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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.
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.
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.
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.
how 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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.'"
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?)
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
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