here isn't "guy in garage makes MANPADS", it's "IRGC converts 100's of thousands of existing unguided cold-war rockets into guided S2A and S2S missiles for $20 each". Even if it doesn't hit any target, each aircraft has a limited number of countermeasures and has to return to base if they run out or risk being hit.
Guided munition at a dumb munition price is enough to invalidate many strategies.
You don't need to win any wars with it if you can use them to sow confusion, obscure the firing of more serious rockets, and/or trigger a sufficiently more expensive response.
It clearly needs more work, but if an amateur can get this far at this low cost, odds are you'll see attempts at overwhelming attackers or defense systems by sheer volume with cheap decoys like this long before they become an actual threat in and of themselves.
Get the rocket a bit more stable, and force an attack to try to take out dozens of these because one of them might be a real threat, and you'll have created a problem.
With a 3D printer and some 'ordinary household chemicals' to quote a certain movie you can do pretty scary stuff.
People can do very scary things with a knife, a car, or petrol+matches.
We don't try to regulate those things out of existence like we do with new technology (drones and now 3D printers)
Kind of ridiculous that a country with more guns than people and 45k firearms deaths per year wants to regulate 3D printed plastic. Yet collecting and shooting actual guns is still an acceptable hobby in many states.
The same states that want to regulate 3d printers and force you to register them and install only software that will prevent you from printing anything that even looks like a gun part are also the same states that have been trying (or succeeding) in enforcing those same sorts of broad and dubious regulations on firearms too. When you think of states whose legislatures think collecting and shooting guns is an acceptable hobby, California and New York don’t exactly top the list.
Oh, I totally agree. I always see this as evidence that the terrorism threat is overblown, if it were really as large as we are led to believe the number of successful attacks would be far higher than it is.
McGuyver pouring sap on a pinecone
Hiya! (Grenade)
Exactly. Consider the current conflict in Iran. They have thousands of drones that cost $50k each. The US’s only real defense against one of these drones is to fire a million dollar missile at it. That assymmetry can win or lose a war.
It's not the only real defense. This works pretty well too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centurion_C-RAM
There's clearly a need for more cheap interceptor drones as well, but it's not like the US military won't start deploying those soon enough.
"and you are not going to win any war with this toy, even if all your enemy has are rocks thrown at you"
I don't want to use it for war. I think it would be a pretty cool technical project (if it works).
This design is pretty clearly optimized for weaponry. Eg the foldable fins - necessary if you want to keep a magazine of these things stored compactly before firing. Totally unnecessary for funsies.
What nonviolent application are you imagining for a gps-guided rocket that is launched by pulling a gun trigger on a hand held mount?
> What nonviolent application are you imagining for a gps-guided rocket that is launched by pulling a gun trigger on a hand held mount?
A launcher for a climbing rope or grappling hook. Have you ever tried getting a rope up over a branch on a very tall tree?
Not joking - I considered it as a hobby project years ago until I discovered how hard it would be to do legally.
Ukraine needs more cheap weapons.
Regardless, he made a prototype rocket enclosure and he seems to have the software down… I think the propulsion system will be the easy part. Hardest part will be tuning the PID so that the rocket goes where he wants it to. Then incorporating his tracking system will be another challenge of itself but that’s because of the form factor. As long as his calculus and linear algebra is good I see than being successful. Either way I’d hire simply to be a prototype engineer. Either Anduril or CIA would hire him in a heartbeat for prototyping.
> I think the propulsion system will be the easy part.
Really? I think rocket science is still not easy. Just look at how much nation states are spending on maintaining their liquid and/or solid fuel rocket programs. If they even have one, let alone both.
This book might give some insights into the why https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pd...
Quote: "All this sounds fairly academic and innocuous, but when it is translated into the problem of handling the stuff, the results are horrendous. It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that's the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water —with which it reacts explosively. It can be It has recently been shown that an argon fluoride, probably ArF2, does exist, but it is unstable except at cryogenic temperatures.
[...] kept in some of the ordinary structural metals — steel, copper, aluminum, etc. —because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminum keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes."
Granted this is about a fuel that is AFAIK not used for MANPADs, but the joke about the running shoes could be made about most aspects of rocket propulsion.
With all do respect I think your over complicating the problem. It’s not rocket science (no pun intended). It’s essentially a hobby rocket that can be weaponized and it’s all DIY. That’s the point simple and off the shelf. Not meant to travel towards the stratosphere or even long range. Quick and dirty way to cause havoc in a localized area.
Ok. Maybe you are right. I don't know.
Taking a quick look at the BOM, it lacks the correct sensor selection.
Even if the correct sensor could be chosen (whatever it is), unlikely is attainable by consumers and the technology would definitely be export controlled in the US.
You'd be AMAZED what you can find on eBay.
I saw this pop up alongside its video thumbnail and nearly shit myself watching it and going "damn, that looks exactly like what's on those RU/UA drones going at each other"... https://www.ebay.com/itm/197224214645
"HS AI Vision Cube For Ultra-long-range Target Recognition tracking & Thermal" for as low as $175. I am feeling the potential ITAR violations straight through my screen.
The funny thing is, at least as I understand it, ITAR only applies to things produced in the United States. As example, you can't buy very good FLIR IR cameras in the United States without a lot of paperwork, but you can trivially buy much better (higher resolution, faster frame rate) and cheaper IR cameras that are produced in China.
> I am feeling the potential ITAR violations straight through my screen
And possibly landing on all kinds of watch lists.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the sellers there are just honeypots.
A name like “Ultra-long-range Target Recognition tracking” just screams “Hey, FBI, please come visit me and ask what I am building in the basement”
Are items made, located in, and sold from China covered by ITAR?
I think MEMS gyroscopes and accelerometers used in consumer drones should be just about good enough to measure orientation and acceleration, and those are cheap and easy to get.
You could integrate acceleration to get speed - the flight is short enough to make compounding errors easy to ignore.
I think thanks to drones and RC hobbyists, there's a generally nice body of knowledge on how to get good enough data from consumer hardware to keep things flying.
> You could integrate acceleration to get speed - the flight is short enough to make compounding errors easy to ignore.
‘Easy to ignore’ is not a term I would use here, especially given the motion environment of a rocket. It seems like it might be beginning to be borderline possible.
> You could integrate acceleration to get speed - the flight is short enough to make compounding errors easy to ignore.
False, given how noisy MEMS IMUs are, and the accuracy required. Even Ring Laser Gyros drift quickly.
Get connected with DARPA ASAP, just to let the overlords know you are on "the right side of the fence" - - before Homeland pays you a "very uncomfortable" visit
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 let alone with AI, you might have some workarounds, but never a real counter.
Weaponized drones (say D_A) can be countered by other weaponized drones (say D_B), equally cheap or cheaper than D_A because the D_A is usually targeting something larger (so more payload) and typically has a longer range. D_B only needs to wreck D_A at a shorter defensive range. That's what Ukraine is doing.
You can also use drone swarms with coordinated action so that each drone in the swarm is only targeting one other drone, and automatic re-targeting if one node misses. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_robotics
> equally cheap or cheaper
I doubt it, as D_A's target is stationary (and could be reduced to GPS coords) while D_B's target is moving.
> I doubt it, as D_A's target is stationary (and could be reduced to GPS coords) while D_B's target is moving.
It's a good point, though I should point out that GPS denial is assumed in those sort of contexts as a first countermeasure so D_A likely has alternative targeting, and that smaller drones can move faster with less energy storage, which itself requires less weight, compounding the benefits of being smaller.
And also the attacker can send 100 drones without any real targeting at all and 10 proper expensive drones and you need to send up 110 defenders which need to be able to track flying drones. Being the attacker will always be easier.
The good old "The Bomber always gets through" debate from 1932.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_bomber_will_always_get_thr...
However, D_A is moving, while D_B can be stationary.
How is a stationary defense drone going to defend from a incoming attacking drone?
Couldn’t post earlier seems HN is rate limited :/
hardest issue as I mentioned in another comment is detection. Now on using other drones to counter a drone, there are other issues, as I built and tested some before, assuming you got the detection part done. The first one is guidance and correction mid-air, flying manually won’t really be practical due to the need for an extraordinary flying skills, which can’t be relied on in the field, the second part is the speed, you need to ALWAYS make sure the interceptor is faster to catch it up, third is the weight, I disagree about the payload part you mentioned, I have seen videos of light weight drones failing to wreck bigger ones, if you are relying on collision alone. Additionally, the telemetry/video/C&C for the interceptor, if jamming is already in place, your counter won’t work either.
The swarm will require a low latency comms link, centralized or decentralized, if the area is jammed, it won’t work. i have built a self-healing decentralized system using cellular in each drone, but that’s useless if the network is down to start with.
So they might work in a very specific use case, but not an ultimate solution to counter them.
While it [1] doesn't talk about swarms, it has some details - $1k - $2.5k price, 170mph speed, backpackable, thermal imaging, radar, ai, manual control (fiber-optic I think, based on other sources and battlefield pictures).
This [2] talks about swarmer software used by Ukraine.
$1k-$2.5k gives a lot of room for tech to avoid jamming - ir or visible light, ultrasound, for in-swarm comms.
And I wonder if the battery itself could be weaponized. We have seen that a very thin layer of the right material can turn phones/pagers very destructive.
[1] https://www.twz.com/news-features/ukrainian-companies-prohib...
[2] https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/ukrainian-drone-swa...
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.
"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.
At long distances the small cross section of the drone requires tight focusing (expensive optics) or a high power, preferably pulsed laser (expensive laser) or both.
Not impossible but many times more expensive than the drone
Expensive is fine since it is reusable.
At some point it itself becomes a target. It has to be able to get almost 100% kills, otherwise the enemy can swarm it with cheap drones, destroy the expensive installation, then continue as before.
Sure, but it needs many "many times" for that to be a factor.
And even in the case it could be useful as an addition to or paired with a tank etc.
Many times more is about what it comes out to. There are some companies selling laser defense systems but they are many times more than cheap FPV drones with grenades attached.
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
At very short distances and with a lot of power, perhaps. Despite what we see in movies laser beams diverge. And then with distance it’s harder to track moving objects precisely to hit the same spot long enough to melt it.
At that point might as well spend the money to use a kinetic weapon with basic tracking and ballistic calculations.
Kinetic weapons pose greater risk to bystanders.
Powerful enough laser and accurate enough targeting system is easy to say, but not easypeasy to do. Dumping thousands of Joules on a tiny moving target is much easier to do with explosives.
Lasers imo don't really have IRL advantages over machine guns and rockets, and their line of sight nature is a huge limitation.
Laser:
- are cheap to shoot - do not fall on someones head if they miss (unlike firing bullets and rockets at a drone that will come down again) - do hit the target immediately if aimed right
Problems with lasers are, cooling, power consumption limiting mobile use - and indeed targeting and fog and clouds.
And rain.
Lasers won’t effectively work, it’s a two part equation, detection and targeting. To neutralize a target using a ground-based laser, you need an enormous power, and still it won’t penetrate a high distance/altitude in the sky, environment factors also to be considered. The detection part is even harder, these small 8in drones are almost impossible to detect unless you can hear it, aka it’s over, because they can fly at 250km/h, too small to be visually detected, acoustic sensors will fail to detect them, and radar will miss it as a false negative since it’s the size of a bird. I have seen some systems trying to combine all that to detect them plus AI for flying pattern detection, but they are far from being reliable in practical applications.
8 inches drone cannot carry much of explosive at all. In order to dump 10 kg load of explosives, you need an “agricultural drone” one that can carry 45kg, since the additional mechanisms and their batteries (and the drone’s backup batteries) are heavy.
Those are bigger and noisier.
DJI ARGAS Series are good starting point.
https://ag.dji.com/mobile
Last week I was flying the argas! But I think you are misunderstanding, these are suicide drones not dropping the payload kind, and 8in can very well carry a deadly explosive, mostly against personnel, vehicles ones you get it bigger but not by much, from 12-18in max.
I see.
Nowadays I fly nothing, but I do see them Iranian drones get intercepted from my porch in Abu Dhabi.
The fact I am watching it and not panicking anymore tells about how cooked I am.
Unless you mean it just can't detect objects that small, my guess is we'll see things calibrate toward a lot more birds being cooked in active war zones vs drones with explosives being let through.
Can radar distinguish from the bird since it’s moving 250km/h?
The small weaponized drones do not fly 250 km/h.
Yes, but they still approach in just a few seconds.
They can fly at 350kph, check this redbull drone that was used in Olympics, acceleration of 100-300kph in just two seconds faster than any F1 car. Now add a bit of payload and you get the 200-250 speed range, still crazy fast.
https://www.redbull.com/id-id/worlds-fastest-filming-drone-b...
From what I can tell, Ukrainians are having some success with converting guns into automatic turrets that can track and shoot down drones via sensors, and the rifle-equivalent of birdshot.
"let alone with AI" what's falling into the AI category here perhaps is the key question, since microseconds counts, and LLM are very slow!
Even the fastest "real-time" LLM frameworks currently report sub-second latencies around 120ms. This is fine for high-level mission planning (e.g., "fly to the red house") but too slow to prevent a drone from hitting a tree at 50mph (80 KM/h)[1]
Whilst the Shahed-136 kamikaze drone typically flies at a maximum speed of around 185 km/h (roughly 115 mph or 100 knots).
[1] https://arxiv.org/html/2602.19534v1 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HESA_Shahed_136
> "let alone with AI" what's falling into the AI category here perhaps is the key question, since microseconds counts, and LLM are very slow!
LLMs (Large Language Models) are far from the only type of AI around. It's a pretty broad field, and there are real-time AI systems, for example, self-driving cars, which have the response times you're thinking of. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_Intelligence:_A_Mod...
hence: "what's falling into the AI category here perhaps is the key question"
YOLO is a good example for something that can work.
https://docs.ultralytics.com/models/yolov8/
> 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
What kind of systems are you thinking about? Jet airplanes for sure are completely safe from small drones.
"Jet airplanes for sure are completely safe from small drones."
That feels like a bold and unsupported assertion. Ask a pilot how they'd feel about takeoffs or landings through airspace filled with adversarial drones.
A flock of unlucky geese can knock out a jet turbine, how is this a "for sure" conclusion?
> Jet airplanes for sure are completely safe from small drones.
Until they land then, due to their cost, they become a very juicy target to aim for.
maybe in the air, but I seem to recall the Ukrainians being successful at attacking Russian planes on the ground.
So this is basically a DIY mini rocket clearly advertised to be used in an asymetrical war. I do not expect this project to remain on github for long.
> This project manifesto declares a fundamental shift: advanced air-defense capabilities—once locked behind billion-dollar state arsenals and classified labs—are now within reach of determined individuals using consumer electronics, open-source software, and rapid prototyping.
I guess a lot of people will not be happy with this xD
> Description: Space echoes like an immense tomb, yet the stars still burn. Why does the sun take so long to die?
Translation: everyone should be able to shoot down an airliner, not just nations.
I mean, if we already "trust" nations with that power...
A certain kind of mind deals with stress by devising solutions, even if one cannot put them into action.
Seeing people in Israel, Iran, the general Middle East as well as the Ukraine live in fear of drone strikes might have incentivised this person to come up with a potential way to deal with these threats.
Cheap air defense would equilibrate drone warfare again:
Currently drones are much cheaper that the systems that take them down.
I would invert that statement.
The fact that home made drones can cause such havoc to even the best funded military is an equalizer when the military with all the power is actively trying to completely eliminate the otherside.
There are no home made devices a Gazan can build that can protect from a 2000lbs bomb.
MANPADS can be effective against large drones, but definitely not against the kind of FOV shit we see in Ukraine. They were originally designed to kill helicopters and low flying aircraft, and I'm guessing that's still his design intent.
My understanding is that for the civilians in Ukraine Shaheed style drones are the danger.
They are but the Ukrainians are making some serious inroads into the effectiveness of those drones and if they keep that up for a little while longer they will have near perfect ability to shoot them down. Essentially they've built hunter-killer drones that are sent off in the general direction of Shahed that then either succeed or fail in their mission. That success rate has been very steadily climbing over the last couple of months.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sting_(drone)
So far russia launched over 57 000 Iranian/inspired shahed drones. They are like 6ft long drones with 40+ lbs payload with couple hundreds of miles of range.
USA/NATO/allies heavily rely on Patriot AA system. Even if you disregard the prohibitive 100x cost difference, there are about 2500 Patriot compatible PAC missiles.
This is why gulf states are scrambling to get their hands on cheap alternatives - Ukraine manages to shoot down over 90% of all drones heading their way, usually it is over 400 per day in big waves.
>FOV
FPV.
But I really hate the whole weaponization of these FPV drones (as opposed to the bigger fixed wings ones), not just they ruined the fun hobby that a lot enjoy, but also increased the prices for the parts. Before 2022 whenever I talk about drones everyone is enthusiastic about them, what benefits they can bring like drone deliveries and all, after that, you get a hostile reaction or the government putting you on some watchlist.
You can hate it, but at the same time, without it Ukraine would have been overrun by now and I think that trumps your feelings about your hobby.
That's not true at all, the success rates of these fpv drones are around 1 to 100, ie out of 100 failed attempt you get a hit, but you only see the successful ones, and those aren't my words, this is straight up from a Canadian soldier in Ukraine (1). And you can actually ask any hobbyist, they will tell you how prone to failure/crashes/loss these fpv small drones are, after all, they are meant to be for fun.
(1) https://youtu.be/K8o4afysnBg?t=766
I wasn't talking about the success rate for any individual drone, but about the cumulative effect. And the success rate of individual missions depends very strongly on which part of the front you are looking at and what kind of missions are flown.
Just to give you one figure: estimates are that between 1000 and 1500 Shaheds have been downed by interceptors during last February. That's not a 100% kill rate but it definitely isn't 1% either. And they're getting better every week.
Many mention ITAR or some other issue, nothing about this project is even close to ITAR (as far I understand), connecting camera to rocket using it as guidance will get in trouble most likely, if not mistake only thing allowed is using camera to AIM at sun.
https://www.youtube.com/@LafayetteSystems is similar project, also by actual defense contractor, and less opensource.
MANPADS are certainly covered by ITAR. It could probably be effectively argued by his lawyers that what he has created isn't truly MANPADS but rather just an edgy toy that superficially resembles a weapon system but isn't actually capable of performing as one. Maybe that would work, but I think his chance of getting dragged into the legal system for this or for some chickenshit like weed possession are very high, particularly if the media at large picks up this story.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2332g states that just having a system "intended to launch or guide a rocked or missile described in... [description of MANPAD type rocket]" carries life imprisonment. He calls it a manpad and then shows a system intended to launch it.
There is no consideration in the law whether he actually plans to use it or ever meant any violence, nor any consideration of whether it violates ITAR.
As someone who has a lot of interest in weapons law, this is probably about the only kind of weapon that can't be even legally contemplated in the USA, worst case for almost anything else you can get an NFA stamp. The USA is absolutely paranoid about yielding their air power so they come down like a ton of bricks against anyone that might want to defend against that.
the links says explosives + guidance system, but guidance system still allowed in hobby project as long aim toward sun (eg. sun is the target, same for stabilization), I think having horizontal stabilization hitting an target would be equal to breaking law.
So design a system for launching test vehicles?
Straight up admitting that it's meant to implement MANPADS is certainly a choice, I hope the author doesn't get himself in hot water.. ITAR or something..
(Would be cool to see an ATGM variant too!)
I would suggest using a more modern IMU, the MPU6050 has been long obsoleted both in cost and capability by newer IMUs. I used the ST LSM6DSOX in my rocket flight computers, for example it has a way better rate noise density of 110ug/Sqrt[Hz] at 16g fs compared to the awful 400 ug/Sqrt[Hz] of the MPU6050 and is cheaper than the MPU6050 on LCSC last time I bought some. If you go newer to the LSM6DSV you can get 60ug/Sqrt[Hz] but these aren't as cheap. There was an interesting Sony project which used a synchronized array of these consumer IMUs to achieve lower noise (apparently they became export controlled despite just fusing a bunch of consumer IMUs on one PCB!)
Nowadays you can even use the LSM6DSV320X which has both a low-g and high-g integrated which basically obsoletes the high-g ADXL375 and saves some space, but it's not quite at the price and supply reliability of the LSM6DSOX since it is less than a year old.
> Contributors > novatic14 Alisher Khojayev > claude Claude > hobostay Qiaochu Hu
I wonder how much role Claude plays in enabling the designing/building of it
As the YouTube comments say:
> This guy really wants that defense contract.
They may just give it to him to buy him. It’s the first stage of neutralizing the peasantry of rebellious thoughts against the aristocracy.
Really cool work on making your own rocket motors.
I wonder why he calls it a MANPADS (Man portable Air Defense System) It does slightly resemble a Manpads, but with a GPS based guidance system it would not able to be used for air defense, even conceptually. Typically manpads would use something like an infrared/optical or radar guidance system which would run way more than $5. This does seem like a cool home made AGM-176 or similar. There's always been a side project idea in the back of my head about what the cheapest IR or laser guided RC Plane launched rocket would look like. A cheap rocket design powered by some model rocket engines that could be used for a drone -> drone intercept cheaply.
Awesome job taking a fun idea into reality. It's really impressive to see the design work
This is obviously a missile, and I'm not well-versed in weapons tech, but won't this need a camera to actually track and take out a flying object? So far I just see gps and barometric sensing...
Also 3D printing and some electronics, ok fine, but where do you get the rocket propellant? That seems at least as critical as the software and sensing side of things...
Yeah, this current project uses external sensors (a camera array/grid) for guidance.
He's using potassium nitrate/sugar as his rocket fuel.
Watch the video. He makes his own propellant.
> rocket propellant
You can homemade it, kno3+sugar
You can also blow your hands off, blind yourself and/or burn down the building. So be very careful if you try this. Note it is illegal to make your own solid fuel motors in some countries (you need a special license in the UK).
Given the navigation is done by the cameras (not GPS) you will also need to do some work with the second repository (by the same guy)-
https://github.com/novatic14/Distributed-Camera-Node-Trackin...
Fascinating, is miniaturisation and “democratisation” of offensive capabilities via 3d printing and consumer tech going to impact defensive capabilities as well?
Are we going to see foot troops carry one of these strapped to their backpacks and launched autonomously to counteract incoming drones?
Impressive. But:
-Is a 3D printed assembly really going to withstand the heat of the rocket motor? Or is that going to be replaced with metal?
-The solid motor grain shown looks pretty janky. I definitely wouldn't want that any near me when it fired, let alone on my shoulder.
I strongly object to building weapons. It is not right. Raise your consciousness, young hacker.
I grew up building homemade rocket engines to power model rockets. I even programmed a flight computer in ASM.
I was always quite risk averse and, then being only shortly after 9/11, I told my friend I worried what we were doing may be illegal or otherwise get us in trouble. So he picked up the phone and called the county fire marshal. My friend explained EXACTLY what we were doing, down to the potassium nitrate and the homemade black powder and nitrocellulose igniters. The fire marshal paused for a long moment and said “it’s not against any law I’m aware of. Just don’t start any fires.” We proceeded to have many successful flights and participated in NERF (a rocketry club that used to get 12kft clearance from FAA before the govt started stonewalling us).
I feel very fortunate to have grown up in an environment where that was permitted. I fear that my children will not have the same privilege—for many reasons, but one factor is people putting violent things like this on GitHub. Please take it down.
> I strongly object to building weapons. It is not right.
I used to object to building weapons. Now the EU is engaged in a proxy war with Russia, and the US has repeatedly threatening to annex Greenland. Suddenly the need for a domestic weapons supply chain does not seem so farfetched
It's impossible to get a job nowadays so new grads will do anything to stick out.
You don't really understand the desperation we're going through right now. OP wants to be visited by the feds.
Seems like a one way road--the way things are getting stricter and stricter. My parents did shit when they were growing up that would have landed me in prison, and I did plenty of things growing up that would have landed my kid in prison.
I fear the next generation is going to grow up confined to a bubble where they're only allowed to stay home and mindlessly consume corporate approved product, never make things, never build things, never destroy things, never hack a computer game, never reverse engineer a wire protocol, never go out and walk around and explore, never race things, never jump off things, never blow things up or burn them down, never protest things or yell at someone, never get into a fistfight, never take physical risks and learn what hurts and what doesn't. In 2050, growing up means just 1. go to church, or 2. watch streaming.
I was suprised seeing american youtube folks building rockets (including orientation and guidance systems) in their free time. In many countries doing this is borderline jail time.
Unbombed people are cute.
That's why it's so important for people who can hold a moral line, to do so. Violence breeds violence.
A good engineer in America can afford avoiding weapons work.
it's good work if it helps the right people
Who are the "right" people to kill? What happens when govt decides to aim your weapons at the "wrong" people?
the people who are invading another country in a war of conquest, for instance
you seem to believe we live in a world where there no longer are such wars of single-handed aggression
we don't live in that world
Right. Not knowing human nature doesn’t mean you won’t be affected by it in ways that you just haven’t thought of or don’t believe could happen to you.
A moral line is to help the right side with all heart, all mind and all might. If you know any other way to make Russia get off from Ukraine besides tons of cheap weapons - I'm listening. Otherwise, weapons are a necessity.
God, I feel like I am going to be on a list after clicking that link.
The future is scary
But you get more followers and that's the goal today isn't it? You have to take the good with the bad. No one is categorizing the follower ranks by "good guys" versus "bad guys" so you never know when one of your "admirers" is only there to monitor you in case you get out of line.
> God, I feel like I am going to be on a list after clicking that link.
It's a poor life that doesn't put you on a few such lists!
What the “government” has in store for you is way scarier. You just don’t know it any more than a cow on a pasture knows what a slaughter house is, yet.
But in Canada we ...
Oh shit. You're right.
I watched a YouTube video the other day about how the usa tracks missle launches globally. I would assume they have to pass a minimum threshold of power/heat/energy to be detectable.
Let’s all pray this toy project, if readily upgradable, is also trackable and well … the way we keep law and order is by actual policing and prosecuting. So hopefully this doesn’t get out of hand.
Very impressive, but very troubling.
Right now, today, the US government and it's three letter agencies are being run by a club of human trafficking peodophiles and rapists. Not individual, isolated, crimes. An organized group of very twisted people, having 'immigrants' rounded up and killed, pushing women back into the 1920s, and trying to make anyone who strays from heteronormative a criminal.
Having some independent developers in the defence market is not necessarily a bad thing.
Isn't it obvious that, if one person can do it, many more can do it as well, and probably have? It's not like they'll put it on GitHub.
This thing doesn't do anything a launcher from the 70s couldn't do.
Global detection is for balistic missiles, not things launched by human portable devices
Check out his code. It’s a joke. His control loop is a naive proportional response that doesnt even account for error let alone interpolate trajectory. Look at rocket.txt and launcher.tx. Especially the “fusion” function. lol. Stay in school kid.
Well that doesn't bode well for the coming world war :(
It still doesn't cease to amaze me what can be done with modern ultra-cheap electronics. $1 for the accelerometer. $17 for four servos. But as DIY cheap weapon development? Only if the ultra-cheap electronics pipeline will keep flowing.
Kid knows how to advertise
Yes to three-letter agencies.
This isn’t a serious project, in the terms of something that will disrupt warfighting. It’s basically a resume to work as a junior engineer at Anduril.
Interesting stuff, neat project, nothing new at all here except his multi camera sensing, which isn’t new but his implementation is interesting.
IDK if maybe it’s a political statement or some kind of obtuse sarcasm, but it seems like he drank way too much of his buzzword cool-aid lol. It’s probably just a job application though.
This is the coolest thing I've seen all week, possibly this month
A word to the wise: don't design weapons and share them publicly on the Internet.
I hope the kid is aware that he better not commit anything even remotely like a crime, because they will try to stitch him up quick.
Sounds a lot more like a missile than a rocket.
The HN headline is very euphemistic, but his own published materials aren't. He's openly saying it's a missile.
That is wild. Entertaining to watch.
Very cool project. The combination of 3D printing and low-cost sensors has really changed what's possible for experimental rocketry.
Impressive! Well done
the obvious goal of that is to help kill those iranian drones
So basically a homing missile?
John Connor.
This is insanely clever—especially using a $5 sensor to adjust the rocket mid-flight. Shows how much you can do now with cheap electronics and open-source software. Curious how reliable the recalculations are under real-world conditions.
Insanity. Airbus fighter jets, open-source rockets on github...
Can't wait for the open source fighter jet.
Clawjet, secured with sandboxing, bring your own SKILLs.
this is not funny yall!
Airbus has been in the defense industry for a long time.
And the deadliest weapons in war today are repurposed toys.
Just a few days ago, we got a legitimate from scratch open source design for a phased array radar [1].
[1] https://hackaday.com/2026/03/12/open-source-radar-has-up-to-...
that's lit
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47370362
And what this misses is with his other repo https://github.com/novatic14/Distributed-Camera-Node-Trackin...
This provides a distributed camera network to provide realtime updatable telemetry for target acquisition.
Only thing missing is he should have used LoRa as the backend comms. Meshtastic devices provide encryption and full comms with mesh for cheap.
Thankfully ive already downloaded everything. I suggest you all do the same, cause this repo is getting purged and the student Alisher Khojayev at Los Angeles Valley College is likely going to get black bagged.
I’m waiting for the open source EW project that attacks the uplink. Now that would be a fun competition.
And then the rocket maker pivot back to control by wire, as in the drone sphere. DIY TOW when?
Glad he’s in the US, I remember reading in Canada few months ago students got criminally charged for building and testing an anti-drone system.
Be very careful. Google and GitHub will turn you over without hesitation, and everyone who downloads this will probably be vanned.
Remember kids, the warrantless search is only illegal if they don’t find a surface to air missile. Anything can be made retroactively legal if they find something like this.
Uhhh, as someone who is very much under the thumb of ITAR and EAR as an aerospace employee, this is absolutely asking for prison time, and a LOT of it.
Are you afraid this person might be coming for your cake?
Its scary that you can whip something like this in under 100 bucks. Add a small warhead and you got a small missile.
Like we see in Iran, with trumps idiotic war the US cant even protect its allies and own soldiers, even with a whopping 1.5 trillion budget.
The budget is not the issue...the idiots running things behind that budget are the problem.
So you are going to see the following cope
Coper: But it's sensors are so low end it will never be reliable enough. Response: We can use AI to make up for low quality sensors, we can add a camera if we want it to be as reliable as self driving cars for a small amount of money Coper: AI what a joke that doesn't work Response: It's live in production Coper: But you can't fit a big enough payload Response: Lets see