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.
Later versions allowed launches from longer ranges and from off-angles.
Presto! Two axis continuous flight control with a 1-bit input.
Edit: my memory wasn’t far off. It’s Starstreak: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starstreak
IIRC in the Stugna case, they even use solid fuel micro motors - they have a couple dozen of them in a rignt near the nose and fire them as the missile rotates in flight providing a kick in the right direction to hit the target. Given the missile usually flies for <30 seconds, this is perfectly adequate versus a complex set of aerodynamic actuators.
That does explain why it lands on civilian areas tho
It seems this is how Russia moves in general. Hopefully, this will end at some point.
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-...
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
Just be sure to (re-)read your Sun Tzu and Clausewitz first (unlike the current US administration).
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.
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.
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.
Out of five and a half minutes of video, David Koresh appears for perhaps three seconds.
It does put a new twist on the recent controversy about 3d printers needing to be licensed, however.
Just licence everything private people can buy except (healthy food). /S
Microcontrollers and electric motors are too dangerous for the general public.
edit: Ok, I googled the guy
> I have read the works of authors such as Jean Baudrillard, Desmod Morris,
and Ted Kaczynski who believe that technology is harming us and the world.
https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/User:Alisherkhojayevhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrain...
"between 400,000 and 1.5 million estimated casualties (killed and wounded) during the Russian invasion of Ukraine from 24 February 2022 to November 2025"
Mostly due to artillery. Both sides are firing in the region of 10,000 155mm shells per day. For years.
The russians have taken close to 1.5 million casulties because ukraine engineering for cheap drones. Putin really, really f-ed up his "3 day military operation".
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.
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.
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
Even if “your side” won in the end, you'd have lost a lot in the process.
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.
Good luck. Hoping to fight off tyranny, instead some nutters will probably down a commercial flight.
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.
My friend's brother works in munitions and had, in his spare time, designed and prototyped a missile that could be built for about 10k. He pretty much was ignored by the contractor he works for.
Shockingly, as of a couple weeks ago, they are all hot and bothered to talk.
Where you're right is repeatability. Mil-spec works the same on launch 1 and launch 500 across temperature extremes. Consumer MEMS you'd need to characterize each unit individually — fine for a demo, impractical at any scale.
While the pure gyro/accelerometer stuff does suffer from major problems the improvements in SLAM using just cameras in the last 15 years are insane.
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.
I even have 1 that can remove up to 8 active jamming signals.
Gotta love what you can buy for $20
Other than that, GPS is a one-way system, it does not know you exist, how fast your receiver is moving or "give" different information to one client vs another.
Even if it did, this is essentially a toy and moving slower and lower than a general aviation plane.
It uses accelerometers and other sensors because they can be sampled and integrated hundreds of times a second. The $5 gps module is 9600 baud serial and provides one update/second (or maybe 5/sec depending on which part number you pick).
Are you sure about this? MEMS IMUs have been popular and cheap for ~10-15 years.
I'm not sure the launch tube could withstand the heat of the rocket exhaust though. Although that might depend what it is printed with.
Merely having a device intended to guide the rocket is also the same penalty.
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 [2] https://youtu.be/DDO2EvXyncE?t=280 [3] https://openrocket.info/
For all the technical info given in the video, there is a curious lack of any data regarding the actual accuracy of the system. What percentage of rockets tested managed to hit anything and at what range?
No lack of entrackment data generated by [edit] d̶i̶g̶i̶t̶a̶l̶ ̶t̶w̶i̶n̶ github repo of "the system".
It clearly needs more work, but if an amateur can get this far at this low cost, odds are you'll see attempts at overwhelming attackers or defense systems by sheer volume with cheap decoys like this long before they become an actual threat in and of themselves.
Get the rocket a bit more stable, and force an attack to try to take out dozens of these because one of them might be a real threat, and you'll have created a problem.
I think there's lots of people talking past each other on this post. These kinds of designs won't be as reliable as the existing designs, and they may have a systemic flaw, for example, susceptibility to disabling with microwaves. And they aren't going to work after sitting in an ammo depot for 15 years in the desert or after being dropped from a plane.
But these designs will cost just a few dollars more than the equivalent dumb munition (and can possibly be retrofitted), and can be two orders of magnitude more effective in the short term. The threat here isn't "guy in garage makes MANPADS", it's "IRGC converts 100's of thousands of existing unguided cold-war rockets into guided S2A and S2S missiles for $20 each". Even if it doesn't hit any target, each aircraft has a limited number of countermeasures and has to return to base if they run out or risk being hit.
Guided munition at a dumb munition price is enough to invalidate many strategies.
I don't want to use it for war. I think it would be a pretty cool technical project (if it works).
What nonviolent application are you imagining for a gps-guided rocket that is launched by pulling a gun trigger on a hand held mount?
Really? I think rocket science is still not easy. Just look at how much nation states are spending on maintaining their liquid and/or solid fuel rocket programs. If they even have one, let alone both.
This book might give some insights into the why https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pd...
Quote: "All this sounds fairly academic and innocuous, but when it is translated into the problem of handling the stuff, the results are horrendous. It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that's the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water —with which it reacts explosively. It can be It has recently been shown that an argon fluoride, probably ArF2, does exist, but it is unstable except at cryogenic temperatures.
[...] kept in some of the ordinary structural metals — steel, copper, aluminum, etc. —because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminum keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes."
Granted this is about a fuel that is AFAIK not used for MANPADs, but the joke about the running shoes could be made about most aspects of rocket propulsion.
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.
Weaponized drones (say D_A) can be countered by other weaponized drones (say D_B), equally cheap or cheaper than D_A because the D_A is usually targeting something larger (so more payload) and typically has a longer range. D_B only needs to wreck D_A at a shorter defensive range. That's what Ukraine is doing.
You can also use drone swarms with coordinated action so that each drone in the swarm is only targeting one other drone, and automatic re-targeting if one node misses. [1]
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/9-mothers-corporation
Given the war in Ukraine, wanting to build such things is certainly understandable. But still, this is the stuff of nightmares.
Why would lasers not work?
Those cheap drones are made from plastic, if you have a laser powerful enough and a target guidance system (like a camera and a PI) - then you would just need enough of them.
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 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HESA_Shahed_136
What kind of systems are you thinking about? Jet airplanes for sure are completely safe from small drones.
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.
The fact that home made drones can cause such havoc to even the best funded military is an equalizer when the military with all the power is actively trying to completely eliminate the otherside.
There are no home made devices a Gazan can build that can protect from a 2000lbs bomb.
USA/NATO/allies heavily rely on Patriot AA system. Even if you disregard the prohibitive 100x cost difference, there are about 2500 Patriot compatible PAC missiles.
This is why gulf states are scrambling to get their hands on cheap alternatives - Ukraine manages to shoot down over 90% of all drones heading their way, usually it is over 400 per day in big waves.
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.
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.
I guess a lot of people will not be happy with this xD
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.
(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.
https://www.youtube.com/@LafayetteSystems is similar project, also by actual defense contractor, and less opensource.
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.
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...
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.
(Would be cool to see an ATGM variant too!)
> This guy really wants that defense contract.
But fuck me dude, even with that, he built a manpad in his garage. Like even if his code is ass, that requires drive!
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.
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...
He's using potassium nitrate/sugar as his rocket fuel.
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.
The future is scary
It's a poor life that doesn't put you on a few such lists!
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
https://github.com/novatic14/Distributed-Camera-Node-Trackin...
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
Are we going to see foot troops carry one of these strapped to their backpacks and launched autonomously to counteract incoming drones?
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.
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.
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.
Having some independent developers in the defence market is not necessarily a bad thing.
Global detection is for balistic missiles, not things launched by human portable devices
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.
Whether we should be trying to regulate arms is another issue.
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.
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.
I used to object to building weapons. Now the EU is engaged in a proxy war with Russia, and the US has repeatedly threatening to annex Greenland. Suddenly the need for a domestic weapons supply chain does not seem so farfetched
You don't really understand the desperation we're going through right now. OP wants to be visited by the feds.
I fear the next generation is going to grow up confined to a bubble where they're only allowed to stay home and mindlessly consume corporate approved product, never make things, never build things, never destroy things, never hack a computer game, never reverse engineer a wire protocol, never go out and walk around and explore, never race things, never jump off things, never blow things up or burn them down, never protest things or yell at someone, never get into a fistfight, never take physical risks and learn what hurts and what doesn't. In 2050, growing up means just 1. go to church, or 2. watch streaming.
-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.
And then the rocket maker pivot back to control by wire, as in the drone sphere. DIY TOW when?
[1] https://hackaday.com/2026/03/12/open-source-radar-has-up-to-...
And the deadliest weapons in war today are repurposed toys.
I wonder how much role Claude plays in enabling the designing/building of it
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.
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
Of course he could, anyone can these days. So the most important question is the latter.
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...
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.
