this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2026
338 points (99.1% liked)
Technology
82801 readers
4466 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Notably absent... the explosives.
But sure, if you are wondering how folks out in Yemen or Gaza managed to retaliate against their oppressors for so long, this is a textbook example of how and why. What's being proposed is collection of technology we've had since at least the 1960s that's slowly made its way into civilian circulation.
Also...
I mean, we're seeing what "just-launched prototypes with no effective track record" have accomplished on the Ukraine-Russia front-lines and it's a decidedly mixed bag.
I think a harder question to answer is "Who would be interested in putting one of these into practical use?" And that gets to the real value-add of a Stinger MANPAD. Namely, the humans willing and practiced enough to use it.
I synthesize energetics. I can make a primary explosive that is stable enough for cap usage with a solo cup. I can synthesize secondaries like RDX above (one of the more complicated common ones) in short order with a basic chemistry set and the internet to order basic reagents. None are controlled substances.
It is trivially easy to make effective shapes charges and energetics at home.
Synthesis is federally legal in the US so long as you do not assemble into a device or transport. You can do both with an SOT as an FFL.
If I wanted to, I could make a shaped charge that was point imitated and base detonated for the above projectile and it would punch through about 1.5 feet of homogeneously rolled steel.
The limit to threat is not the access to explosives, as the chemistry and processes are published freely online as easy to replicate. The drone parts and control surface actuation is by far harder and I say this as someone who has a professional background in computer science and software engineering.
I don't know why I feel the need to let everyone know the US trained birds to guide bombs in WWII. It seems relevant.
Safely?
You've got enough information to try to execute the above formula. Okay. And you've still got all your fingers after attempting this... more than zero times?
Absolutely. We invented gunpowder centuries before we invented airplanes.
That said... as an anecdote, I had a friend who had a janitorial position. Used a bunch of bleach to clean a particularly stubborn toilet and dumped a bunch of bleach into the bowl. His coworker came in behind him and proceeded to piss in said boil, creating a toxic miasma that forced them to exit the restroom quickly and heavily ventilate it before returning.
"I could cook up some blasting caps with the trash from a frat party" is a theoretically believable claim.
"Every time I clean up a frat party, I add a dozen shaped charges to my inventory" is not.
Lol, I've done that before in my apartment. Guessing it's the same thing as an ammonia-bleach reaction.
urea-bleach but close enough.
Safely? Yes.
Keep the reaction stirring under ice and if you see the temp rise above 15 C you dump the whole thing in a water bucket or you get a runaway exothermic reaction that is never good with a high explosive forming crystals in the solution.
If you are stupid, don’t ventilate, or are stupid stupid it will light your shed on fire and potentially kill you.
That’s why you work at lab scale, and why you always keep your reactions under the temp limits with acids added slowly.
Basic chemistry safety covers all the bases here.
My preferred blasting caps are nickel guanidine based. I can play with the crystal morphology to produce small more friction inert powder and it is an extremely simple synthesis.
You can use reloading press combined with highly suggested lexan sheet as a blast shield and wooden block to gently press the powder into caps. China sells packs of 1000 electrical ignition assemblies for $40 that you can then set off with a COTS or a clacker.
I cannot emphasize enough that working at small scale and knowing what you are doing are important, but in faster time than it takes to print the parts for that drone you can absolutely complete the reaction, do some recrystalizstion, dry your product,and be ready to mix with plasticizer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrzxSOtj33s
The model rocket community has this one sorted.
Oh the ones from BPS space are even more impressive with adjust on the fly tracking to 3D points and launched from a VLS he made himself.
https://xkcd.com/651/
Not my area of expertise, so please tell me if the idea is complete garbage. With that being said: Theoretically, could the LiPo Battery that's already in there anyway be turned into an explosive payload by intentionally overheating and puncturing it on impact?
Turning a laptop battery into a weapon is a non-trivial endeavor. The absurdity of TSA was more their attempt to police based on weak science than the real danger of an airplane full of lithium battery powered devices.
It's not a MANPAD really.
The sensor package has no IR sensor (or radar unit) and no way to proximity fuse.
It has GPS, accelerometer and barometric pressure. It's more like a rocket powered artillery shell than an anti-air weapon.
Or, given the lack of payload, it's more like a high speed burrito delivery device.
See, now you've got my interest.
future Taco Bell vs future Del Taco during dinner rush:
aww i wanted Taco Time
And as we all know, Taco Bell won the Franchise Wars.
Plastic explosive triggered by electrodetonator is quite safe.
Oh, I know this one!
You can deploy a lot of $96 semi-effective hardware and improve it vs something that might be thousands or even tens or hundreds of thousands to deploy.
I’d build and use one of these if I could get the explosives to go with it and the address of a CEO.
The United States has a variant of the AGM-114 Hellfire missile that replaces the explosive warhead with six scimitar blades. Because fuck That Guy, the whole That Guy and nothing but the That Guy.
Which would come as a surprise to hundreds of dead Iranian schoolgirls.
Turns out the military under Trump is more a "fuck that town in particular" affair.
You know, I'm still struggling to believe the story I've been told about that. "The US bombed an elementary school."
For my entire life, the US has demonstrated precision munitions. The AGM-114 Ginsu is an air-to-ground laser-guided rocket that can kill an individual passenger in a car. We can fly a Tomahawk cruise missile into a specific window of a building. I've seen a bridge in Iraq bombed seconds after the last car crossed. Not saying GI Joe is a paragon of virtue, I've seen the pictures from Abu Ghraib, but...That shit sounds a lot more like Israel than us.
Even in the "no kill like overkill" "We don't target coordinates, we target grid squares" "enemy fire is coming from that way, destroy that way" United States, that shit sounds a lot more like Israel than us.
We're certainly attacking Iran because Israel wanted us to.
One of the stills from one of the videos that the BBC showed identifying it as a Tomahawk showed it at a very un-cruise-missile way up, so it could just have malfunctioned during terminal guidance or been clipped but not destroyed by air defence, and then hit the wrong target. It could also just have been a governmenty-looking building close enough to an intended target that whoever was checking it didn't notice it wasn't the target. It's a lot easier to get everything right when the whole mission is to hit one person with one missile when everyone's got enough time to do their job perfectly and everything's been rehearsed than when there are thousands of targets and people are doing things in a rush, especially if orders are coming from people who don't care about international law.
Lol. And that one village in Afghanistan you leveled, looks like who did it?
Oh, don't even pretend anyone cares about Afghanistan.
Yeah I’ve seen those. The mind that thinks up these things aye.
I have this idea: Scientists some time ago, discovered they could knot light into loops.
Would it be possible to make a curved laser for laser artillery?
Certainly possible. But you're still stuck on the r^2^ problem of diminishing returns at a distance. Light doesn't like staying in a tight beam. The vortex loop is typically not much bigger than the wavelength. I don't see much of a solution for transmitting energy long distances through air.
So it would basically be a Warhammer Lascannon, fuck.
You don't need explosives. It has a spot in the front for a camera. One of the new microcontrollers with AI accelerators can do face recognition extremely quickly. It would be possible to use it as an assassination tool.
Even if you changed nothing about the design, the speed and mass of the thing hitting a person in the face could kill.
As the bps space YouTube channel has shown, reliability is paramount in any launch, especially a guided launch.
That and people duck when shit flies at them, unless it's supersonic, which again, as bps space has shown, control of a supersonic flight is extremely difficult to get right.
This is a guy who landed a hobby rocket like a tesla booster.
But at $100 a pop, you could have backups. (or payloads)
Why kill only one when you can do a whole blast and get a multi-kill?
:-/
I think
Is a more accurate assessment.
Atomize * some propelant, boom, explosive.
* english choose the dumbest word for "zerstäuben".
The trick is to get the atomized propelant to "boom, explosive" at the target and not in your backpack.
Also, you probably want a "boom" sufficient to accomplish whatever demolition you're planning, which - again - raises the stakes regarding what's in your backpack.
There's a classic little film called "The Wages of Fear" that explores the hazards of amateurs transporting high explosives over long distances.
There are plenty of very safe HEs.
Tannerite comes to mind. It explodes from a high impact, and little else. I'm not sure what sort of yield you'd get. That stuff mostly just makes a pop and smoke.
I have heard of people using it on stubborn tree stumps, but that's several pounds of the stuff.
I mean, spray the leftover fuel into the oxygen-filled head only on target? It wouldn't stay atomized for long anyway. And for the boom, the shell needs only be strong enough. Wouldn't that work?
Idk, you wanna find out?
Listen, if you've got the specs for military ordinance and want to say "We've done this a thousand times, it works fine" that's one thing.
But it's very much another to just wave your hands and announce "you know, the boom-boom juice goes here and the detonator goes there and it'll probably be fine"... It'll probably do something.
Does that literally mean "make dust"? I think "powderize" might be a better translation in this context, if it's a solid, or "aerosolize" if it's a liquid. I've never been a big fan of the word "atomize" in any case.
Mate, I'll have you know some of my relatives are made of atoms