Rate.
Zig Forums designs weapons
Hunter Morales
Other urls found in this thread:
ukrspecsystems.com
google.com
google.com
popularmechanics.com
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
twitter.com
Kayden Parker
I got a better weapon.
r8
Xavier Williams
Its brilliant but what about using helium filled reflective party balloons in large numbers to overwhelm the target so long as the wind holds up? Or just use a commercially available drone/quad copter?
Classic but replacing the brick with two D cell batteries will be less conspicuous and can even be used in a sturdy torch that can serve as another weapon.
Clearly the best:
R8?
Noah Ramirez
This is basically a commercial drone, except with custom design. Quadcopters have 100-ish kilometer range at best, that's not gonna cut it if you intend to bomb seaborne carrier group. Wind propulsion alone makes it impossible to aim for the enemy, and if you just gonna launch balloons with nothing on them then nobody gonna fucking care, they'll get completely ignored.
Justin Stewart
What reason is there to use helium instead of hydrogen? The latter is easy to get, cheap, and virtually unlimited. Especially at sea. Who cares if the things blow up? They're decoys anyway.
Thomas Hughes
Caleb Hall
As if kraut would know anything about aircraft design.
Parker Edwards
Why use bombs if it's designed to be disposable anyway? Just have it run into things and explode like a rocket.
Joseph Campbell
Because 3 booms are better than 1 kablooey.
Julian Hill
Rockets are expensive because they're 95% propulsion system and 5% warhead, but the entire thing is non-reusable. Non-reusable bomber drones will also be expensive. I suppose since you can make a drone like this for something like $500 and that's comparable to the cost of the bomb it would deliver, reusability wouldn't very significantly impact the costs as it's already over 50 times cheaper than conventional homing missiles. Still, having them return home is more efficient, and the only two components that could be saved by removing return functionality are the sleds and the bomb release mechanism - not particularly significant.
Connor Evans
Actually bombs like this go for something like $100.
Liam Hernandez
>Joint project by Russia, Sweden and Finland=Costs a fraction of the F-35, is comparatively easy+cheap to maintain and can mount both NATO and Russian weaponry
Adrian Walker
...
Jackson Nguyen
If your issue with rockets is the fuel requirement just put wing on it and be done with it. Why bother recovering such a shitty launcher?
No, you'll spend a lot of money on the camera which you don't need on a missile. You can just have 10 unarmed camera models overseeing as 1000 blind ones attack. No need to combine two distinct roles.
Matthew Richardson
Fuel is the cheap part, the expensive part is the mechanical and electronical crap inside of it that makes the missile maneuver and directly hit the target at mach 3. I agree that at this price point recovery doesn't really matter all that much, but if it does it for free then why the fuck not.
>you don't need a camera on a missile inb4 it's not a camera
Just when I thought you said the stupidest thing ever, you just keep talking.
Nathaniel Brown
With that much effort you may as well make a proper drone bomber. Here are some design ideas for that:
-Detachable wings + tail
-Large bomb bay with adjustable hard points/deployment systems
-Mini turbo-prop for high octane, high speed, high altitude, high maneuver true americanism
-Guided munitions for long range deployment
-Catapult capable + parachute for fast launch/recovery when needed.
-Shark style camo (top color, bottom color, mixed mid color) depending on environment and operating altitude
ukrspecsystems.com
link related is something to aim for, but with more capacity in terms of torque/horsepower, speed, payload, fuel capacity, and signal distance. Unless of course you want it to be a pre-programmed fire and forget drone that goes to target via gps and returns to a specified location.
Also some notes on the flaws of your design.
The wing would need to be much wider and more narrow in proportion to the propulsion system, think something like glider vs interceptor jet plane, jet plane can move more air faster over its small wing area than a glider can over its bigger wings in the same amount of time, this is due to the thrust.
The larger swept wings would catch more air and generate more upwards force for less forward thrust than narrow wings.
The same can be said for your control surfaces, too small in relation to size and speed.
Also it would need a central fuselage, or central connecting point for stability and strength.
The wing also should not be a half crescent, the optimal wing shape should instead be an elongated tear-drop shape, with more round mass on top with a mildly flat bottom.
The flaps should also be inside of the wing to improve aerodynamics.
The craft should also have a bomb bay, as externally attached munitions will increase drag and potentially weigh/pull down the craft.
Also go for gas powered, it's more efficient and cost effective than even the most powerful batteries in the same space.
Add an actual tail like you see on airliners, it helps with stabilization + additional yaw and elevation flaps without have to bank the entire craft to change direction.
Isaiah Cooper
Also as an afterthought.
Take some design notes from tried and true aircraft, F-16 for example could be considered an excellent all-around fighter craft, while the F-35 is a fucking shitty deathtrap.
Copy the good, disregard the bad
profit.
Ryan Hall
That'll make it expensive and defeat the purpose. It's designed to be cheap, not hyper-efficient. Not everything needs to be pimped out so hard it looks like mall ninja came up with it. Also at that point taking it out with a missile or gattling gun becomes a very good deal and easy to accomplish too.
Swept wings only make sense at near transsonic speeds; supersonic speeds command delta wings. Low speed aircraft do best with straight wings, simply because they're cheaper and tougher and the losses are not detectable. High aspect ratio makes good glider wings but the toughness requirement is far beyond of what styrofoam can afford, and it's not a glider so who the fuck cares. Control surfaces of that size are OK, it's not aerobatics craft so it barely needs these, slew rate of a few degrees per second is fine; the upshot is that they can be powered by a tiny servo. And gasoline motors of that size are not nearly as efficient as they need to be and are huge pain in the ass to deal with, that's why most modelists ditched them at the drop of a hat for electric motors. The body doesn't need stabilizers, it's not piloted by a human and computer doesn't give a shit about how often and how much correction does it needs to make. Flaperons do all these jobs just fine and you don't need the rudder for turning.
That thing is not a fighter and not even a piloted craft so none of these apply.
Ethan Anderson
Anyway conventional aircraft are designed for efficiency and safety, not cost savings. Obviously they can't afford any advice to a craft that prioritizes unit cost above all else.
Joseph Hughes
I understand full well the cheaper than dirt ethic you're going for here, but with only two flaperons and binary wings won't it be way too easy to destabilize? Even if the AA ammo spent on it is a huge waste in cost-effectiveness, one forced by the danger of every drone possibly causing write-off levels of damage, it may better if the craft can get pinholed and still fly to its target, or be too small to pinhole in the first place. Having to drop the bomb is also a complication.
Why not model a Mk. 2 around an SS.10 missile clone? Commercial model rocket body or a template copied off one, with styrofoam or hard plastic struts connecting to spoiler wings. You have something a little more robust and difficult to hit than a broad flat wing. Furthermore, the entire central body can be used for explosive load instead of a small bomb. The warhead can be enlarged into a HEAT-FRAG design, with a frontal shaped charge and a sheath of high explosive shrapnel that will go through the styro spoilerons like a hot knife and cause further collateral damage, causing every aircraft that got so much as a paint scratch from the frag component to be a maintenance write-off.
The difficulties here are in getting enough cruise range with the reduced surface area- will a high power propeller be able to take a quad box wing to a stable speed? The Lerche round ducted fan VTOL works fine in simulators, but that was a long full size aircraft with twin propellers instead of a simpler spoileron pusher design, so maybe the Lerche would be better to copy?- and in making the propmissile 'smart' enough with limited insurgent budget & insight to jink out of the way of predicted fire, since while more (barely) resistant to grazing fire it still shouldn't take a hit, as well as getting it to nose in on the target properly through photo recognition. And the gyro stabilizing, and the spoiler programming. Resisting its own speed, also. It's potentially better than the foam wing and still constructionally about as cheap, but presents greater initial programming and material experimentation hurdles.
Samuel Evans
couldn't you drop it out of a cessna at max altitude? Turning it into a vaguely powered glide bomb should improve the effective range by quite a bit.
Jaxon Robinson
Yes, but that makes it a Cessna dropped semi-glide bomb and not an autonomous suicide drone/cheapo styrofoam HEAT-FRAG missile. Like an image recognition targeted fire-and-forget Fritz X. At that point, you should go back to having a high power model rocket engine for final approach speed instead of wasting time, weight and resources with a cruise optimized motor-propeller layout.
Though, while we're on the topic of German glide bombs, might I suggest the revival of the BV 246 concept? Clean aerodynamics, passive guidance, and (intended) radar seeking guidance design. It was similarly made of ersatz materials, though stiffer stuff than styrofoam. Combine it with the intended BV 143 concept of a high-speed waterline dash under rocket power and you have a winner. Or just make it float on the waterline as a torpedo after shedding its wings.
In fact, attempt to make it function as an above-waterline skimmer for propulsion efficiency by program, but make it capable of an effective underwater approach just in case so you don't have the problem the BV 143 had with maintaining the 'right' altitude band. Solid rocket motors burn in whatever you stick them in and don't need anything else unless you're launching them from a submarine, in which case you use a compressed air kick to get them far enough to avoid damage to the launch tube.
Lucas Hernandez
So we're going for something specifically anti-ship? In that scenario wouldn't you get much more range, and at least the potential for, a larger payload out of an ersatz guided torpedo than you would out of a garage-built glide bomb?
Jacob Lopez
Specifically is a strong word, I'm just spitballing. So how are you supposed to deliver the ersatz torpedo, then? It's moving through denser matter now, you'll have to have gotten closer in your rickety ship rather than being able to deploy from high angle standoff range as an unpowered projectile. A styrofoam/other cheap body torpedo is a completely different animal from the original styrowing drone concept of OP.
Of course, you can just build one cheapo missile body type for both purposes, with two sets of programming for glider drop or torpedo launch and a modular backend that can accept a rocket motor, prop engine, or nothing as necessary and as supplies allow.
Asher Adams
Want a fun idea to play with in your designs?
Tada, anti-radar material. It can't be applied as a coating, it has to be the primary material.
Camden Myers
Oh also, pick LESS dense materials. I know its not easy, but try and stick on the lighter side. Keep in mind that glitter is shredded aluminum, the shit is heavvy.
Thomas Ortiz
For the cost of what your going to be putting into it and it's intended purpose (which OP did not specify in the OP post) you would be lucky to get it to even take off, let alone carrying a payload or flying for longer than half an hour.
It would be a total waste of time to completely disregard efficiency in exchange for cheapness, if that's your goal then take a firecracker to a paper plan and have at it.
Nothing about my advice or optimal design would be niggered out, my design would practical in every way his shitwing would not be. It's not meant to be a fighter, it is far too small to even consider combating hostile aircraft. It would simply be a craft that can do what OP's design was intended to do (deliver a payload) and do it with much more precision, his faggoty little pop rock dispenser would be a one and done, and not even done very good at that. With my design you could have the potential to customize payload, by either making them bigger, or more numerous, thus making it equivalent to several shitwings. His is a spray and pray, which for the overall cost of a fleet of them, youd better pray hard. With mine you would have a one time cost of the entire craft and any subsequent fuel and munition costs. You could also count on it actually hitting its mark because it would be a true to its name drone.
If gas engines are as bad as you say then you could add a jet engine or two, that would more than make up for and shortcomings in power and efficiency.
Also lets take a look at the avionics involved, Cameras? cameras ain't cheap hombre, those fucking things are gonna cost you mucho monies each time one bites the dust (which with the intended purpose, will be often). And controlled by a computer? with what program? Are you going to take months of your precious time to learn and program the coding for this guidance system?
And what about it getting shot down you say? Well if the likelihood for getting shot down was certain, obviously it wouldn't be cost effective, just as it would be for literally anything else, and if there is a high chance of running into a C-RAM or missiles then you must be up to some really sneaky breaki shit in the first place, which I would not recommend, also, why would they waste millions of dollars worth of munition and hardware to prevent marginal damages?
With my design you wouldn't even need to worry about that, why? Simple, it wouldn't fuck around with the intention of wasting the enemies ammo, because I assure you, they will ALWAYS have more.
With my design you can paint it for any AO, you can paint it with anti thermal/radar coating if that's your deal, not to mention that it can fly as high or low as you could reasonably need, and if it starts taking fire it can dip the fuck out in a hurry, plus with guided munitions, tv or otherwise, it wouldn't have to be within the effective range of any projectile weapons.
Nigger if that's your goal, then attaching a bomb to the bottom is fucking dumb, if you want a suicide drone then you need to be looking into something entirely different. With the wing setup you have designed a glider/bomber, neither of which sounds like what you want. Also try not to forget that C-RAMs can take out super sonic missiles, a swarm of tard gliders with meth bottles taped to the bottom would be fucking fish food. If you want a suicide drone then you would be better off building a one shot one way rockets, and lots of them. There is a reason modern missiles are long sleek and narrow with relatively small control surfaces, it's because they're not for fucking around.
Jacob Gutierrez
Also a side note, why are unguided missiles so unpopular? If you have good data on the windspeed ect, it is really easy to shoot unguided rockets with a high amount of precision, over long distances. If you know how to stage the rockets properly, a very short horizon pass is even possible.
Rocket artillery is cheap, and if its effectiveness is improved, you could used it for area denial, kind of like long range mortars, but better. You could keep miles of land suppressed for a very low cost.
Joshua Butler
This already exits as a switchblade drone.
Mason Jenkins
you literally answered your own question
Caleb Bennett
Not entirely what I'm thinking of. Think something along the lines of F-22 fucked a drone whos grand daddy was was a P-47.
A drone with either a jet or a supercharged prop, that has a bomb bay for holding munition to make it more sleek and aerodynamic/anti-radar, can takeout and land from any public street, and can be packed up in 10 minutes and put into someones trunk, while a faggot in the back seat with a joystick and a VR headset drops his hot load all over faggots 3 counties over.
Feel me?
Jacob Howard
How good would a swarm of drones that spray chaff at random altitudes and locations be?
Julian Russell
I'm rapidly getting out of my depth here, but would it be possible/practical/sane to build a hybrid glidebomb torpedo, that was dropped from an aircraft, gliding for several miles before it hits the water, drops the wings, and engages the propeller? I know that torpedo bombers haven't been fashionable for a while now, but that's got to be simpler and cheaper than trying to build a budget basement supersonic ASM in your garage with hand tools.
Evan Cruz
Phalanx have never been tested against anything going faster than transonic targets.
And for a very good reason: it can't hit those reliably (it's effective range is 1500m = it has a 4s window to shoot a transonic target, which is barely enough to get it to shoot at it and is questionable whether or not it would succeed without a lucky hit neutralizing the warhead somehow).
There is a reason why everyone else has set 30mm caliber as the minimum for a CIWS…
Daniel Hernandez
You just replied to the OP. He's the only ruskie flag in the thread.
But that's the point. It goes over its target, wastes a large amount of highly expensive munitions slicing through its too-soft and largely redundant wing body, and/or drops a pop rock that turns multi million dollar planes and decks into operational writeoffs even if the damage is mostly minor or cosmetic. The construction of a properer plane may be an increase in cost without an incredible increase in dividends, and you don't want the drone to be more than a one and done, because that means having it either return to field or having it picked up by a ground based cell for return or relaunch at another location, either of which potentially compromises the locations to modern shock-and-awe smart bombing. You do not want to to try to recover your insurgent drone bomber, let alone have to do so due to sunk costs.
Then again, that's assuming the power against the insurgency is smart enough to actually find and keep track of these wee drone bombers. I will not claim to be an expert on the subject, or even a novice, but maximum damage within a certain range of obligatory disposability seems key.
Yes, I'm sure with modern megafucked logistics, the ammo will be infinite and the bomber won't get through because reasons unless they make a mini F-16 or a teardrop flying manta ray which will somehow be less ultimately vulnerable to CWIS BRRRRRT or missiles than a styroglider of redundant size and lift.
You're correct regarding a more refined body shape being ideal, if the materials and expertise are available. It should not, however, have a bomb bay, as that entails additional mechanical whatsits; if you want to reduce drag for this intentionally simple design, then do sunken ordnance mounts with a standardized external bomb casing for underfilled payloads. Bombs are half in, half outside the craft body. No bay doors required. Drop them straight off the pylons and you're done.
Because planes are fiddly things and there are regulations in a modern air force, like 'don't fly the plane if it has (possible) holes in it' or 'don't let an unknown ordnance dispenser slam dunk a 20 pound or heavier mystery bomb in the vicinity of our million dollar boondoggle machines.' Who knows what could be inside? A HEAT warhead that'll punch a plane's fiddly bits in half on direct impact? Frag to fuck the whole deck into maintenance check land? Pure high explosive load in a thin steel casing that might pothole the deck however minorly with a tidy shockwave? Thermobaric canister fun times, because if you can stuff that in a ten pound RPG you can stick it in a larger air dropped dumb bomb? Any of the above with daisy cutter fusing to make sure it dets at just the right height?
That depends on if you want to drop vertically, strike horizontally, or do a fancy horizontal approach-vertical attack system. It's a matter of what your garage techs can program and what you specifically need.
What the OP designed. I, if you would proofread the posts further up, was proposing a quad winged spoiler-missile modeled after the SS.10, designed to explode on impact. I then replied to bonganon regarding a passive homing glider design possibility, also designed for direct impact, and its not being the same in design needs as a powered land or sea launched system.
That C-RAM ammo that surely won't be spent, because the threat isn't worth it, except now it is? Mixed messages here, user. But yes, hucking extended range unguided or mildly improved guidance model rockets full of chaff confetti does sound like a nice idea for ammo wastage and smokescreening. Then you can send the actual payload missiles/teardrop microbombers to do damage to the carrier group.
sMaRT ORdNanCe
FuTURe wEApONS
L O C K HE E B
I imagine it'd be as feasible as the system to mechanically or explosively shed the glide wings on impact or time delay would be. And as feasible as getting a garage sonar seeking element would be. You'd have to answer those variables to know.
Jackson Anderson
Forget chaff, radar corner reflectors and luneberg lenses are where it's at.
Jackson Rodriguez
Looks really nice, it's shape got that 60s-esque retrofuturistic rounded reflective vibe.
Jaxon Johnson
You need "smart" devices to compensate how retarded everyone is.
Ethan Collins
Because it isn't actually easy to shoot unguided rockets with precision, let alone high amounts of it.
Caleb Clark
I can be shot pretty accurately, the software exists in the commercial field already. The problem is accurate instrument data collection.
Dominic Nguyen
Nigger it's about effectiveness through costs rather than through efficiency, because high efficiency is too fucking expensive (cue diminishing returns). What's so confusing about this simple idea that you can't comprehend it after people explained it to you 3 times?
If you think an aircraft can survive getting BRRRT at you're fucking delusional.
Angel Evans
Oops, forgot the pic.
Cooper King
Well, yes. The same goes for every ballistic in existence. We have very good physics-simulating software. But that isn't applicable to the situation. Maybe in 50 years we will have physics simulators integrated into every helicopter and missile artillery that can precalculate based on the wind etc. how and where the missile will likely perform. That's when you'd have a point.
Ethan Watson
Our chairforce and navy can't even maintain their stockpiles of bombs to bomb sand niggers if they wanted to, and you think ammo just grows on trees, user?
Isaac King
It would be easier to just put a "dumb" guided system in using a cheap gyroscope to track where it's at in relation to where it should be. This can get the accuracy of impact from within a 1 mile radius to within a 5 cm radius depending on how much you want to spend on a disposable gyroscope.
David Perry
Accelerometers are cheap.
google.com
So are SBCs (single board computers)
google.com
Some SBCs go for less than $10 but a decent one for this application will probably be $30+.
Aaron Roberts
Are you sure about that?
David Morgan
What he's driving at is that any and all small arms fire is going to overpenetrate with little meaningful effect if it doesn't hit circuitry, because the material is too soft and the impact so brief and sharp that it doesn't cause longitudinal or horizontal fractures as if you just continually bend styrofoam with your hands. It's an interesting idea, at least, but would have to be tested by shooting 20mm projectiles out of a test gun at pure foam gliders of varying thickness to determine if there's any merit.
Isaac Cooper
Seems like I've found a flaw in the plan. This would both increase the probability of a hit, and the damage done by spreading the hit over a large area while reducing overpenetration.
William Garcia
And it looks like someone has already done the test.
Yes, I know that OPs drone would be flying too high for a standard shotgun to reach, but it wouldn't be flying too high for airbursting shells to reach.
Luis Flores
I'm a bird uneducated on the topic, but what sort of target identification is possible on a SBC? Are these drones just looking for a object of sufficient size of a specific color? This seems like a part of this design that is important.
Brody Gray
That depends on what kind of sensors you include.
An SBC is just a very small and cheap computer, you could use one to replace a desktop in most applications like word processing or web surfing. They're not so great at running modern AAA games but they can be used to look for specific shapes.
You'd probably want to set it to scan for a colored dot pulsing at a specific frequency and then just paint a target to make sure it only goes after what you've designated. Alternatively, you could use accelerometers and dead reckoning, or some other method. There really isn't one correct answer, the right guidance system depends on the intended role.
Luis Lopez
Flitetest.com
I would definitely go with full length flaperons. That thing could be built for like 50 dollars,less if you bought the electronics in bulk. Shit is so cheap now even with cameras and gps, get some glow engines or find a target within 50 - 60 miles.
Side note, more people should get into rc planes and drones. It is cheap and fun. You don't have to buy a dji, it's way more rewarding to build your own.
John Powell
Since these already will have a camera on these, I think that will be the main final target designator. I imagine that the paint marking the landing strip is unique enough that the SBC can recognize it. Given these things are built with a gps or solar navigation, these are meant for non line of sight use acting semi autonomously. You are very right, though. Programming would be the final step of designing this thing. I haven't been able to find any videos of lifting body rc planes of this sort of proportion, and I don't know enough about aerodynamics to determine its viability. Is there any past designs as rectangular as this thing?
Ayden Ramirez
It would improve accuracy, but not by such a magnitude. You're looking at improvements from 5 mile radius to 1 mile radius. That's because inertial systems drift (each reading produces small but persistent error and it accumulates) and practical devices drift very fast - typical consumer MEMS accelerometer can drift by as much as 0.5 m/s^2. You can do better if you use GPS but you can take it for granted that in a serious conflict this service wouldn't be available, not directly in vicinity of your targets anyway. It's also pretty obvious that your biggest problem is wind and you just can't sidestep it, you can't take any sort of reliable measurement in all points along the path of the projectile, hell you'd be lucky if you get any wind readings at the target ground level, you'd usually only have launch site wind readings. So if there's no wind then there's no problem, but even small winds can blow your missiles away a very significant distance.
Yep. Bullets would make tiny neat holes in it but beyond that they'd do diddly squat. You'd need to put hundreds of bullets through it before it even approaches the point where its aerodynamics significantly deteriorate, nevermind actual point of wing disintegration.
These drones are not intended to fly under 500m altitude, you'd be lucky if a single pellet could connect at that distance, but they wouldn't even fly up that high to begin with.
At that distance it's the same as getting hit directly by a 30mm shell (not nearly the same energy but just in terms of blunt damage). Which of course such drone is not intended to survive.
500 miles worth of batteries will set you back nearly 500 bucks, that's bulk of the cost.
I would give it neural network image recognition primed to recognize general ship shapes from all appropriate angles, then a simple navigation program can do the piloting and aiming. Doing this using computer vision and preprogrammed patterns is too unreliable, the enemy can dazzle-paint the ship overnight and instantly defeat all of your missiles, which'll take a lot of time to reprogram.
There really is no magic juju to making wings. A sheet of plywood can produce lift if you give it a little bit of attack angle, it's just it would also produce a lot of extra drag and will have very high stall speed. Teardrop shape simply reduces the drag, it has nothing to do with generating lift or any other aerodynamics. Lift is generated from attack angle and attack angle alone, this is why fighters use elongated symmetrical teardrop wings. Chorded wings have gradually increasing attack angle to increase lift at low speeds for a given wing area, which due to laminar drag makes it more efficient than having larger wings. And as I said earlier, plain straight wings work just fine at low speeds, they're usually tapered to reduce wingtip flexion (since it generates less lift). Swept wings help in near transsonic speeds because they increase the speed at which shockwaves form around the airfoil (air is accelerated while it passes around so it can go supersonic even if the aircraft goes subsonic). Delta wings use similar concept except they're better than swept wings at low speeds. The hard part about designing an airplane is making it as lightweight as possible for the given specs, all the aerodynamic features you see are just the result of relentless autism over perfecting the performance, if you don't care very much about having highest possible efficiency then you can just make flying bricks.
Adrian Perry
The most effective if you can weaponize….Influenza
Alexander Davis
Pistol bullets definitely don't do crap to styrofoam, I'm pretty sure it's the same story with intermediate cartridges. I'd also like to point out that my idea of a styrofoam wing was to make it 1x2 meter in size and 15 cm in thickness at the crest, so it probably wouldn't immediately disintegrate like that styrofoam glider
Justin Jackson
I'm just saying that tanks, most long-range guided missiles, etc. Rely on a fiberoptic gyroscope for distance calculation and they adjust for wind just fine, bro.
Jordan Brooks
They really don't. Submarines have the top grade accelerometers and compensation algorithms and even those drift by several dozen miles per day. Something moving as violently as a missile will also have its inertial guidance system drift violently. They wouldn't have had created GPS if they could navigate by inertial instruments alone.
Henry Johnson
Submarines don't use the same accelerometers as missile systems, move underwater, and move in slow increments that would throw off an accelerometer. It's different math, so I don't think that's a fair comparison.
Oliver Morris
Well, at least it'd boost the popularity of shotguns.
Mason Williams
Assuming it can even handle all the weight of cameras and any sort of ordinance (it can’t) you’be just built a drone that can only operate in absolute calm air where a slight breeze grounds your entire feet of useless shitfoam drones.
Lincoln Brooks
Cruise missiles like Tomahawk fly by GPS and if it's not available then its accuracy does to shit. Normal unguided missiles have literally no guidance, just some fixed stabilizer fins. The missiles that can control their own flight usually have homing warhead or GPS navigation, because inertial system alone is just not sufficient - in the 100 odd miles the missile might travel it may drift away from its intended target by as much as a mile. It's not a large fraction but it completely disqualifies it from being called "accurate", you not gonna hit a huge factory with it. To top it off, such missiles are expensive due to all the navigation and maneuvering hardware, marginal increase in accuracy is often not worth the price and you'd either go with a proper homing missile or a dumb unguided missile.
Loaded weight is about 10 kg so it works out to 4-5 kg/m^2 wing loading, cruise speed about 80 kmh, it'll do fine. It's computer controlled so it doesn't gives a shit about weather conditions or difficulty in piloting, it'll combat through any atmospheric turbulence and retarded aerodynamics. You wouldn't send it out in a thunderstorm but only because it wouldn't be able to see its targets in order to drop the bombs, and in that kind of weather its intended targets (aircraft group) wouldn't be operating anything either.
Nathan Perez
I'll check into it a little more before I make an ass of myself since you're probably right, but I remember talking with some engineers at Northrop about just that when I was an undergraduate because we had a laugh about how they pretended to run on GPS but the main navigation element was the gyroscope since it was independent of outside signals/couldn't be so easily altered. They were making bank on them at $10,000 for the "within 10 meters" units and a quarter million for the "within 5cm" units.
Zachary Young
Loaded weight is about 10 kg so it works out to 4-5 kg/m^2 wing loading, cruise speed about 80 kmh,
What size are we talking about? From your image I assumed ~40cm, wingspan. I don’t know shit about electric motors but I have a hard time believing it could get up to 80km/h
It’s still a styrofoam board essentially, any wind will blow it around, not turbulence as a plane, but actually flipping the ting upside down or throwing it in a cartwheel spin suddenly. A friend had some of those styrofoam gliders as a kid and while they had no propulsion or thrust and no mass the slightest wind would flip it just like if you threw a normal piece of sytrofoam packing in the wind.
Jaxson Torres
The gyro can only tell you the attitude, nothing else. If the rocket is blown off course by the winds or if it flies slightly sideways because thrusters and stabilizers aren't perfectly mounted, it's not gonna know. High grade accelerometers have something like 5-6 digits of precision, which is enough to clearly register your footsteps anywhere in the house. But they're not perfect and even if precision is high, the accuracy might be off, or it could be non-linear, in practice these systems are absolutely never bang-on at all times, they always have some error in measurement. So in a perfect world you just integrate your acceleration and you get your current position and speed as if you'd actually measured them. But in real life with real instruments the errors add up and your projected speed goes apeshit, and so does position. Your best bet is to do dynamic zeroing of the integrated acceleration and speed values, (you try to guess when the accelerometer is at rest so you reset acceleration to 0, eliminating accumulated error), but it's not always possible nor reliable, and you easily end up with drift fraction of over 1/100. Without such corrections, inertial systems are virtually unusable altogether.
It's 1x2 meter block cut in the curved teardrop shape. With just electric motors you could easily get up to 300 kmh but how long you will be able to fly at that speed (and how much distance can you cover) is a whole different story. Drag is a function of square of velocity - halving the speed quarters the drag and power requirements with it, so you double your flight range. Of course in real physics it's not exactly like that but factor of 1.41 of range increase for halving speed is a rule of thumb for low subsonic flight. Note that this doesn't applies to pistons and especially jets, only electric motors can maintain high efficiency in all power output ranges (through voltage adjustment).
As I said, it's computer controlled and it'll be able to simply CANCEL external attitude changing moments. That's how quadcopters and canard planes operate.
Kevin Richardson
I'm not disagreeing with your main point here but this statement is absolutely wrong. The entire purpose of a gyro is to tell how it's positioned and theoretically correct that. It specifically cannot tell altitude.
Justin Perez
Angled.
Jackson Martin
Also keep in mind that the instrument itself is never perfectly aligned, some few arcminutes of calibration angle deviation work out to pretty large position error over hundreds of miles of flight. That's why you need external markers for accurate navigation i.e. GPS and cameras.
Connor Morgan
My bad
Ian Kelly
Here is a wacky proposal, maybe we COULD just use a mortar tube.
I'm probably the only person here who could actually build something that could fly and kill.
Easton Hughes
...
Asher Phillips
Good point user.
I just got off track with some low level elitism.
Our two planes ideas are for two entirely different purposes and have completely different operational requirements.
With yours being one and done it is completely understandable to make it dirt cheap. Plus with it going on a one way trip it wouldn't require any sort of specialized avionics other than basic guidance and control systems where you could get away with electric motors/engines.
Now comparatively to my design, it would need beefed up a bit. Now with it's intended purpose being recon/harassment it would need to be all weather. This is where it would require a combustion engine as electronic motors would have a higher chance of water leaking into the engine and short circuiting it, I imagine this may be a problem even with rear facing props, although a fat glob of petroleum jelly may remedy this. Whereas with a gasoline engine it could get wet and not short circuit, especially since all the guidance/control and fixed electronics (camera) would be internal and away from the elements, especially with proper insulation. Also with it being a scoot n shoot kinda plane it would need to bug out quick after giving and taking, which is where combustion engine would excel in terms of getting to and from quickly.
Since it would be RTBing 100% more often, electric propulsion would be compromising, as the situation which this would be used, you either wouldn't have the ability to charge batteries, or simply not have the time to. With it being combustion driven you would need some quick and basic r&r before being back in action.
Of course with all that said, it would be a much more valuable plane overall as it would require more resources to manufacture and operate, along with manhours in terms of maintenance and piloting.
How would one go about mounting a camera to enable real time footage? lower FPS is acceptable but poor latency would seem fatal in my book. What ways are there to boost the power of the signal to ensure this, and are there any computer programs for this purpose?
Jacob Cooper
Last I checked mortars can't do a 300 miles flight downrange, can't put shells into targets with any degree of precision either.
Nigger, water can't short-circuit a motor, it's fully electrically isolated. Even the brushed motors - water has several orders of magnitude greater resistance so it's more like a small parasitic leak than a short circuit; they can operate perfectly well fully submerged in water.
Also, nigger, jets can't escape missiles and neither can props. If your big ass UAV presents any threat, it will be shot at, and with that size it's more likely to be a missile than minigun (neither of which it would survive).
It's not about mounting, it's about connection - you will have to use sat link, and it's all bottlenecked by its throughput. You generally wouldn't need real time feed (nor any feed at all) and just let the drone attack autonomously. Sending a signal to the satellite is not a problem - a handheld phone can do this. But it can and will be jammed and then you'll be shit out of luck, so your drone better had an ability to work autonomously; see above. As for feed compression, you use an encoder hardware compressing it down to uplink bandwidth, depending on how much of it you have available you'd have to use chroma subsampling or monochrome, interlacing, and plain compression artifacts. That, or you could send analog signal but again, it all depends on bandwidth - you'll be getting shittier blurrier image if your link is not up to the task, at some point it won't even synchronize and you'll get no discernible feed at all.
Leo Miller
With those points I should state that operationally it would only be used on land, as in not recon/harassment against naval vessels out at sea.
Also it's preferable signal range would be 100 miles, and at least 2-3x that in fuel/loiter time.
For as long as it would be in the air or on target it's unlikely jammers would effect it as by the time they get it setup the drone will be long gone, the exception to this would be if they kept a jammer constantly on, or had some kind of heads up and could activate it ahead of arrival. That of course would warrant having an auto-RTB function, or autonomous function to complete it's task then RTB.
Don't forget that it's main advantage will be speed and portability, as it will be able to be packed up and in a trunk in less than ~10 minutes, with the added security of being able to be launched and recovered at different points, with the main transport vehicle meeting it at the pre arranged landing area. Also with it's intended size it would be able to utilize most stretches of public roads, so long as they are clear of houses, and traffic for at least short periods, which would significantly decrease the risk of capture.
Lucas Reed
And if I added a parachute recovery function (slow down to just above stall speed, pop frontal parachute and the rear chute a second after) it could be recovered in nearly any open area where pinpoint accuracy of landing is either unavailable or unneeded/unwanted.
This could be good for having it recovered by a team of ghillies in a field after an op, or if you simply need to grab that shit and leave ASAP, where you wouldn't have time for a nice neat landing. Just an idea though.
Anthony Reyes
Why does the plane have an erection?
Samuel Cook
For ultra low CAS, or should I say cASS lmao.
Jack James
Neither can a flying wing with a mortar strapped to the bottom.
Charles Hill
HEAT stands for high explosive anti tank. It is designed to penetrate armor. There’s not much armor on the deck of a ship to penetrate. Even if you made a hole your bomb has to be big enough to go all the way thru to the hull.
Now if the bomb could swoop horizontally at the last second and come up into the hull just at the waterline you might have something.
Jackson Kelly
Obviously needs a lot more setup than most streetfighting equipment, but whoever gets hit by this is absolutely fucking fucked. Just make sure to hose them down quickly and bail at the speed of light, since those fuckers will definitely open fire on you after they realise what's going on
Adam Cox
Is there any point to using smaller 'not quite cratering charges' against an aircraft carrier? An Aircraft Carrier that can't launch or recover its aircraft is a pretty expensive waste of space after all.
Camden Mitchell
Hey, kid, wanna sink an air carrier without anybody noticing until it's too late? Use gallium! Gallium reacts with aluminum and iron (so stell too) by "infusing it" - literally just scratch away a bit of paint, leave some gallium there, and it'll start to seep into the entire thing, like rot (no need to spread it or anything, the formed alloy will actually conduct the fluid to yet uninfected parts of the metal), forming this brittle alloy that's so weak that you can break it by hand (feel free to find videos of padlocks getting crushed this way or similar fun shit). Better yet, you do not even need much gallium for it – a single paint can you left in some dusty corner, full of galium and with a hole at the bottom, so that it'd touch the ship's steel, should be enough to create a large hole that no amount of duct tape will fix. If you use it on a light ship, something that uses aluminum for the hull, it gets even better – the shit created by aluminum and galium reacts violently with water, causing a large amount of heat and hydrogen to be emitted, thus ensuring the hole WILL get created should water pressure not be enough to punch through the brittle material.
It'll probably take a couple days for the gallium to fully infuse itself in the hull, so you have plenty of escape time.
Kayden Taylor
you forgot the part where the computer was loaded with object recognition software with a database so autistic that it could recognize firearms from every country all the way back to the 1800's.
Hunter Bell
Bear with me
Adam Cooper
...
Liam Smith
Hmm.
If I had to engineer a drone-based weapon system, I'd probably make computer guided glider-bombs that get their initial propulsion from a solid rocket motor. No noise and the heavier the bomb, the faster it glides. All the noise is made upfront and away from the target.
Launch them from mortar tubelike racks built into a van like the IRA did in London all those years ago. Just park the van somewhere, open up the top of it, set the timer and GTFO in another car. Make sure nobody caught you or the car on camera anywhere.
The real work would be thwarting forensics from tracking back to you from the various components left in the wreckage, acquiring them without getting tracked back would be the real challenge.
Jace Murphy
popularmechanics.com
And whaddayaknow if I have the idea, it's probably already in production.
Carson Sanders
The “box” is basically a plastic box with
The drones are basically plastic frames with
And maybe
In operation
Pros
Cons
Dylan Richardson
I forgot to put what the drones would do in operation. It doesn’t matter, it’s pretty obvious.
James Brooks
don't put gun on drone to fire forward, make drone glider with rear firing gun, ultimate stealth, then open fire on target just after passing and gun propels glider upwards, then circle and glide in for another super-stealth night owl attack.
Carter Martin
Meanwhile, in Russia
>WE MAKE KALASH FLY (actually a Saiga-12, but okay)
Elijah Wilson
The styrofoam construction is a really neat, already proven (in RC/tpy planes) idea. However, you bring up a good point with the laser defense shield you included that I think might be better addressed by building something more like a traditional balsa wood RC planr (pic related).
You obviously wouldn't want to build the drone out of balsa wood but I think it would be possible to make a frame out of cheapo injection molded plastic. Wrap it in a mylar/reflective foil and you not only weaken the laser's effect, even if it burns through it is more likely to burn through empty space than anything structural. A styrofoam wing is cheap and sturdy but the whole thing is flammable so hit it anywhere and it burns up. a more traditional aerodynamic layout would also be much more stable in adverse conditions. I don't know if you've ever tried flying one of the kid's toys designed similar to your styfrofoam flying wing, but its control surfaces are very easily overwhelemd by even the smallest gust. This would be heavier and 3-4x more expensive but 3-4x "basically free" is still very, very inexpensive.
Dylan Ward
Laser defense would pretty much burn through entire thing, I expect the contact patch to be a few inches in radius. Plastic can only really take the heat to 300 degrees or so, then it can no longer hold its own weight, whereas aluminium foil can heat up to 800 degrees without significant loss of strength (threshold is lower since it's not structural). Additionally, it's separated from the body so the foil must be melted before any damage could occur, also it's doubly ventilated so that increases amount of time needed for this.
If you ever flown a drone with stability control you'd know that it could be any retarded shape and configuration and will still fly just fine.
Kayden Long
Also the idea behind using a block-wing like this is to enable single-pass manufacturing from a styrofoam brick using hot wire cutter. If you have a styrofoam press you can rapidly manufacture a monolithic airframe of any feasible shape, but if you have a stability-controlling board you really don't need to do this, and by extension, don't need to own equipment like that - a simple chorded teardrop cross-section block will do.
Oliver Ward
I can get an accelerometer for about £5-£10 on the high street; it might take some work to figure out how to calibrate it for the precise shock of a low speed impact with the ocean (and for something fired at a multi-billion dollar naval vessel that cost is less than 'less than negligible'), a little more work to rig that to blow the explosive bolts when it's tripped - and that's feasible.
As for the sonar, that's a little tricker if we're trying to match milspec designs. However, if you're not planning on firing this at a submarine that's trying to stay hidden it should get a little easier. A pair of directional hydrophones can also be bought off the shelf (for quite a bit more than $5 though - then again, see the point about about 'cost of weapon vs cost of target'). Have the torpedo mechanically deploy a pair of streamlined mechanical arms (on a timer activated by the impact trigger that fires the explosive bolts) and that should work as a relatively effective nig-rigged passive sonar with the right coding behind it.
Granted it's going to need a lot of prototyping and testing before it's deployed, but it's certainly not as tricky a build as it looks at first.
Grayson Murphy
I thought about things like that and I wondered, how come nobody used this technology back in WW1? Basic electronics already existed, you could rig two directional hydrophones to produce signal, rectify and amplify, and drive a pair of counter-pushing solenoids attached to a steering rod. It would turn towards sources of loud noise in front of it. Give it an activation timer so it couldn't turn until it's a minute or two into a straight line travel towards enemy so that it wouldn't home in on friendly ships. Using three hydrophones, you could rig a torpedo that can also pitch towards target and attack fleeing submarines. It could even use active sonar seeking if it had an emitter at the front that would frequently send a loud pulse (steering solenoids would be disengaged for that moment), which would also cause closely launched torpedos to follow each other, ensuring multiple direct hits. Was definitely more than possible with WW2 technology.
Dylan Smith
I'm not sure about this, but it might just be that the concept hadn't occurred to them at that point. That may sound harsh, but by now we all have a reasonable idea of what a guidance system should do - but given that the first recorded use of guided weapons (that I could find) was when the Luftwaffe sank the Italian battleship Roma in 1943; so guided weapons were still a weird, fringe, experimental concept in the later years of WW2.
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Reading up on the sinking of the Roma, the Fritz X was an MCLOS glide bomb rather than some kind of sonar seeker and while the Americans had an experimental design for a self guided missile with the BAT it still took quite a long time for that idea to really catch on. Besides, if you look at submarine warfare of the day subs weren't hunting other subs, but had all the time they needed to calculate a firing solution on an unaware target - if you had proposed that sort of idea to a navy during WW1/2 they'd probably have told you that it looked interesting but that they didn't need it and couldn't give you the resources to test it because they needed to build things that they already trusted.
Theoretically, at least, a modern engineer could use some of the first brass cartridge rifles and the technology available at the time to produce some kind of minigun equivalent - if we were prepared to accept a significant reduction in functionality he could probably build that ersatz machinegun with wheellock era technology, assuming that he had enough time and funding. I'm sure that in ~50 years time the future Zig Forumsommandos will be pointing out that 'some widely used modern device' can do X, Y, and Z at least well enough, but that we just never thought to try it.
Parker Sullivan
I looked it up and yeah they did also actually used sonar seeking torpedos in WW2, Germans put them on U-boats to sink merchant vessels, and for a time, that worked splendidly. Allies developed countermeasures against them but they didn't had their own technology like this nor examples of functioning torpedos until nearly the end of the war. Surely this type of torpedos would make quick work of U-boats, as opposed to depth charges, really odd that they knew such weapon existed but didn't built their own.
Easton Robinson
Huh, so the Germans invented it with the T4 Falke torpedo, and the Americans started to copy the design after the capture of U-505, and the Russians got hold of them after divers found the wreck of the U-250. I honestly thought that the concept wasn't developed until the early days of the Cold War, the first one I'd heard about was the British '21 inch Torpedo Mk.XX' which didn't enter service until 1955. It's a shame to see that we were more than a decade behind the curve there.