* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phased_array
* https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2003/02/11/294058...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-role_Electronically_Scan...
Somewhat interesting in that the Pentagon did not want the E-7 (as a replacement to the E-3):
* https://www.twz.com/air/e-2-hawkeye-replaces-usaf-e-3-sentry...
nominally because it wanted to spend the money on more E-2s, which can operate on smaller and rougher airfields, which would be handy in (e.g.) the Pacific where tiny islands don't necessary 'fancy' runways that the E-7 needs.
But they're actually very handy in tracking tiny targets—like drones—so Australia is sending E-7(s) to the Middle East:
* https://www.twz.com/air/massive-leap-in-ability-to-spot-iran...
Congress rebuffed the Pentagon's attempted to 'completely kill' E-7 acquisitions, and the USAF has now put in an order, and it may be that people now realizing having some number of E-7s may be handy:
* https://breakingdefense.com/2026/03/following-congressional-...
it is a reasonable point that any airborne radar is an attractive target to long-range missile. and that if your radar is in space, it's a different, less available class of missile to attack it (and also that so far treating space as contested is taboo).
the recent loss of THAAD radar should also make people rethink how to make an emitter that survives the first round of missiles.
In fact, I think I now have all I need to start a war with my neighbours.
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
The problem is: they can, too.
It's also incredibly slow. There are children's rocket kits that fly significantly faster than this.
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
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-ukrain.... 200 mph and 3 mile range is not bad, and definitely better than whatever the OP is.
If I am understanding what I saw, for all the work on the canards, the propellant runs out immediately leaving it to tumble in air,
That being said, I agree that it's a prototype and all that entails. I agree that it can (and probably will be) improved upon.
(A quadcopter is perfectly guidable, but it must be slower than a rocket, and costs more than $96.)
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.
Right, and you don't need to conjure up anti-tank missiles (sure those could be nice to have) to do this. You could seize a bulldozer and drive it into the airframes, or just shoot them to bits. At this point if you have access to American jets on the ground to destroy them, you've already lost the manufacturing capacity to repair them.
> There is also no reason to assume what starts out as your side will remain such, revolutions are crazy risky.
Absolutely. Robespierre learned that lesson. Putin is learning that lesson from the perspective of starting a war but not being able to predict the outcome. The status quo is pretty great and we should be very careful and guarded about changing that, especially through violent means. Most things that are problems today can be resolved through legislation and the existing democratic mechanisms. Throwing that out (not suggesting you are suggesting that) would be almost certainly profoundly unwise. It's very much like the Monty Hall Problem.
In the situations a revolution comes to exist, it is because life for everyone is already getting much, much worse with little prospect of anything being better. Nobody starts a revolution for funsies, so you're supposing a false dichotomy where the choice is between "plunge into hell for no reason" or "continue living a great life", when in fact the latter is not an option at all.
Some folks want to hasten "a revolution" because (a) they think it's going to happen 'eventually' anyway so might as well get it over with, and (b) they think they can come out 'on top' and set up the new system the way they want it (because the current Enlightenment-based system(s) suck in their opinion):
well some folks are doing that all the time, but only sometimes does it take. what's the difference between one time and another?
They definitely do, see the 1900s.
I think modern day Americans do not understand how bad war is because they’ve been engaged in it for nearly 30 years continuously without directly feeling the consequences.
Maybe not “for fun” but largely for justifications that pale in comparison to the suffering they unleashed.
Americans ready to go to war because eggs and gas are too expensive, or their trans teen’s top surgery was delayed, might be making similar mistakes. But Americans are good at making mistakes, perhaps supernaturally gifted.
This is in poor taste given there is a bill right now being debated that bans the exact surgery you’re mocking. It also bans trans Americans from participating in gendered sports. You should find a better example.
My point wasn't to suggest the options were "hell for no reason" or "continue to live a great life" so to speak, but that the probability of "life gets better" as an outcome is one of the least likely. The most likely outcomes, certainly in a single lifetime, are death, destruction, food shortages, roving gangs of gunmen, religious theocracies, dictatorships, and more.
The US for example is in no position or need of a "revolution". Reform, sure. Most revolutionaries are just in it for their own power grab, at your expense.
They do when they're convinced it's a walk in the park.
See the Spanish civil war, which was a two week coup by military worried about conspiracy theories turned into a years long war turned into a 40 year dictatorship (with decades of hunger).
Even people living a quite miserable life have a lot to lose.
No American revolution would succeed without a significant chunk of US military support. Either from above ("autogolpe"), or entire units defecting en masse.
If the responsibility of Holodomor lies solely with the USSR, the nexus between the NATO and occupied Palestine are responsible for at least a billion deaths, going by your intellectual honesty standards. I have factored in death due to military interventionism, gun laws, and capitalism related deaths (death from being uninsured, hunger, poverty).
What about the 240 million who died under the tzarist regime?
If you're going to make up nonsense numbers, why stop there?
I mean... we're 4 years into a little Russian jaunt that was supposed to be over in a matter of weeks. And a certain someone just picked a war with Iran pretty much for funsies
I don't want to underestimate the level of arrogance/stupidity that might be involved in sparking a revolution at this point
Being able to effectively organize enough to create home grown weapons and fight an insurgency is a signal to a 3rd party that you are organized and committed and worthy of further support. From there it can snowball.
Nobody is really talking about hitting supersonic jets at 40k feet, nor even destroying a fully-armoured tank. More about making your opponent think twice about deploying close air support, and have move cautiously with their APCs and supply trucks.
We can see some version of this playing out in Ukraine, and I guess it is possible that FPV drones have pretty much invalidated the role a DIY missile launcher would play
would the chechens be in their position now had they never fought? impossible to say, counter-factual conditionals are all unconditionally true. though i'm not sure why you'd assume so...
You dont need counterfactuals to ask if it was worth it or compare 9 years to the age of the universe.
Armed revolutions are often lionized and glorified because they form part of most countries' national mythos - the binding agent holding together most national identities.
But, the ugly truth is that most of them are just a tragic waste of human life. Chechnya was very much that.
yes you do.
to say something was bad to do is to say it would've been better to have not, and that is a counterfactual.
revolutions are like earthquakes or pandemics: created by forces beyond our control and a matter of when, not if. people romanticizing or anti-romanticizing armed conflict online doesn't even enter the frame <zizekian sniff>.
There's a reason why Hemingway wrote "There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter." Going home just to have a toddler scream at you for the wrong color cup or walking into the grocery store and just effortless picking one of 1000 brands of cereal just seems so -- hollow -- afterwards.
> much less complicated than say something like trying to juggle a dentistry practice while driving the 2 kids to school events and then going home to patch drywall on the house
There is genuinely a group of people who'd rather fantasize about mass murder than do chores. Every now and again one of them actually picks up a gun. Then some school kids never have to go to events, or anywhere, ever again.
I have some sympathy for people who can't adapt to peace. When I was a kid one of my neighbours was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Calvert ; I knew him as an old man who drank too much and never talked about the war. This is not an excuse to restart the war.
I couldn't tell you. YPG was dominantly left-wing and looked up to the former communist 'Apo'. I imagine the phenomenon is fairly politically universal.
>There is genuinely a group of people who'd rather fantasize about mass murder than do chores. Every now and again one of them actually picks up a gun. Then some school kids never have to go to events, or anywhere, ever again.
Yes there are people like that. Although most of the Kurds I met started fantasizing about fighting ISIS only after Islamic theocrats starting murdering and raping their population. I doubt many of them who gained a taste for combat were doing chores one day and started fantasizing they could live under a tyrannical regime so they'd have an "excuse" to "restart" the war.
Personally I don't think soldiers in need of a war have to fantasize too hard to come up with a morally acceptable outlet. I wouldn't look down on those who fought against the Russians in Ukraine or against ISIS in Mali because they need an outlet for their escape from civil life.
America won a Civil war against traitors like the Epstein class, but we want to just give up today because democracy is hard and what, hope the new dictator class is more benevolent? When has that ever been the case?
The US is ours, Democracy is ours. That is why they constantly undermine it. Why would we give up the stronger position that is easier to win from just because they keep trying to undermine it? That makes zero sense.
Even if “your side” won in the end, you'd have lost a lot in the process.
Good luck. Hoping to fight off tyranny, instead some nutters will probably down a commercial flight.
I found this paper when I was reading about that guy in NZ who was trying to build a missile at home for $20k in around 2003-2004.
The cost for what he was trying to achieve is likely below $5k now, if you don't include access to machines like 3d printers that are pretty ubiquitous now.
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.
(Edit: ^f 'itar' brought me straight here)
Between that and playing spot the fed at the local machine gun shoot, I was surprised at just how much attention the state pays to these kind of hobby conventions, but I guess I shouldn't be.
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.
looks at his github see's he is a US college student
Yeah he's likely going to jail.
Not that this matters for the topic, but I don't see why people have started saying "weapons system" instead of "weapon".
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
Just consider that "self propelled gun" and "main battle tank" are very different things despite the first being a quite accurate description of what the latter consists of. Or the distinction between a cruise missile and a one way drone...
This changed long ago. Optic, light, IR illuminator, IR pointer, NVG/thermals. The rifle or carbine is now a component of the weapon system.
Basically, WWII showed planners they were in the war business not in the ship/plane/tank business. Take navies, for example. For most of the history of the professional navy, the overwhelming cognitive container for “unit in the navy” was a ship. Planners paid for ships to be laid down, admirals planned where they went and captains were responsible for them in all regards. You could reasonable count a navy’s capability by counting the kind and number of their ships: thus and such frigates, ships of the line, etc. However, even before the 20th century naval planners knew and acted like ships weren’t atomic: counting guns on ships of the line as a distinguishing feature or planning a sortie based on available marines both herald what would come later. But mostly we thought of ships as ships. If the enemy was to have 3 battlecruisers then we ought to have 4.
WWII shuffled all that around. At the scale of fighting and industrial demand, the idea of a “ship” or a “tank” or a “fighter” as a unit of analysis started to look tenuous. Successful commanders and (especially) planners noticed that the math worked out much better if we considered units of analysis larger than individual technological objects. The immediate consequence is one starts to think in terms of weapons delivery to the enemy and not the Sherman tank. The primary concerns then (often but not always) shift from characteristics of the weapon as a weapon to: can this system as a collective be built cheaply, can it be deployed + trained on easily, and can it achieve goals in mixed employment.
The same basic idea animated the operations research revolution in warfare, the bam changes from thing to thing_system or thing_platform are consequences of that.
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.
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.
This is shifting. First, economic stratification is getting worse, and as economic mobility declines people start looking for alternatives. (See all of Gen Z cheering for Luigi Mangione). Second, AI will enable people who are less educated to build these kinds of weapons.
For example, you can use a Kalman filter to greatly improve the data you get from an IMU and GPS via sensor fusion. Before, this required a specialist skillset; now you can get a "good enough" implementation by prompting Claude.
I really wish the debate around this stuff wasn't framed in terms of preventative enforcement because it naturally leads towards more enforcement (when your only tool is a hammer...). The root of the issue is that the government does not trust its citizenry to follow the law without Big Brother watching. That in and of itself is a symptom of a larger grave political crisis in America: the decay of the state's political legitimacy.
People did fly two planes into the World Trade Center. That was a thing that happened. Along with all the regular mass shootings, all the way up to Vegas.
> That in and of itself is a symptom of a larger grave political crisis in America: the decay of the state's political legitimacy.
Well, only because people are actively chiselling away at it because they think they will be able to loot the ruins.
Whether we should be trying to regulate arms is another issue.
I am arguing that the new laws being proposed (e.g serializing other firearms components, ammo serialization, assault weapons bans, higher gun-owner standards) have absolutely no bearing on an entirely new source of firearms. Many Dem-controlled states have passed "ghost gun" regulation, but there is no real enforcement mechanism and it's mostly an additional charge to tack on after an actual crime has been committed.
You can see states like CA trying to go after 3D printers, but I suspect this will fail. There is no software out there that can realistically determine whether a part is a firearm component, other than dumb hashes of known parts. 3DP is a general tool, it is like trying to ban milling machines, files, or basic handtools.
I am arguing there will still be a significant number mass shootings/casualty events, political assassinations using a firearm, etc, and that the only way to effectively prevent them is to roll back most of the bill of rights.
The gun is a very old piece of technology and you do not need a sophisticated one to kill people effectively. Shinzo Abe was assassinated with a gun that could be described as primitive at best. Mangione used a 3dp firearm to kill the United Health CEO. Rebels in Myanmar are fighting the military junta with 3d printed small arms.
I am fundamentally arguing that the capacity of any one person has dramatically (100,000x) increased since the bill of rights was written, for better and for worse.
To be clear, I fully support the bill of rights and want to see it expanded. However, I reject the idea that simply eliminating the 2nd amendment and removing guns from civilian ownership can fix the underlying issues. I think you will see "casual" shootings and hopefully even mass shootings go down, but they will not go away and I expect they will still be higher than anywhere else in the world.
These are extremely rare in other countries? It's very hard to achieve true zero, yes, but the UK has about 30 gun deaths per year, almost all of which are crime-related rather than mass casualty events. Those tend to be rare, and tend to be bombs. The Shinzo Abe assassination was also such a "black swan".
> I expect they will still be higher than anywhere else in the world
Why do you think that would be, given (important!) your premise "the public is broadly supportive of this effort"?
To answer the point, there is no technical limitation keeping people in the UK from building, creating and shooting homemade or otherwise improvised guns that I am aware of.
What the UK does have is universal healthcare, a 3-4x lower incarceration rate and dramatically improved social safety services.
I think you can group the majority of shooters into three buckets -- ideologically driven (think white supremacists, Islamic terrorists, anarchists, etc), the mentally ill, and the criminally motivated (gang shootings mostly). The US has only amplifying factors for all three groups.
For idealgoues, there is no wider span of acceptable discourse than in the US. Commonly espoused views in the US legislative and executive branches are criminal offenses in a number of peer countries, e.g hate speech is still constitutionally protected speech in the US. The rhetoric is insane, accusations of nazism, faciscm from the left and similar accusations from the right, and generally a very high degree of polarization.
For the mentally ill, the support system in the US is abysmal, with cracks big enough to drive a truck through. There are multiple books written about the failures of America's mental health system, I will not belabor the point.
For the criminally motivated, gun crime is concentrated in young, mostly black men in decaying post-industrial cities in the midwest and (south)east. They have almost zero political capital, low social mobility and very little pubic support. Other countries certainly have their ghettos, but take a trip to Gary, IN or Jackson, MS. You would be hard pressed think you are in the richest, most powerful country in the world.
Fundamentally, the point still stands. There is not a feasible technical path to keep firearm technology out of a massive number of hands. The skills needed to produce a functional firearm have never been lower, and they will keep declining until almost zero. The only technical (preventative) measures run squarely into the bill of rights -- think a lowered bar for a warrant or infringements on the 1st amendment limiting the sharing of technical knowledge. Changing the culture -- around mental health, around poverty, and around power is very difficult, so we will see an attempted erosion of civil liberties, just like 9/11 was used to erode civil liberties with the introduction of the Patriot Act and similar legislation.
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
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-9_Reaper
[3]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/10/what-are-the-ukrain...
Of course he could, anyone can these days. So the most important question is the latter.
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.
Sure you didn't forget a few zeros there bud?
They are currently trying to shoot down Iranian drones with $4 million Patriot missiles
The IR flare or 30mm bullets or whatever, not the whole system that fires it.
