9 ms·
Makeshift weapons are becoming more dangerous with commercially available kit
- JoeAltmaier 10y agoI'm certain they are not hitting anything with any accuracy with the cannons described. Its hard to make an accurate weapon.
- steve19 10y agowell they hit something, probably civilians living near the target.
- the-dude 10y agoJust like regular armies.
- nickpinkston 10y agoI would think of them more like really big grenade launchers, not true artillery, and in their street fighting capacity it's probably good enough.
- PhasmaFelis 10y agoThe first paragraph says they're shooting them at multi-story buildings.
- jcoffland 10y agoThis is a bunch of fear mongering to gain readership. We already know people can and will do bad stuff with new technology. There's very little of value to read here.
- venomsnake 10y agoI am honestly surprised at how little of the potential they have unveiled so far. We have thought of way more lethal applications over a beer with friends.
- jcoffland 10y agoIf this were Reddit we could start a thread and list them.
- Aelinsaar 10y agoBullshit. The author of this article should see all of the clever improvised things the British planned to deploy if the Germans ever made it across the channel. Take a minute to see what the Vietnamese did with virtually nothing. At best, this is mindless clickbait, at worst a distraction from important issues.
- nickpinkston 10y agoYou're right to point to the long history of improvised weapons, but I'm unsure what point you're trying to make. Can you elaborate?
- Aelinsaar 10y agoThere have been more practical, reliable, and proven (and savage for that matter) improvised weapons, traps, etc than anything in this article. Would you rather rely on the flame fougasse, and proven methods to draw someone into an ambush, or a jerry-rigged "weapon"? If you're fighting on the poorly-armed end of an asymmetrical fight, you do your best by embracing that, not trying to make field artillery from pipes. IMO of course.
- joe_the_user 10y agoEven if shooting an explosive-packed water heater from a distance doesn't get you an inch of advantage against the opposing army, even if the civilians survive, this tactic is good in itself for a given ethnic militia because it evicts the population of your targeted ethnicity from their homes and generally terrorized them. The Syrian conflict has involved targeting civilians on a massive scale. The various sides aren't necessarily destroying apartment blocks to flush out the military that might hide there, they are destroying apartments to destroy them and the civilians that hide there - those civilians aren't fighting and aren't going to be drawn into any ambush. Edit: I'm not an expert on how new the various improvised explosive techniques are but it seem that question is being conflated with the question of what use improvised artillery would be (terrible against other mobile opponents, good against civilians, Syria isn't "asymetric" warfare in the usual sense, both sides have "their" civilians and civilians they want dead or fleeing).
- semi-extrinsic 10y agoWhenever this type of article appears, presenting a danger-hyping narrative of how anyone can make weapons using modern technology, I like to point out that 70 years ago Allied resistance fighters were able to manufacture good submachine guns [1] by the hundreds [2] while under heavy surveillance by ze Germans. The Mark III Sten can apparently be built in just four hours in a typical machine shop. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sten https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sten [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bror_With https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bror_With
- Zancarius 10y agoI'm not terribly surprised. Submachine guns, being pure blow back firearms, are probably among the simplest to make with the most difficult component in the manufacturing process being the barrel. Even the bolt would be relatively simple given its fixed firing pin, provided it's been appropriately heat-treated, and everything else is just a matter of springs, stamping (or pipes), or welding. I agree with you, though. "Danger-hyping" seems to ignore the fact that in nearly all cases, many of these weapons aren't new technologies. Modern techniques and tools may make it easier (or faster), and certainly new technologies (like drones) expose us to additional risks (but RC aircraft have been around for decades). It's a trade off we'll always face.
- lifeformed 10y agoThis may be a naive question, but why is the barrel the hardest part to make? It looks the most geometrically simple part to make. Does it require a very high degree of precision?
- CapitalistCartr 10y agoYes, plus making twisted landings is tough. Akin to threading the inside of a pipe.
- Someone 10y agoWikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rifling https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rifling
- wrong_variable 10y agoIts seems like a PR piece to push for money into the military industrial complex. Make shift weapon can be built out of anything almost anywhere - they are a symptom - not a cause :: angry people -> weapons -> people die The question is what desperation is driving these people to build these make shift weapon - just like my kitchen knife will switch to a weapon under the right circumstances - what is driving these people to turn their mobile phones into missiles ?
- sandworm101 10y agoI'm calling shenanigans on the first paragraph and the pic. >>they use an explosive charge at the bottom of a pipe to hurl a propane cylinder That doesn't look like a pipe. That looks like a piece of a field artillery barrel. The walls are at least two inches thick, and steel. Nobody makes "pipe" so small with walls that thick. A charge sufficient to throw that projectile that distance would shatter anything deserving of the label 'pipe'. We are looking at a piece of artillery perhaps cut down, a "sawed off" howitzer. And am I seeing a slight taper? Pipe is always strait. Perhaps this is less an improvised weapon and more improvised ammo for an actual artillery piece.
- Aelinsaar 10y agoIt would be funny, if it weren't a major publication. We could call it a "Howie", and a have a laugh. Now we're all faced with yet another ugly incarnation of Brandolini's Law.
- gonzo 10y ago> Nobody makes "pipe" so small with walls that thick. nobody: http://specialtypipe.com/home/products/heavy-wall-seamless/ http://specialtypipe.com/home/products/heavy-wall-seamless/ nobody at all: http://www.steeltube.sk/zelpo/vyrobky.nsf/Tab1UK?OpenPage http://www.steeltube.sk/zelpo/vyrobky.nsf/Tab1UK?OpenPage found in < 30 seconds via Google.
- sandworm101 10y agoYes. None of those are close to that in the pic. That chart doesn't even come close, with a max wall diameter of 16m, probably less than half that of the "pipe" in the pic.
- known 10y ago"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." --George Bernard Shaw
- ZoeZoeBee 10y agoWho am I supposed to be rooting for in the article? Besides the title nowhere do they make mention of this commercially available kit, it reads as DARPA is looking for ideas from people on how to make improvised devices from commercially available materials, I presume this is in effort to provide metrics to track and counter measures.
- ourmandave 10y agoThe Texas plumber's pickup truck being used by ISIS all makes sense now. http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-12-15/how-texas-plumbers-truck-wound-isis-hands http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-12-15/how-texas-plumbers-tru... It was filled with old water heaters bound for Syria! (I did not see that coming...)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- hodgesrm 10y agoThe picture at the beginning of the article brings back memories. I was about 400 yards down the street when the RAF bombed the US Air Forces Europe (USAFE) HQ building on Ramstein Air Base in 1981. The explosives were packaged into 2 propane tanks hidden in a VW Bus that the terrorists parked in front of the HQ. It went off at about 7:30am in the morning and left a real mess. Amazingly nobody was killed. What's interesting is that only one of the propane tanks actually exploded. The other tank was blown through the side of the building, leaving a round hole on the left side of the building entrance between two blown out windows. (See picture: [1]) I remember standing in front of the building later and wondering what that hole was. We were told later that the tank contained about 35kg of explosives. If it had detonated it would have destroyed most of that wing of the building. Propane tanks packed with explosives are fearsome weapons. [1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aftermath_of_the_1981_Red_Army_Faction_bombing.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aftermath_of_the_198...
- jdeibele 10y agoHad to click on the link because I was trying to figure out why the Royal Air Force was bombing the US Air Force ... Am not familiar with RAF for Red Army Faction.
- Animats 10y agoPeople have been making improvised big bangs and hurling explosives in the general direction of the enemy for a long time. Progress will be when they get guidance systems that can hit what they aim at. That's been the big advance in high-end military technology. The bangs aren't bigger, but they're on target much more often.