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$96 3D-printed rocket that recalculates its mid-air trajectory using a $5 sensor
- lukan 7mo agoSo 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.
- throwaway290 7mo agoInsanity. Airbus fighter jets, open-source rockets on github...
- RobotToaster 7mo agoCan't wait for the open source fighter jet.
- abhikul0 7mo agoClawjet, secured with sandboxing, bring your own SKILLs.
- throwaway290 7mo agothis is not funny yall!
- mschuster91 7mo agoJust 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-20-km-range/ https://hackaday.com/2026/03/12/open-source-radar-has-up-to-...
- dalelux9196 7mo agothat's lit
- nutjob2 7mo agoAirbus has been in the defense industry for a long time. And the deadliest weapons in war today are repurposed toys.
- mikkupikku 7mo agoStraight 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!)
- codethief 7mo agoAs the YouTube comments say: > This guy really wants that defense contract.
- roysting 7mo agoThey may just give it to him to buy him. It’s the first stage of neutralizing the peasantry of rebellious thoughts against the aristocracy.
- Mizza 7mo agoThis is bonkers. Video on GitHub: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDO2EvXyncE 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.
- mikkupikku 7mo ago> 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.
- radialstub 7mo ago> 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.
- roysting 7mo ago[flagged]
- einpoklum 7mo agoI 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 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.
- randomNumber7 7mo ago> 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
- Xmd5a 7mo ago> Description: Space echoes like an immense tomb, yet the stars still burn. Why does the sun take so long to die?
- pjc50 7mo agoTranslation: everyone should be able to shoot down an airliner, not just nations.
- PowerElectronix 7mo agoI mean, if we already "trust" nations with that power...
- MagicMoonlight 7mo agoBe 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.
- redgridtactical 7mo agoThe 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.
- mikkupikku 7mo agoIt'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.
- jeffbee 7mo agoPeople 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.
- dw_arthur 7mo ago
- tzury 7mo agoGiven 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-Tracking-System https://github.com/novatic14/Distributed-Camera-Node-Trackin...
- chewbacha 7mo agoSounds a lot more like a missile than a rocket.
- mikkupikku 7mo agoThe HN headline is very euphemistic, but his own published materials aren't. He's openly saying it's a missile.
- alansaber 7mo agoKid knows how to advertise
- amelius 7mo agoYes to three-letter agencies.
- roysting 7mo agoI 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.
- jofzar 7mo agoGod, I feel like I am going to be on a list after clicking that link. The future is scary
- roysting 7mo agoWhat 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.
- realo 7mo agoBut in Canada we ... Oh shit. You're right.
- nbernard 7mo ago> 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!
- doodlebugging 7mo agoBut 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.
- niemandhier 7mo agoA 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.
- mikkupikku 7mo agoMANPADS 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.
- tamimio 7mo ago>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.
- jacquesm 7mo agoYou 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.
- tamimio 7mo agoThat'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 https://youtu.be/K8o4afysnBg?t=766
- getcrunk 7mo agoI 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.
- stavros 7mo agoIsn'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.
- lm28469 7mo agoThis 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
- nik282000 7mo agoRight 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.
- mirekrusin 7mo agoJohn Connor.
- neatze 7mo agoMany 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 https://www.youtube.com/@LafayetteSystems is similar project, also by actual defense contractor, and less opensource.
- mikkupikku 7mo agoMANPADS 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.
- mothballed 7mo agohttps://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2332g 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.
- charcircuit 7mo agoSo design a system for launching test vehicles?
- 7mo ago
- isoprophlex 7mo agoThis 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...
- icegreentea2 7mo agoYeah, this current project uses external sensors (a camera array/grid) for guidance. He's using potassium nitrate/sugar as his rocket fuel.
- bethekidyouwant 7mo agoI believe it currently actually does nothing of the sort
- amelius 7mo agoWatch the video. He makes his own propellant.
- tamimio 7mo ago> rocket propellant You can homemade it, kno3+sugar
- hermitcrab 7mo agoYou 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).
- tamimio 7mo agoOf course yeah, not just dangerous but as you said it can be illegal, so always double check the laws or get the needed permits.
- alexnewman 7mo agoSo 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
- holografix 7mo agoFascinating, 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?
- planerde 7mo ago[dead]
- tamimio 7mo agoGlad 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.
- planerde 7mo ago[dead]
- fph 7mo agoSo basically a homing missile?
- relaxing 7mo agoI’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?
- kuberwastaken 7mo agoThis is the coolest thing I've seen all week, possibly this month
- systima 7mo agoImpressive! Well done
- phplovesong 7mo agoIts 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.
- stuckkeys 7mo agoThe budget is not the issue...the idiots running things behind that budget are the problem.
- tzury 7mo agoThere 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 https://youtu.be/DDO2EvXyncE [2] https://youtu.be/DDO2EvXyncE?t=280 https://youtu.be/DDO2EvXyncE?t=280 [3] https://openrocket.info/ https://openrocket.info/
- tamimio 7mo agoAnd 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.
- tzury 7mo ago"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 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.19534v1 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HESA_Shahed_136 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HESA_Shahed_136
- ninjagoo 7mo ago> "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_Modern_Approach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_Intelligence:_A_Mod...
- Acquireyet 7mo ago[flagged]
- kikkia 7mo agoReally 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
- MarkusWandel 7mo agoIt 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.
- nekusar 7mo agoAnd what this misses is with his other repo https://github.com/novatic14/Distributed-Camera-Node-Tracking-System 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.
- bethekidyouwant 7mo agoCan I really put up repos on GitHub that purport to do things with no demonstrable proof and have them get taken down for wrong think?
- nine-one-two 7mo agoCheck 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.
- awesomeMilou 7mo agoI like to put down peoples achievements to cope too sometimes, though usually not by insulting their code. This kid is likely only able to do what they're doing because their Mom and Dad can afford to buy them the tools (mainly a 3D printer and lots of powertools and other stuff) to live out their hobby like this. I didn't have that as a teen. But fuck me dude, even with that, he built a manpad in his garage. Like even if his code is ass, that requires drive!
- bethekidyouwant 7mo agoHe built a model rocket that fires off of his shoulder out of his home. It’s a cool project, but I think people are right to push back on its purported functionality.
- zoklet-enjoyer 7mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47370362 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47370362
- lightedman 7mo agoUhhh, 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.
- stuckkeys 7mo agoAre you afraid this person might be coming for your cake?
- clbrmbr 7mo agoI 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.
- ivanjermakov 7mo agoI 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.
- atemerev 7mo agoUnbombed people are cute.
- infinitewars 7mo agoThat'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.
- muyuu 7mo agoit's good work if it helps the right people
- K0balt 7mo agoThis 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.
- quickrefio 7mo agoVery cool project. The combination of 3D printing and low-cost sensors has really changed what's possible for experimental rocketry.
- colechristensen 7mo agoA word to the wise: don't design weapons and share them publicly on the Internet.
- peterus 7mo agoI 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.
- Steinmark 7mo ago[dead]
- jokoon 7mo agothe obvious goal of that is to help kill those iranian drones
- hermitcrab 7mo agoImpressive. 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.
- rcr-anti 7mo ago[dead]
- ralferoo 7mo agoI 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.
- ramijames 7mo agoWell that doesn't bode well for the coming world war :(
- stuckkeys 7mo agoThat is wild. Entertaining to watch.
- sy26 7mo ago> Contributors > novatic14 Alisher Khojayev > claude Claude > hobostay Qiaochu Hu I wonder how much role Claude plays in enabling the designing/building of it
- moxie1337 7mo agoCan it destroy cruise missiles?
- femto 7mo agoCheaper than Bruce Simpson's US$5000 cruise missile. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Simpson_(blogger)#DIY_Cruise_Missile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Simpson_(blogger)#DIY_Cr... The $5k cruise missile dates from 2003 and was based on a pulse jet, a bit like a GPS guided V-1.
- remarkEon 7mo agoThe kids, in fact, are alright.
- sidewndr46 7mo agoHere's a link to the actual video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDO2EvXyncE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDO2EvXyncE This appears to be flight stabilized and guided via direct command coming from the launcher. It is not an autonomous guided missile.
- throw0101d 7mo agoOn the defensive side, see perhaps this phased array radar system with a 20km range: * https://github.com/NawfalMotii79/PLFM_RADAR https://github.com/NawfalMotii79/PLFM_RADAR
- throwa356262 7mo agoWhat a time to be alive. In fact, I think I now have all I need to start a war with my neighbours.
- notlenin 7mo agoyou could have started a war with your neighbors using only sticks and stones - indeed, much of human history is people starting wars with their neighbors using weapons that we today would call primitive. But now you can start a very destructive war with your neighbors. Thanks to modern technology, you don't have to bother beating your neighbor to death with a wooden club, you now can annihilate them, and basically anything in their immediate vicinity, from a comfortable distance :D
- postalcoder 7mo agoFor the non-Americans, the modern technology you're referring to is the HOA.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 7mo agoLol!
- pif 7mo ago> you now can annihilate them [...] from a comfortable distance The problem is: they can, too.
- rainmaking 7mo agoConvenient warfare!
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- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- game_the0ry 7mo agoThis makes my inner anarchist warm and fuzzy. Bring the chaos.
- CryptoBanker 7mo agoIn the two test launches shown in the video, the "missile" doesn't fly straight nor does it demonstrate ability to be "guided" by the launcher towards any particular target. It's also incredibly slow. There are children's rocket kits that fly significantly faster than this.
- embedding-shape 7mo agoYeah, neither article nor the video itself talks about "accuracy" AFAIK, which seems like a kind of important thing in this whole concept, otherwise it's just a "horizontal rocket launcher" which is cool I guess, but not so close to a MANPAD. The video is also cut in a way so you cannot tell that the launch seems to have been a complete failure? The rocket is vertical at the last frame: https://i.imgur.com/e2Kld6I.png https://i.imgur.com/e2Kld6I.png
- palmotea 7mo ago> Yeah, neither article nor the video itself talks about "accuracy" AFAIK, which seems like a kind of important thing in this whole concept, otherwise it's just a "horizontal rocket launcher" which is cool I guess, but not so close to a MANPAD. Yeah, it seems to be trying to hew too closely to the conventions of existing missiles. A way more practical home-made "MANPAD" would probably be more like these Ukrainian drone interceptors: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/10/what-are-the-ukrainian-drone-interceptors-sent-to-counter-iranian-attacks https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/10/what-are-the-ukrain.... 200 mph and 3 mile range is not bad, and definitely better than whatever the OP is.
- nine_k 7mo agoI frankly would care little about the speed; it can always be improved with a better propellant. I would care about a cheap ability to guide the rocket. If it's there, it may be consequential for a real (para)military application. (A quadcopter is perfectly guidable, but it must be slower than a rocket, and costs more than $96.)
- giantg2 7mo ago
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- robertlagrant 7mo ago> Despite the tech-cool factor of the project, Tom's Hardware does not condone making your own weapons system at home. Not that this matters for the topic, but I don't see why people have started saying "weapons system" instead of "weapon".
- epolanski 7mo agoprice bump -> value alignment layoffs -> right sizing censorship -> content moderation tracking -> personalization secretary -> executive assistant gambling -> event contracts inflation -> price pressure protestors -> domestic terrorists bailout -> liquidity support invasion -> stabilization effort war -> special military operation war of aggression -> preventive action for national security purposes lies -> misstatements
- chronic20001 7mo agolmao so true
- tristor 7mo agoGuided missile launchers are weapons systems, because the projectile and the launcher each are a component of a complete system which requires significant technology. This is in contrast to a firearm, which has all of the technology in the gun and not the ammunition (for the most part) or more simply a knife or sword.
- robertlagrant 7mo agoI suppose I'd say: well, no, a gun's ammunition does something significant, but also even if that disambiguation were necessary in a particular circumstance, this article is not that.
- esseph 7mo ago> This is in contrast to a firearm This changed long ago. Optic, light, IR illuminator, IR pointer, NVG/thermals. The rifle or carbine is now a component of the weapon system.
- cucumber3732842 7mo agoI think with the proliferation and effectiveness of countermeasures passive target acquisition and first shot accuracy with traditional ballistic methods might be a better place to focus but I understand that's very hard to do nonprofessionally as an individual thanks to the rules and laws. On the other hand, there is a lot to be said for making them blow their $1k active countermeasures on your $500 missiles before sending a real one in to finish the job. Heck, even just forcing your adversary to treat every sky like it's hostile is worth a lot. Both approaches are clearly worthy of development.
- swiftcoder 7mo ago> $1k active countermeasures Sure you didn't forget a few zeros there bud? They are currently trying to shoot down Iranian drones with $4 million Patriot missiles
- cucumber3732842 7mo ago>Sure you didn't forget a few zeros there bud? The IR flare or 30mm bullets or whatever, not the whole system that fires it.
- swiftcoder 7mo agoThe $4 million is the sticker price of the PAC-3 payload, not the launch system (reports put the missile battery + radar setup at ~$350 million, before you load any ammo)
- Hasz 7mo agoThis is called the shot exchange problem and is a very, very active area of work.
- phkahler 7mo ago>> This is called the shot exchange problem and is a very, very active area of work. And addressing that should also bring down the defense budget. Oh wait...
- briandw 7mo agoI think this violates ITAR. You aren't allowed put a guidance system on a rocket. And even if you were allowed to do it for your own fun/education, you certainly aren't allowed to provide instructions to foreign entities about how it do it.
- mothballed 7mo agoIt's life imprisonment just to possess a launcher (not even the rocket) that is intended to launch a rocket/missile that guides towards an aircraft. And the guy has another youtube short where he explicitly says the intended guidance system is cameras that update the location of a missile and then he shows a real drone and also the emblem of an aircraft as intended targets for this guidance system, while also calling it a MANPADS launcher. That's before you even get to ITAR. Those of us who have seen people get nailed to the wall for having a almost to scale picture of a machinegun part on a piece of metal, or people convicted of possessing rocket launchers because the ATF put an entirely different gun inside of an deactivated tube and claims it is a rocket launcher because the ATF's own gun could fire inside of it, are watching this with our jaws dropped because we've seen that even bad faith representation of intent that were so much looser than this end in serious convictions.
- rpcope1 7mo agoThat man must really hate his dog. I'm sure there's some ATF agents just salivating to Waco this guy.
- thunfischbrot 7mo ago"This guy 100% must be in Ukraine. It would be one of the few places in the world where you can feel relatively safe right now to not just design but build and launch and even better, publish documentation on the web of you doing such. Surely there is NO WAY person is in any other country." looks at his github see's he is a US college student Yeah he's likely going to jail.
- rithdmc 7mo ago
- Hasz 7mo agoRegardless of whether this actually works (I have my doubts, but also understand it might be difficult to get range time on a device like this :)), it exposes a fundamental issue with arms control today. Small firearms are hundreds of years old. Drones have been commercially available for many years and are easily modifiable into something that is 80% as good as what is currently being fielded in Ukraine. It is not technically feasible to restrict someone from assembling basic, non-firearm-specific components to build a firearm. In the US, there is an increasing effort at the state level to serialize, restrict, and document individual firearm parts. However, an 80% good barrel can be fabricated at home, a 100% as good receiver can be printed on any recent 3D printer, and the rest of the parts (bolt, trigger assembly, etc) can be designed around easy home fabrication (see FGC-9). There is no practical way to trace, regulate, or stop behavior. It isn't possible to restrict someone from building a capable drone either. The firmware is opensource, the parts can be ordered from almost any marketplace, and an energetic payload can easily be made by any amateur chemist from chemicals in any hardware or camping store. EW is often touted as a solution, but is frequently beaten by tethered drones. Cheap COTS IMUs are getting good enough to provide surprisingly accurate short-term INS, to say nothing of autonomous systems that need no external input past initial targeting. I personally think this is a far bigger risk than most countries realize, largely because they are 10-15 years behind the technology. I believe this will force most governments into spending an order of magnitude more to defend their institutions at every level, not just core government security. At least in the US, these threat vectors will absolutely be used to justify intrusions into civil liberties, but no amount of infringement will be able to even partially mitigate these threats. I think this should start to play out over the next 5-10 years.
- idiotsecant 7mo agoI am certainly pro T2A but your argument doesn't hold - laws to regulate arms are not effective only in a binary way - if they reduce the number of arms they are doing what they say on the tin. Whether we should be trying to regulate arms is another issue.
- mothballed 7mo agoObama and Biden were the best gun salesman the USA has had in awhile. It's not clear they reduce the number of arms, depending on the culture. In USA culture we've seen the number of arms in civilian hands expand even as regulations increase.
- bparsons 7mo agoWe might want to prepare ourselves for the fact that the Strait of Hormuz might not be reopened to US traffic any time in the near future.
- swiftcoder 7mo agoWhen everyone started working on 3D-printed guns, I was sitting here thinking that if it comes to actual revolution, one is going to need anti-tank/anti-air a whole lot more than (relatively easy to acquire) small arms... Nice to see movement on this front
- ericmay 7mo agoIn the American context, hopefully it never comes to an actual revolution, because life for everyone will be much, much worse with little prospect of anything being better afterward. We should do what we can to avoid one, especially because while it's fun to fantasize about your side being the one to start a revolution, there's no reason to think that the other side won't also think the same way and maybe they'll beat your side and make your life really, really awful. Secondarily, there's a lot to say about anti-tank and anti-air power in the context of a "revolution". Most of it is pure fantasy including the idea that 3D printed missiles are going to start striking US strike aircraft at 40k feet in the equally absurd fantasy that those aircraft are going to just be bombing American cities and towns and countrysides. It's really just pure Internet-driven fantasy to think that these scenarios are plausible or the least bit desirable in any fashion.
- harimau777 7mo agoIn order for that to happen, there has to be a way for regular people to live good lives without needing a revolution. Unfortunately, the Epstein class has and is doing everything in their power to get rid of those alternatives.
- pjc50 7mo agoAmerica is not going to have a Tahrir Square. It just about managed Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter.
- pasquinelli 7mo agono one knows.
- the__alchemist 7mo agoI will be a negative yancy, and regurgitate things from the previous thread in combination with my pattern-matching brain and experience with making UAS firmware/hardware etc. Cool project, but this is the 1% of the work that's required to get an initial platform in place. It cannot intercept an airborne target, and it will take the rest of the 99% of the work on testing, refining guidance/propulsion/sensors etc, finding and fixing errors, finding and fixing incorrect assumptions that will lead to re-building various subsystems etc. Another way of phrasing it is that this is a cargo cult MANPADS.
- rithdmc 7mo agoA slingshot is a MANPADS. It's not a very good one, but it's portable, and an air defense system. The Fliegerfaust was a manpads, and it just yeeted a few tubes into the air.
- bitwize 7mo agoAnd this is why it will soon be a felony to possess hollow cylinder CAD or CNC files in the state of Washington.
- jamesvzb 7mo ago[flagged]
- tcherasaro 7mo agoThis guy is so preoccupied with whether or not he COULD manufacture his own guided missile, he didn’t stop to think if he SHOULD. Of course he could, anyone can these days. So the most important question is the latter.
- bluGill 7mo agoIf he can get a good cheap design to Ukraine - without Russia getting a hold of it - he should.
- nntwozz 7mo agoI expect the Yautja to file a patent infringement.
- 7e 7mo agoA prototype without an explosive warhead? Congrats on doing the easy bits.
- throwaway290 7mo agowhy? what's happening with the world?
- DHolzer 7mo agoi don't like the framing of $96 that pops up with this topic. There are so many reasons why the pricing point is completely irrelevant. Yet it frames it as if it were a similarly helpful option to fpv drones for the underdog nation - It's not, nor would it be if it were $9.60 or $0.96. This launcher has not even hit a PoC state - to mention the production cost of the prototype at this point is an extremely weak talking point - it means nothing.
- SunshineTheCat 7mo agoWhenever I see something like this it reminds me of the Demolition Ranch YouTube channel, one of my all time favorites. It will be missed. :(
- GuestFAUniverse 7mo agoBut do the computers have age verification? /s
- jmyeet 7mo agoI find how technology changes warfare to be fascinating. Usually the impact isn't fully predicted beforehand. The American Civil War was defined by being the first large-scale war fought with accurate long range rifles and the casualties reflect that, being higher than any subsequent war America has been in (600k+). WW1 was defined by artillery and the machine gun. In many ways, the horrors of WW1 are actually worse than WW2. WW2 was defined by tanks, air power and aircraft carriers. Although, interestingly, the concept of mobile warfare goes back to the Mongols. Vietnam was defined by asymmetric warfare and the inability for a vastly superior, imperial power to win a land war against a vastly inferior but motivated foe. One of the more significant inventions in military technology was the AK-47 (named because it was invented in 1947 btw). This became the tool of choice for insurgencies everywhere for decades. It's cheap and highly reliable. And this brings us to Afghanistan, which interestingly is called the graveyard of empires. Through a sequence of events the USSR invaded in 1979 and quickly captured Kabul, installing a puppet government, and then weathering a decade of insurgency that resulted in defeat (sound familiar?). The the defining weapon was the Stinger should-mounted SAM [1]. Why? Because it devastated helicopters that the USSR was dependent on in a highly mountainous region. In the 1980s, the Stinger launcher cost $30-40k and that completely changed warfare. We're now firmly in the drone era. This really began in the 2000s when fairly expensive drones became the tool of choice for the US to assassinate people. A reaper drone [2] still costs $20M+. But that has all changed with how cheap commercial drones have become and the crucible for that change is of course Ukraine. We've seen all sorts of military uses of drones, from as simple as a commercial drone silently dropping hand grenades on Russian troops in trenches to more sophisticated attacks that make it virtually impossible for the Russian Navy to operate in the theater. And now we're seeing it in Iran where the US, despite spending $1 trillion every year on the military has no answer to Iran's Shahed drones, that cost probably $10-20k each and Iran can produce thousands of them every month. These will only get cheaper. It's fair to say that drones will impact every conflict going forward. The US has sought Ukraine's innovations against Russian drones, specifically the bullet drone [3]. So up until now it requires a state actor to make a shoulder-mounted SAM like the Stinger but with advances like the submission, how will the world change if any bunch of insurgents with $100 in chips and sensors and a 3D printer can manufacturer a nearly comparable weapons system? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIM-92_Stinger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIM-92_Stinger [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-9_Reaper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-9_Reaper [3]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/10/what-are-the-ukrainian-drone-interceptors-sent-to-counter-iranian-attacks https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/10/what-are-the-ukrain...
- djmips 7mo agoI feel like this has been available since forever - it's just been sitting there and any reason it hasn't happened is self censorship.
- Boulos00191 7mo ago[flagged]
- Marcelo_Freir12 7mo ago[dead]
- goatyishere25 7mo ago[flagged]