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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.
The Monkey Pages: Not just another personal site...okay, so I lie.
An anti-spam solution that's bound to work....
I bet I could get some nerds to build one of these and send a hamster into space.
As the apprentice of Prof. Chaos said, "SIMPSONS DID IT!!!!"
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Now I'll show my loser neighbour down the street who's boss! One tomahawk coming up!
"Entropy is the bad-guy, and he is everywhere"
Seriously,
Intel Inside
AMD
Designed for Windows 95
Though, personally I like a peace sign.
Where do you put the warhead? Some of my Korean friends were asking...
I'm told you can buy Chinese Silkworm cruise missiles for $25K or so at your friendly arms bazaar. The Silkworm is basically a Mig-17 airframe with the pilot replaced by a guidance system. Man, this stuff is scary.
How do you want to calculate today?
Bill Gates: "Hmmm... 50,000,000,000/5,000 = 10,000,000 cruise missles... Imagine a beowolf cluster of these you hippies!"
At a million dollars a pop, the US govt. sure gets ripped off on theirs.
besides the obvious *geek* factor this kind of *experiments* and demonstrations should make us all stop to think a bit ...
...
how do we prevent terrorist from using this kind of stuff ?
limiting acces to knowledge (with DMCA style laws)?
creating a orwellian policial state where all are suspect ans subject to vigilance (and who controls the vigilantes) ?
limitating the publication of (now) public-domain stuff ('cause it can be used to devilish ends) ?
the RIAA/DMCA people already want to control what could go on the net, and that is, maybe, only the beggining (see China - although there 's hope there - see the massive failure of the SARS coverup) so maybe it is time to start thinking about how to mantain the net free and at the same time this planet a safe planet to stay
just my two uros,
cheers from Portugal
The impressive thing about cruise missiles is the multi-thousand mile range. That's achieved with very clever turbojet engine design, and some of that technology is still classified. Still, it's decades old.
(It's annoying that general aviation is still putt-putting around on reciprocating engines, decades after everything big went turbine.)
"Not surprisingly, that piece has produced a significant amount of feedback from the tens of thousands of people who have read it so far"
I am a felow hobbiest, please sned me detailed plans.
FROM: moustashiod_villian@yahoo.com
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Uh-Oh, New Zealand building Weapons of Mass Destruction. Next thing you know Osama has been spotted in Wellington. I bet the B2s are already being fueled up as I write this.
Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
The real question is not 'how do we prevent terrorist from using this king of stuff' , since if joe-nobody can build a cruise missile in his backyard, you can be sure that terrorist organisations could have built it years ago. However, they do not need to buy their own missile. They have enough money to buy *quality* missiles from kind multinational corporations when they want to.
The question this article raises is why would somebody who is not totally out of his mind would want to build a cruise missile. I don't think the *geek* factor alone would be a correct answer. A cruise missile... as if the world needed more of those. I cannot believe the man could not find anything more useful to build.
And the cost of putting a limit on informatin in areas such as electronics or rocket science would be *way* over what anyone would accept.
The best way to prevent a terrorist attack with LCCM's is to keep an eye on who's who in rocket scienc, jet propulsion and turbo jets.
The powerplant on the rocket is the one single component that i difficault to get(buy) or construct.
Or better (like thats gonna happen); try to eliminate the reason behind the fact that there actually are (probably) somone who wants to fire a LCCM on New York.
Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
What? That's mostly where the economic benefit from conflict comes from. Blow up the old shit, buy new, more high tech, more expensive new shit.
Never confuse volume with power.
Just go ahead and put out the plans for a rudementary cruise missle. Your country is in no danger of getting attacked. Oh wait, al Qaeda hates Australia and New Zealand now, too! Damn, that's going to be ironic indeed when you get smoked by your own design.
By the way, it doesn't matter if the missle has a guidance system or not. Just as long as any civilians are killed, Osama and his minions are happy. Very much like the Nazis with the V-1/V-2. Didn't matter if it hit anything important, just as long as it killed a few people in London.
Yes. Please do.
Right to bear arms (poor bear...) is to protect yourself from a tyrannical government... when the government has smart bombs, nuclear weapons, and the brand-new F-22 Raptor at it's disposal, a 30-06 rifle is about as useful as a shiv made from an old spoon.
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.
This is spending money to keep people employed.
Cruise Missile production keep people in California, Kansas, Missouri and Washington employeed through the primary assembly and secondary assembly and R&D.
Subcontractors are scattered around the country.
Apache helicopters are assembled and tested in Arizona.
M-1 tank upgrades and factory caretaking is in Michigan.
F-15E, I, S and Ks are assembled in St. Louis MO.
JDAM kits are also made in St. Louis.
Captial Warships are built in Maine, Virgina, Rhode Island, Mississippi, Florida, Wisconson and I might be forgetting some places.
B-1B upgrades will take place in Texas and the parts are made all over the place.
In short, defense does help employment, and it helps keep blue-collar and engineering jobs going all over the country.
Why not spend that money on getting the 8.8 million people that are currently unemployed some jobs?
Because then you risk spiraling into socialism by doleing out tax dollars...
Note: I'm not trolling, I'm serious.
neurostarhow do we prevent terrorist from using this kind of stuff ?
Dammit, a bunch of teenagers with box cutters have fly jumbo jets in the WTC. They had about 200 times more explosive in these jets than in one of these missiles and their equipement cost was box cutters and airplane tickets. Why would they want to build one of those missiles?
You have to solve the weakest link, not the sexy link.
Now I'm putting my aluminium foil beanie back on.
Anyway, the aircraft went through its inevitable weight growth (like software bloat when you keep adding features to a package) and it has outgrown the Williams jet engines, and they begged Williams to come up with a higher thrust version, but Williams has a good thing going with the cruise missile and said nothing doing about changing their design. Trouble is that the next tier of jet engine costs ten times as much which means the half mil price tag on the jet plane is out the windows, so I don't know what is happening.
Will declare New Zealand to be part of the Axis of Evil.
While this money spent on weapons does translate to some employment, it should be noted that a lot of the defence budget are actually spent towards R&D. You could waste billions of dollars to test run dozens of the experimental weapon in order to get it work correctly. This money does not necessarily create that many employment. It is much better off spending the money on infrastructure projects, such as repairing broken highways, bridges, schools, etc. It will not only get more people to be employed, but also improve the general living standard.
1.
Radar operator in military:-God damit! OMFG! There is CM heading for the Washington prob. the White House! I'm caling the President RIGHT NOW so he can shut down the civilian GPS system.
*Calls White House by dialing 666-WWHITE HOUSE EMERGENCY HOT-LINE*
President: -Howdy! What's up sergeant?
*Radar op. explains*
President: -Ok. I press the button that triggers the civil GPS-system on and of, it right here om my side on the desk.
*President push button and civil GPS-system is offline. Terrorist CM crash.*
Total time from detection to shutdown: Less than 2 min.
or
2.
Radar operator in military:-God damit! OMFG! There is CM heading for the Washington prob. the White House! I'm caling my [Insert highest ranking officer he can call].
*Calls [highest ranking officer]* Highest ranking fficer: -Holy shit! OMFG this ain't no test or exercise!
*trigger all the possible terrorist alarms*
*Calls Chief of Staff in Pentagon (or whoever is in charge there)*
Chief of Staff: -Holy shit. OMFG we are running out of time, fuck the President, not time to get in touch with him. I'm taking the decision: We have to shut down the civil GPS system who guids the CM.
*Calls [whatever agency who is in charge of this system]
Chief of Staff: -Incomming terorist CM in Washington. Sut down the civil GPS system NOW!
At the agency: The techdude: -OK.
*Techdude writes on his keyboard : "shutdown -h now" (or similar command)*
*Civil GPS system goes down and CM crash*
Total time from detection to shutdown: Somewhere between 10 and 15 minutes. (wildly guessed)
Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
My cruise missile is for hunting and self defense only.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
We must slashdot this page before the information gets into the wrong hands!
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
I think while it's within easy reach to build what amounts to a large RC model powered by a pulsejet engine and guided by GPS, there are a number of issues he needs to address:
1. The pulsejet ain't going to be quiet. The motorboat sound of pulsejet engines are going to be dead giveaways of its presence. It'll be better to use a small RC jet engine with careful exhaust design to muffle the jet engine sound or a modified RC piston engine that drives a multibladed propeller so the engine runs at a lower speed to reduce engine noise.
2. A 10 kilogram warhead isn't going to do much in the way of damage, unless it dispenses a really toxic biological agent like botulin poison.
3. Guiding the DIY cruise missile is going to be a very tricky proposition. While GPS will get the missile to the general target area, the lack of the ability to avoid obstacles and to fly very low to avoid most radars means the missile will have to cruise at about the same altitude as the V-1 (about just over 1,000 meters off the ground), which means it can be intercepted by modern ground AA systems.
He didn't look into the fact that civillian GPS recievers crop the data stream if the speed gets over abour ~300mph or the altiture exceeds a preset amount (15kft?).
After his pulsejet is lit and going for a minute, he'll ahve a damn hard time driving it without any guidance information other than dead reckoning...
This is not a sig. this is a duck. quack.
God forbid anyone have a hobby and share with people how to do it! It's just immoral.
Especialy when it's obvious that terrorists are way to stupid to figure any of this stuff out themselves.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Ever notice how we are all worried about terrorists building bombs, missles, etc and they just crash a plane into a building?
----
All of whose base are belong to the what-now?
Not that I wouldn't put it past those wankers Bush and Ashcroft to try.
Way back when I was going to university, we had a lot of unwanted guest (G-7 summit or something like that and a whole bunch of protestors). A friend of mine joked about using an RC plane to carry a home-made bomb and blow up the conference. A small group of Comp Sci and Engineer students sat down and thought about it. Our solution involved a glider (for a stealth approach) and an onboard camera (since we did not want to be near the conference). The only limiting factors we came up with (with respect to the size of the bomb) was the wing span of the glider. The bigger the span, the bigger the bomb, the easier it is to spot.
We never build it, since we did not care one way or the other about the conference (other than the fact that the protestors caused a lot of disruption to our classes), and we became scared of how easily anyone could build one of this things (using readily available parts, components and kits).
It was an eye opener of how illusionary our protection from this sort of stuff was (this was years before the Sept. 11 attacks). We realized how much our safety depended on the goodwill of our neighbours not to use something like this.
And like many posters have said before, anyone with enough education (we were all studying for Bachelor's Degrees) can build something like this, even if the information is freely available.
Based on the stuff he's buying, he doesn't have to even *try* to do it surreptitiously. It's all stuff that's used for many mundane purposes. Until it's all put together, it's as harmless and commonplace as dirt.
Just when does this become illegal or a threat to the public?
Never. You know that thing... freedom of speech?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
A Tom Cruise Missile?
Help! The Scientologists are after me!
As a matter of fact, check out this site. GPS navigation of model airplanes has been around for at least seven years already. The only difference I see is that this guy is using a jet powered craft, and is calling it a cruise missile. Other than that, it is the same thing.
Oh, and by the way, the FAA has no jurisdiction in New Zealand.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
But how do you know that the Internet will not be born without military research? A lot of the technologies powering the Internet were not started from military research, such as, TCP/IP, HTML, Web browser, etc. The Internet could have born from civilian research projects.
Before you say that this is nuts, think about this: helicopters are far more dangerous than any airplane. There have been a total of 21 deaths to date in U.S. commercial airplanes this year according to the NTSB. That's based on up to 150,000 flights per day.
So far, the U.S. Military, has already seen 29 helicopter deaths (and 8 additional British casualties in one of those crashes), and at least one other minor crash with no fatalities, and this is not including any that resulted from being under fire. That's based on a few hundred flights per day in Iraq, so I'm guessing a few thousand worldwide. Oh, and that's total flights, not helicopter flights. I doubt the percentage of helicopter flights is particularly high... maybe a couple of hundred helicopter flights per day as a high estimate.
That would make helicopters about 1,000 times as dangerous as airplanes. Lest you think this is a fluke of the way the military uses aircraft, the statistics on the crash rate of helicopters in Alaska should tell you otherwise. The only problem is that airplanes fly too fast for people to get a good view of what's going on in terms of ground traffic.
Enter the cruise missile. Fly ten of them around, snapping pictures and shooting video clips and periodically dumping the footage back via 802.11b networks on the ground. Near-instant gratification, and without putting your staff at risk.
Not to mention that if a blimp is cool, a missile must be... well, really cool. :-)
120 character sigs suck. Make it 250.
There's an open sourced missle guidance app called seeker that was made in the early 90s as a project at howell university. It was later used to guide p-30 rocket powered projectiles to a target some 450 yards away from launch point. The source is out there and easily googleable for. I wonder if it would apply for this project?
When you put money in R&D, you are paying for saleries.
.$77 each.
CAT, PET, MRI are all spin-offs of Nuclear Weapon design tools.
Roads, Bridges and Schools, while are somewhat funded by the Federal Government are for the most part the resonsability of the State and Local Governments.
There is a flier up at PSU of a cartoon in which the teacher is ranting that the US is going to start a war while Portland OR schools are having a funding problem with the implication that it's Washington's problem.
It isn't.
The problems with state budgets at this point are amplified by bad tax and monetary policies at the District, City, County, and State governments.
Here in Oregon the state legislature spent $212,000 for new chairs while selling the old ones for
Additionally, Oregon's legislators reportedly spent more than $500,000 of taxpayer money on newsletters and travel to resorts in Hawaii and Florida.
When they found out they couldn't get $400,000 of new Thinkpads there was a near revolt.
When a state gets money, they do stupid shit. I say spending it on DoD and NASA is alot better than pissing it away with things like the Big Dig. 5 years and 11 billion dollars late?
Lets fund the Mob! Lets repair something.
Throwing money at a problem caused by bad fiscal policy doesn't fix the problem.
If you have someone with a credit card problem do you hand them another card?
As the $5K budget shows, this is within the range of an individual or small organization.
I've been expecting something like this for the last several years, but I expected to find out about it on the news, i.e. somebody used it on somebody, not on the Web.
Tech Public Policy stuff
You see, the URL ending in .nz denotes New Zealand. Ashcroft has no jurisdiction there. Of course, if I were this fellow I wouldn't plan on any vacations to the states for a while, but frankly if I lived in a fair country such as New Zealand I'd be loath to waste my hard earned (and undervalued) dollars coming to this place. Seems to me that those in the know are considering escape.
ehintz
There is a reason for over building defense.
At any given time 1/3 of your force in down for some reason.
Aircraft Carriers are at 1/8 of the force is down at any given time.
Fighters are around 1/4-1/3.
Bombers and non-nuclear ships are at 1/3.
If you need 10,000 Sidewinder missiles, you need to buy around 14,000 so you have 10,000 that work.
When dealing with nukes, it's different.
There are tactical, reserve, stockpile, strategic stockpile and strategic weapons.
There are formulas of what needs to be done, how many weapons it takes to eliminate a target and what weapons are where.
For instance. The SLBMs on the Trident subs are for blowing the hell out of silo complexes and railroad networks that might have a rail ICBM system. The Minuteman missiles are for C3 (command/control/communication) and the manned bombers are for recall up to the point of a drop. If you are going to nuke the DPRK you send the manned bombers so you can recall if there is a breakthrough at the last minute.
Now you have all these systems, you have to build extras because you have to assume systems will be down and that in a war, systems will be lost to attrition.
And targets do require more than one nuke. For instance, I recall that your average Minuteman II/III silo during the Cold War had 5 MIRVs targeted on it. That was because they needed to get three on the silo and thier CEP was so high that they needed to chuck 5 over to get 3 close enough to kill the silo.
The United States does not have the ability to kill everyone 50 times over. NBC weapons are bad, but not that effective.
As you say, you could use a PIC. You can't get something as accurate as a tomahawk this way; you will have to settle for hitting a building as opposed to flying it through a window of a building. (Since GPS is supposed to be accurate to about 15 meters or so, worst case, with SA off, and most buildings are more than 30 meters in at least one dimension, hitting the building is pretty reasonable.)
The craft will of course not always be making a straight, level flight. There are environmental issues. But a course correction every second or two should be sufficient.
The GPS can deliver hyper-accurate time, and fairly accurate position. From these things one can compute one's airspeed and the direction one is heading. It is then a simple matter to determine which direction one needs to turn to correct one's course.
One would plot a series of waypoints with some sort of computer software, possibly some sort of freely available GIS package, using maps available from the USGS. Once the craft is launched it will immediately begin determining which way it must turn to head to the waypoint. The little gyro replacement will provide straight and level flight when desired. Servos are trivial to control with off the shelf hardware, like a basic stamp for example, it's nice to use a dedicated microcontroller just for servo control so you don't have to tie up your primary microprocessor doing something that silly. You could also just build some custom hardware for it since they're pulse rate (or pulse width?) controlled. It would be a relatively uncomplicated task.
Now, a tomahawk missile is capable of recognizing its target by image, and it can dodge things in its path. Obviously it has significantly more processing power than the machine we're describing. However, my point was hitting a building is easy, not flying through a window, again, as the tomahawk supposedly can. (They claim a 1 meter square hit box.) All we really need to do is follow waypoints, which we can precompute on our launch control system. As the comment above this one points out, doing so will be amazingly trivial. I suspect the poster mentioned a PIC chip because they are insanely cheap and they speak RS232 serial with nothing more than something to raise voltages, for which there are several standard solutions readily available. This allows trivial interfacing to the GPS. IIRC the Basic Stamp also provides RS232, so a pic with enough legs could speak serial to both the servo controller (at a suitably high speed) and the GPS. You only need TX and RX for each connection, because the only other connection to do about 19.2k on a good day is a ground. With four wires to the servo controller you could do higher transfer rates, or reliably get 19.2k, which should be plenty.
In other words, using GPS makes this fairly trivial. The only real defense against it is GPS jamming, since it will be small and reasonably radar-transparent to the point where if it is flying low enough the only way you will spot it is visually, and good luck to you on that front.
The next step beyond this is using radar or laser imaging to find the ground and various obstacles, and apply enough processing power to the problem to make it able to dodge trees, phone poles, aircraft (unless they're your target), and so on. That does make the problem dramatically harder, and raises the cost of the electronics by several orders of magnitude, but of course it is still within the ability and budget of the more determined and wealthy hobbyists. This necessarily means that a hostile organization with some fairly lucrative funding source, such as drugs or oil (similar compounds from a financial standpoint) could put whole fleets of them into the air.
The next step after that would be inertial tracking so that it could still operate when GPS is jammed. After that, you want to do EMP hardening, which is probably more expensive than everything else put together.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Because that's what socialism is. It's the state sponsoring people who don't have jobs.
Maybe you haven't been paying much attention, but job creation is one of the major arguments for our ridiculously large defense budget: even hardware that the military doesn't want is hard to kill because representatives from those districts are worried that out-of-work defense workers will cost them reelection.
If you define "socialism" as "the state sponsoring people who don't have jobs", then the US is the biggest socialist country that ever existed, and defense employees are the biggest recipients of government handouts (followed closely by farmers). And perhaps it's time we put a stop to that kind of waste and "socialism".
*Techdude writes on his keyboard : "shutdown -h now" (or similar command)*
Thankfully it wasen't Windown
*Techdude clicks Start->My Computer->My GPS Systems->North America
*Clippy "It's looks like your shutting down your GPS system"
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
First of all, they're not all terrorists, so there are different ways to engage each threat. Let's assume you're talking about terrorists.
They need a friendly environment in which to hide and train. This is easy today, with many people hating the US. The hatred can be tempered by deeds: perceived sensitivity and fairness in dealing with Palestine; transparent and fair rebuilding of Iraq. Basically, improve the chances that a righteous Arab would call the cops on the terrorists living next door.
They need money. People angry at the US give money to terrorists. Decrease this anger, and they are left with a few independently wealthy fundamentalists, whose assets are much easier to track down and seize.
They need weapons. You might be aware that the US is one of the biggest exporters of weapons. You don't have to cut it out, but you do want to be more careful who you sell them to.
It seems we have a bit of a paradox here:
But the above hasn't happened. With the spectacular exception of September 11 (which wasn't achieved through high-tech means), the best terrorists have been able to do is conventional bombing, and they haven't been able to kill that many people, even Israelis.
So, what's the problem with the above argument?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Do you guys really think that countries in the world don't have a clue on how to build cruise misslies?
Comrad - slashdot has posted someone elses article on how to build cruise missiles.
El Presidente - eh? well you got on that browser and dl that material and have it sent to our defense division immediately. This is just the breakthrough we've been looking for,
Comrad - Si Si!
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
So atam sez:
(stupid shit about $600 toilet seats)
OK, listen up.
It wasn't a toilet seat of the type you sit your fat ass on.
It was a fiberglass unit that incorporated a toilet seat, while covering the entire toilet mechanism that was installed on an aircraft.
The DoD bought ~50 of them (possibly fewer) and each and every one of them HAD to be essentially hand made.
Why? Because automating the procedure would have increased the unit cost by an order of magnitude.
You want to know where all those $500 hammers come from? The PAPERWORK, that's where.
Your head would explode if you knew of the obscene amounts of paperwork required for a government entity to buy anything.
And you have to pay the people who fill out the forms and someone has to supply that money to pay the bureaucrats who fill out those forms.
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
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."
(1)people should be studying for their MBA(2)'s and try hard to get football scholarships instead of wast(3)eing the(4)y're time trying to learn about the world.
No kidding.
Infuriate left and right
Yes, you just let the helium flow through the reactor core and it tends to expand through the wider exhaust tubes beyond.
Yes, you just have to use a piston pump.
Yes, you just have to launch far enough up for the ion stream to not get contaminated.
Yes, you just make sure the intake valve can slap shut fast enough for most of the pulse to be forced backward.
Yes, you just throw the nuclear propellant fast enough so it detonates at the right distance from the blast plate before you fall too far.
Yes, you just use metal wicks to draw the liquid oxydizer and fuel into the combustion chamber.
Yes, you just make sure that you get enough stored energy from the previous pulse so your lasers have enough for several attempts at igniting the next fusion pellets.
Yes, you just weld a bunch of ramjets together.
Yes, you just pinch the gathered plasma into several small streams before forcing it together in the large heating chamber.
Yes, you just have to have enough springs and golf balls.
Yes, you just have to spin the pinwheel emitter fast enough so the ignition cups have enough fuel before they are in the rearward position and ignited.
Yes, you just have to wriggle the handle on the pump fast enough.
There would be nothing illegal about building a cruise missile. The thing is simply a small experimental/hobby aircraft.
Legal issues would not arise until you armed the thing and used it as a weapon. Cruise missiles don't just randomly take off at self-selected targets and explode.
I've never heard of consumer GPS systems disabling themselves at high speeds and can't locate anything in the specs at the major vendors, do you have a reference for that?
Of course, it's irrelevant to the task at hand, there are plenty of GPS recievers with NAV-OUT ports that are right at home at these speeds. Plus, GPS is just the most accessible of the nav aids out there. The FAA has hundreds of beacons scattered around the country, their exact LAT, LON and ALT are published for anyone to use. Same with costal waterway navigaion beacons via the Coast Guard. And then there's simple direction finding with any commercial broadcasting antenna. (Missile: fly to the strongest radio source at this frequency (choose a station that broascasts from downtown), then circle until you run out of fuel.
Navigating via these methods is well documented, and the equipment involved could be (in many cases) cooked up at home with some wire and transistors; unlike the more complex GPS receivers and their very sensitive timing systems.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
Given the hypersensitive climate in the U.S. today, why would one try to build a weapon of mass destruction, just to prove it could be done. I can see it now in the CNN headline: "President Bush declared today that Bruce Simpson is a threat to national security and bombed his house."
A 'cruise missile' without an explosive payload is just a model jet with a sophisticated guidance system.
Perhaps the term 'missile' is a term that carries a negative connotation, but semantics should really not affect the fundamental issue that it is OK to experiment with aeronautics and electronics in your back yard because its your back yard and we (well, Bruce does) live in a moe-or-less free society.
Personally, i would think a more interesting goal would be to build something akin to a Predator UAV than a cruise missile, but that is just me.
John Carmack is trying to build a fucking InterContinental Ballistic Missile in his backyard, but everyone seems to love that project.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
According to NTSB records, with search criteria from dates 1/1/02 through 1/1/03 there were 72 helicopter accidents (report status as final), with only two of those accidents including fatalities (three fatalities total). I dunno about you, but that seems like a pretty decent record. It's not really practical to compare civil aviation for airplanes to military helicopter operations in wartime conditions.
It'd be far more difficult and expensive to maintain and operate dozens of rocket powered aircraft as camera platforms than it does now for helicopters and planes.
Yeah, unmanned aerial vehicles are probably the future, but not rocket powered cruise missiles. Piston powered and turbine powered aircraft are much more efficient than rockets.
My other SIG is a 9mm.
painfully obvious that anyone with half a mind and a bit of ingenuity can create a decent weapon. What's left? Perhaps we all stop being gready sods and start treating others in the world with respect...i.e. give them a fair shake.
The security issue is a classic excuse to eat ones own tail. Secrecy solves nothing as basic information and some intelligence is all that's required to come up with some new and nasty way to off your fellow human.
So, how do we manage to do group therapy on the national scale? It's obviously required. The fear, the paranoia, the willingness to become more ignorant and let others deal with your "freedom" is a sure sign that the island is sinking. Get help...now before you do something that you regret. Oh wait, that's already happened....drats!
Commercial aircraft operate in a relatively safe environment.
... In this environment, the pilot's attention is OUTSIDE the cockpit. He doesn't get to look at his instruments nearly as often as other pilots. If he did, he'd run into something in seconds. Now add night vision goggles, which kills a lot of depth perception. I have a lot of respect for those rotor-heads.
Combat helicopters spend a lot of their time close to the ground, hiding behind ridge-lines, trees, buildings, medium sized rocks, tall tarantulas,
You simply cannot compare commercial aviation with combat avaition. If you want a comparison, you need to look at commercial rotorcraft vs. commercial aircraft... or some other apples & apples comparison.
Are you actually trying to compare accident statistics between commercial fixed-wing aircraft and military helecopters? Don't you think that the operating parameters are a little different? The very nature of the operations military helecopters undertake makes them more risky-- not necessarily the fact that they are helecopters. I won't argue that helecopters aren't more dangerous, but I'd say the bigger danger is that they're flying in close formation at low altitudes.
BTW, unmanned aircraft are not permitted to fly over populated areas.