DIY Cruise Missile Grounded

[nzrockets]

http://www.interestingprojects.com/cruisemissile/
it just shows how backwards our government can be down here. so i better not use any guidance for my rockets from now on :)

[Jacks Complete]

Do we know what the pretext is? He doesn't say on his site, but it sounds serious.

Is it something to do with guidance, or what?

[McGyver]

Don't want to start a new thread but here is my question. Why is it that rocket explosions like cuise missles and others like anti-tank, produce black smoke when they explode? Is it because thier secondary explosive is TNT?

[metal dragon]

My guess is it is carbon and ash being thrown about by the explosion. And some left over smoke or the detonation, yet it may not be TNT but another compound.

[Axt]

From what I can see, hes been declared bankrupt for not repaying a debt, that is all. I take him for a bit of a dodgy customer when it comes to talking about his "missile" he constantly claims that hes proved that it can be done ..... but hes proved nothing other then hes a brillant marketer and news-person by talking up his project.

Could be that he found out it simply cant be done and is getting out whilst trying to save face, we cant know.

Some plasticisers create black smoke look at the PETN/PIB in explosions link in sig, it creates black smoke

[ronald]

No, this guy CAN do it. I wouldnt doubt on that guys skills and capabilities.

[vulture]

Hey, US/New Zealand/Australian government are all keeping the sheeple SAFE and SECURE with colorcoded charts hanging around the place. New Zealand even gets rid of the airforce, because nothing can beat some sophisticated color coded chart! Fearsome!

Anyways, then this punk stands up claiming any Joe schmuck with a budget can build a cruise missile that would be very hard to defend yourself from...

Got the picture yet?

[Flake2m]

Who would wnat to invade New Zealand anyway? All they have is sheep and mountains.

Yeah, on topic. If he had been less public about this and simply kept to a small website then maybe he could have completed the project without the media intefering.
There is no proff that he has actually made this "cruise missile" however it is certainly possible given Mans natural ingenuity.

[flashpoint]

I figure, since he's not giving up the fight, that's why he's lost the ability to license his x-jet and all of that stuff...sucks for him definently...I was checking out that stie, after someone was working on a jetcart here on the site. I think he's a complete idiot though for posting the information in a country like NZ...what country is it where they are heavy on no guns? NZ, Ireland?....just curious

[spydamonkee]

Originally posted by Flake2m
Who would wnat to invade New Zealand anyway? All they have is sheep and mountains.


Excuse me but we have alot more here than just sheep & mountains Mister!

But if anyone seriously does want to invade new zealand then some would welcome it as most of our army consist of south park's "operation human shield" :p

We certainly could do with a few less native's...and i dont mean the sheep :D

Also with an invasion keeping all the sheeple & native's busy it would give someone a chance to exercise his HE skill's on the local mud's wiping them away with a swift clensing action.

One can dream i guess.

[Jacks Complete]

New Zealand is one place I would seriously like to move to!

You are thinking of Ireland being wildly anti-gun - they are nearly as bad as the UK. New Zealand actually has a story on the imigration website about a world-class rifle shooting couple who moved there. They aren't anti-gun, really, but they are very anti-nuke, in all forms.

New Zealand has a policy of relying on Australia's military strength, because they are so remote. Who the heck is going to invade them? Anyone who did would be using it as a stepping stone to Australia anyway, so Aus. would have to help, regardless. New Zealand really don't need an airforce, unless they want to piss about like the UK at being some kind of superpower.

Personally, I would have sold the crap, and bought three or four state-of-the-art fighter planes, and a few small long-range recon craft with the capability to fire a few missiles, and a few nice shiny helecopters.

The helicopters would be dual-use, as most are good for moving people round, rescue, etc. as well as shooting up small boats full of smugglers.

The Recon craft would tell you where to shoot.

The state-of-the-art fighters would be for me to play about with! :)

Having looked at the guy's sight, and looked at a lot of his videos, he is for real, and has some superb engines. Even a total fool could set one of those into a longer tube with stub wings and fire it into the sea. He has a valveless design that can push his go-kart, with him in it, at quite a resonable speed. Without him in it, it would probably be air-borne in seconds.

Wfter that, it is just a case of working out how to wire the GPS unit output to a map system (available for very little from Tandy, Maplin, etc.) and there you go.

A really silly way to do it, without any integration, would be to use one of the really cheap GPS units that just points an arrow at your destination. Use a small embedded controller to read the arrow via a camera, and that steers the fins. It explodes when it gets to the destination, and the arrow changes to a circle. (I advise putting a timer in there, too, though!) Once you had the code, you could make loads for way less than $5000 a time.

[Axt]

Again i'll say ... Just because a model plane flys, a jet engine pushes and a GPS guides slapping them together does not make a cruise missile. Noone has stood back and thought about the true scope of the "missile" project and seen how incredibly complicated and hard it actually is, how long and at what cost did the V1 take before it worked ... and even then a lot were lost. $5000 NZ dollars maybe for the basic missile if all the work is done yourself, but $5000 doesnt get far when it has to be developed, tested and flown. Hes gone too far with his webpage and media interviews and such to simply say ... nope sorry cant do it so it seems just as logical to me that he will let out his little "government conspiracy theory" to get out of it.

I'll never say that hes not a talented craftsman but hes also involved with the media and has the motives to attempt to ride the wave of terrorist hysteria to promote himself and his "x-jet" engines. You people can remind me to eat hy hat if this missile ever flys, but I think im quite safe in saying that it wont fly under the $/speed/weight/range constraints hes given to the project, and im quite sure it was for the most part a publicity stunt.

[Tuatara]

From an engineering standpoint I can't see the missile idea as being all that difficult. The Germans had such a hard time with the V1 because rocket technology was new. Hell, they even had to develop a suitable explosive for the warhead, that could withstand the air-friction heating.
Now we have pulse jets as a known, proven technology. We have GPS, with selective availability turned off so now your average civilian GPS can be accurate to 10m. We have off-the-shelf computing power that fits in a cigarette packet, that was once undreamed of. We have complex numerical simulation available so you no longer need to build 100 missiles that fail to get one that works.

The project is definitely do-able! Maybe not for 5 grand, but even $10k would still be one hell of a lot less than the million bucks a shot the US army is paying.

NZ is not an anti-gun country. Lots of people here own guns for hunting (ducks, pigs, deer, goats), and plenty are into target shooting. We do have gun licensing, so the police know who has what. The only things are are banned are full-auto, and military look-alikes.

Our military is so small we've come to specialise in support roles in conflict - transport, medical etc. Personally I think this is sensible use of limited resource - what use is another four fighter jets, when your allies already have 1000? Only the Navy have a real peace-time role : keeping Asian fishing vessels out of our territorial waters!

Jack: NZ is a nice place to live. But then I have to say that, eh?
Aside form sheep and mountains we also have a burgeoning film industry! I'm so looking forward to LOTR: Return of the King. I already have the other two movies (extended edition - much better). Myself, I live about 10km north of Weathertop.

[Flake2m]

Isn't alcohol really cheap in New Zealand? From what I have heard about $30 will get you about 1.5L of vodka :D

Yeah but the US cruise missiles are a much more advanced form then what is trying to be achieved. The SLCMs that are currently used have a range of like 1500 miles, fly much faster and are much larger and can carry much bigger warheads. Plus they are designed to have a low radar signiture.

A bastardised version of the US cruise missile is easily achievable, even if it onlt has 1/10th of the range and payload size it would still be anough to be a threat if a terrorist cell used them.

[ronald]

30$ for 1.5L of vodka?! OMG, we have 3$ for 0.5l vodka, that makes 9$ 1.5L.

[Tuatara]

Depends whose currency you're talking about. NZ$30 sounds about right for 1100ml spirits. I think thats what I paid for the last bottle of brandy. I don't drink much (prefer coffee :cool: ) so I'm not in the grog shop very often.

[Axt]

Theoritically do-able and practically do-able are totally different things! If this missile was to work first try, or in the first 5 tries for that matter this guy would be a mechanical genious. To stabilise the V1 they actually had to strap a very brave woman into it to find out what it was doing in flight, and all the unmanned US jet propelled spy planes guided by GPS all crashed in afghanistan due to becoming unstable and it was a multi million dollar machine. ITS NOT EASY !!

[John Ashcroft]

Yes, but as already was said about the V1, the technology was new, which is no longer the case.

Strapped a brave woman to a missile? Somehow that doesn't sound realistic.

The spy planes crashed because they weren't designed to simply go from point A to point B. They probably were extremely complex and compact, meaning there's lots of ways they could fail.

Isn't alcohol really cheap in New Zealand? From what I have heard about $30 will get you about 1.5L of vodka

That's expensive, here in the US I can find a half gallon (1.9L) of vodka for $8.

[Axt]

How about a google search for 'V-1 brave woman (http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=V-1+brave+woman&meta=)' before you make me out to be a liar ay? :mad:

The spyplanes were not compact they were very large, and as if theres not lots of ways a homebuilt missile can fail :rolleyes: its hardly a stable platform. And how many fails has this bloke equationed into this project, and how many do you think he can afford in $ and time before he looks like a twit in front of the all the media he has talked to?, or will he come up with an excuse blaming a government conspiracy .... get it?

If you wish to go on thinking its "easy" fine, but no more comments from me as this will never be more then a ping-pong game of opinions, especially since none of us have even seen what this misslile looks like, we'll just have to wait and see.

[xyz]

That price was in New Zealand dollars, not US dollars.

[streety]

transatlantic model plane (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3145577.stm)

If this is possible I don't see why a cruise missile isn't possible. I would imagine it's the exact same technology.

[Axt]

Using an inheritably stable platform launched by radio control before being switched onto autopilot is the logical way of doing it, but "GPS guided plane flies 100km before crashing" is hardly likely to attract the attention of the media which is what this bloke is after.

By the discription on that page it took them at least 8 planes to get it to work with the help of international engineers. I dont think anyone is going to argue that launching a DIY jet powered buzz bomb off the back off a moving truck is somewhat different (harder!), no? Still think this bloke is looking for an easy way out of what hes gotten himself into.

[NightStalker]

Me thinks he took the easy out by saying "The Government shut me down" rather than "I talked shit and now I can't back it up.". ;)

[Flake2m]

Well when you think about it the easiest part of making the "cruise missile" is the engine and fuselage. The real tricky part is making it fly. Even with GPS and all the state-of-the-art technology avaliable the main problem is keeping the whole thing stable.

[12Gauge]

This whole exercise is somewhat useless, anyway. Ok- you make a jet powered R/C aircraft- nothing new there. The GPS control and such is interesting, but nothing that would particularly difficult to figure out for someone with the knowledge and experience to do so..... This project really wouldn't be overly difficult, and $5000 would probably be reasonable for someone working alone, not paying wages of flight,electronics,explosive engineers etc... Of course the Nazi's had a hard time developing the V1 and 2- they were doing so over 50 years ago, and were the first to try something where virtually everything had to be developed from scratch- guidance systems- even the jet engine itself was in it's infancy......
Anyway- say this guy succeeded- so what? You have just made yourself a weapon that will travel a whole 100 miles (maybe) and deliver a whopping payload of nearly 10 whole pounds!!! Wow! 10 lbs of HE doesn't exactly qualify for "WMD" status. Load 'er up with chemical or biological warhead and it's even less effective.... chem and bioweapons are generally only effective in enormous, concentrated amounts (remember how ineffective the Sarin attack in Tokyo was? That was inside a cramped subway- not an open space with wind)- something this system hardly delivers...
For something like this to be effective you'd need to launch literally hundreds of them to do any real damage. You think the authorities might be curious about several semi tractor trailer loads full of homemade cruise missles? There are much simpler ways to accomplish the same, relatively ineffective result, should one wish to do so. In the same vein, there are any number of much more effective schemes that are also much easier than what Mr. Simpson has attempted...

[Jacks Complete]

As a weapon of terror, this thing would be very successful! I can't believe that anyone here disagrees!

From a hundred miles away, with a non-ballistic trajectory, you could hit Downing Street or the Pentagon, whenever you felt like it. If the GPS guided cruise missile wasn't that good, why would the US pay a million or half a million a shot for them?

The guy says on his site that, with the plans and basic skills, you could produce one of these projected designs for less than $5000 NZ, or £1666, or $3000 US. He isn't including his time in this, nor your time. Yes, it will be a bitch to make it stable, fly straight, etc, but once that is done, those who follow his designs will know that they will have a stable platform, etc. at the end of it.

He is doing the R&D, so that you don't have to do nearly as much work. As other posters have pointed out, he has 50 years on the Germans, and they did it under fire!

Yes, you can knock him, but at least with the publicity he doesn't need to worry so much about getting dead by some spook! If he makes any money, I will be amazed, except for payment for interviews. But hey, it is still easy money.

As for 12Gauge's comment about 10lb's of HE, well, you can drop that ten pounds anywhere, with no worry about blowing your hands and head off, without being seen by the CCTV cameras and without anyone having any real clue about where the launch was made (not that you would do it from home anyway!) whilst being fairly sure that that ten pounds of HE will land within about 25 yards of where you told it to go. The kill radius from a standard handgrenade is bigger than that, and it only uses 4oz of HE and 8oz of steel!

In summary, it is ideal for "reconasence by fire" as practised by the US in Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as attacks on any un-armoured target at almost zero risk.

[Snowfist1971]

I don't get this guy.

He sounds like he's over-engineering it for what he's trying to accomplish. If he's trying to rub the NZ government's nose in it by supposedly doing it on the cheap, that's one thing but how is an average schmoo like him gonna reliably test something that would go more than 100 miles? Using GPS for a short range project is over kill when store-bought gyros,an electronic compass, and home brew accelerometers integrated into the project as a primary guidance system would work just as well, and no doubt be a lot cheaper to interface even if you had to go to Rad shack for the electronics parts as opposed to a GPS with such a large window of error.

In so far as the pulse jet is concerned, if he's gonna go to the trouble to make a jet engine he might as well just take the extra time and make a turbine and save himself the extra expense of needing a high speed launcher that a pulse jet would require( obviously he didn't think of that did he?)

Let's see what else? Ah yes, a little looking around his site and a segway into his X3 pulsejet ...blah , blah, blah pretty much gave me all the info I needed on why he was even trying this at all. Anyone else read that he was on a NZ grant for his X3? I get the feeling he was trying to goose more money out of the NZ gov by using his little engine for a potiental defense contract and not a "wake up and smell the toast burning" lesson like he said.

This guy is hilarious, and the NZ government seems to have seen right through him.

As for that Transatlantic plane, yup, it would be about the same just flying a lot slower and having larger wings to skimp on fuel for such a long trip.

[Blackhawk]

You don't need a high speed launcher to get a pulse jet running, they work at 0Km/h, you just need a leaf blower or other fast air pump to get it started, as I have seen him do.

[Tuatara]

Snowfist, GPS is a far simpler technology to use than gyros, compass and accelerometers. GPS gives you absolute position in three dimensions, usually via a simple serial port. Using accelerometers and integrating to get position is fraught with problems, mostly due to noise, drift and other errors. Unless you use very accurate (and expensive) systems for intertial navigation you accurate range is going to be less than a mile.

[Snowfist1971]

With all due respect to you Tuatara, I know what a GPS is and how it works, and you still get drift because of wind with either system. As someone above mentioned this would be more a weapon of terror and therefore wouldn't have to be too incredibly accurate to make the point, making the use of a GPS and associated circuitry to interface a serial port just as expensive if not more so when the gyros would be needed anyway just to keep it straight and level while in flight.

With respect Blackhawk, your response proves my point. If you need to add a leaf blower or some other appropriate device to get your GM up to speed(whether it be handheld or built onboard) then you are not starting it at 0km, you are starting it at the air speed of the leaf blower up until it can create enough thrust to take off on it's own. While only slightly more complex to build and start, a turbine combines leaf blower and pulse jet of a sort (not strictly so as a turbine uses a continuous firing cycle due to the fact that the air is continually condensed into the firing chamber) as well.

Now not to piss anybody off, but present CM's use a turbo fan so that there is no sacrificing of speed, and a turbofan is essentially a turbine with a larger "propeller" forcing more air into the air compression stage than a true turbine would. If you don't believe me, look for info on the present day ALCM's yourself. The only bad part about a turbine is that they are generally fuel hungry critters for the extra speed they give which can cause weight problems.

Ideally with a turbine powered example, you could just set the craft on the ground( if it had wheels of course)and leave so that you could launch it by remote control, and make a "fast getaway". Could you do that with a hand held leaf blower?

[Blackhawk]

A turbine is not 'slightly' harder to build and fly, it requires very well balanced blades for the compresser and equally well balanced and heat resistant blades for the turbine. You will need very good bearings and a pressurised fuel delivery system, which means a heavy pump and a way of running it. You will also need a way of starting this, probably a big motor to get the blades spinning before you can produce any thrust. So if you really look at the situation, there is absoloutly no advantage of using a turbine over a pulsejet. The pulsejet on the otherhand is only a big tube with a valve assembly at one end, and if you make a valveless one then it is just a big tube, not very heavy at all, much easier to make and requires just as much ground support as the turbine to start.

[Jacks Complete]

Snowfist1971,

you really are talking shite. GPS doesn't suffer from drift from anything, wind included. In the event of wind pushing the missile off aim, the control surfaces would act to push it back on, and this would work at any range and in anything but a randomly changing wind direction at hurricane strength. Even then, it wouldn't be the fault of the GPS.

As for testing the flight distance, how trivial would it be to enter twenty waypoints in a circle, and just have it do ten mile laps till it fell out the sky? Nothing hard about that.

And as for your ideas about how a pulsejet needs "the air speed of the leaf blower up until it can create enough thrust to take off on it's own" that just shows you have no clue about these engines, nor have even taken the time to look at the guy's site, or even read the earlier posts from those of us who DO have a clue.

Have you seen how small turbines are started? Gosh, can you see? It is an air supply, from a leafblower or compressor, used to spin the blades of the turbine up to speed before the fuel with be turned on, to avoid it flaming out, and the lack of throttle response otherwise found.

As Blackhawk says, turbine blade are not easy to build. Every single design I know of uses a shop-bought turbine wheel, most often taken from a car turbo unit.

Try having a clue, before NBK catches up with you.