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Build Your Own Cruise Missile
WegianWarrior writes "Bruce Simpson, the man behind one of the more interesting site about pulsejets on the web, has launched a project to build a US$5000
DIY cruisemissile - just to prove that it can be done, since some said his earlier
article about it was off the peg. Bruce has also designed and placed on his site a non-weld
pulsejet you can build with simple tools, a 2D airflow modeling rig and a new valve/injector design for conventional pulsejets (according to the first page on his
site, this new design is placed in the public domain)." We linked to his pulsejet pages about two years ago.
Silkworm doesn't look too close to MiG-17
However, IIRC, USSR did have a cruise missile developed based on MiG-17 - AS-1 "Kennel".
BTW, a minor nitpick - correct spelling is MiG (which is shorthand for Mikhoyan i Gureevitch, two of the designers wgo started the bureau).
-DVK
"The right to figure things out for yourself is the only true freedom everyone shares. Go use it"-R.A.Heinlein
That would be "Gurevitch", not "Gureevitch", of course. Need to learn to type better :)
Oh, and while i'm at it, the URL for the MiG "ÍÉËÏÑÎ É ÇÕÒÅ×É" Bureau is:
http://www.migavia.ru
-DVK
"The right to figure things out for yourself is the only true freedom everyone shares. Go use it"-R.A.Heinlein
However, I don't think it's nearly as easy as he paints it out on his website. He may have a working rocket design, but that's not the hard part. The hard part is getting the guidance system to work with your rocket. That doesn't come "off the shelf", and he's going to have to do a lot of software hacking in order to get it all to work together. Not only does this guy have to be a quasi-expert in rocket design, he's going to have to know a lot about software design.
He's trying to do something that most nations in the world can't even do. It takes entire nations years to come up with even a short-range cruise missile. This guy thinks he can do it in under $5000, by himself? Building a rocket-propelled go-kart is one thing. Making a cruise missile with an accuracy of +/- 100 yards is a whole different level.
And this doesn't even take into account FAA regulations he's going to have to comply with if he plans on lobbing one of those missiles on a 100 mile flight path.
Not that I wouldn't put it past those wankers Bush and Ashcroft to try.
The United States Navy sponsored a test project with a ~$500,000 budget in late 1998 to see if an independent team could build a reliable cruise missile weapon using off the shelf technology. I suppose that since the project failed they quietly cancelled it or declared it a success (since the independent team failed to develop a useful weapon) and ended it. Things may be different now but $5,000 probably won't be enough to build an effective military grade cruise missile, especially when one considers the advanced counter-measures employed by the United States and other Navies. I doubt that a $5,000 homemade cruise missile would defeat the Aegis system employed by the United States Navy. I was able to find only this small snippet of information on the web regarding the whole affair:
missile defense
"14 Apr 98 The Kraken cruise missile built by the BMDO Countermeasures Hands-On Project crashed on take off from Point Mugu, California. The Kraken was built to test the ability of a rest-of-world country to develop this type of weapon."
I'm told you can buy Chinese Silkworm cruise missiles for $25K or so at your friendly arms bazaar.
Where exactly is my local arms bazaar? I can't seem to find it in the yellow pages. (And do they take credit cards?)
The Silkworm is basically a Mig-17 airframe with the pilot replaced by a guidance system.
Rather it's an anti-ship missile based on the Soviet made Styx, which China acquired from the USSR in the late 50s/early sixties. Since then a lot of variations have been made on it. The Silkworm and its variants seem to be popular with assorted totalitarian hellhole states (Iraq, Iran, North Korea...).