When everyone started working on 3D-printed guns, I was sitting here thinking that if it comes to actual revolution, one is going to need anti-tank/anti-air a whole lot more than (relatively easy to acquire) small arms... Nice to see movement on this front
In the American context, hopefully it never comes to an actual revolution, because life for everyone will be much, much worse with little prospect of anything being better afterward. We should do what we can to avoid one, especially because while it's fun to fantasize about your side being the one to start a revolution, there's no reason to think that the other side won't also think the same way and maybe they'll beat your side and make your life really, really awful.
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.
> hopefully it never comes to an actual revolution, because life for everyone will be much, much worse with little prospect of anything being better afterward.
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.
Exactly. Revolutions are awful things that are only defensible if the conditions are brutal enough. And even then, there has to be the caution that the revolution can be co-opted by infinitely worse people than those that were overthrown (take the Russian revolution, for example)
If its a revolution you probably aren't hitting them 40k in the air, your hitting them when they park similar to how Ukraine sent drones after bombers behind enemy lines. I really hope we can avoid any kind of conflict, with the way American's think I could see one or both sides resorting to biological/chemical weapons faster than they start making missiles. There is also no reason to assume what starts out as your side will remain such, revolutions are crazy risky.
Everyone with the “only solution is revolution” mentality needs to read this comment. Anyone salivating over/romanticizing armed conflict has never experienced it and can’t fathom how awful it is. I know I can’t, and that’s why I don’t want to find out.
Anyone salivating over/romanticizing surrendering to a dictatorship hellbent on committing genocide has never experienced it and can't fathom how awful it is. I know I can't, and that's why I don't want to find out.
From my experiences with the YPG in the Syrian Civil War --- You'd be surprised how many people that have seen combat absolutely loved it. There was one guy that would go in a state of ecstasy while being shot at, literally expressing happily "ha ha they try to shoot me" and this is a guy who had seen many of his comrades die. Once you accept you are dead it's actually far less mundane than normal life, while at the same time you have a fairly straightforward sense of meaning and purpose. Plus life is much simpler -- 99% of (that) war is just standing guard, smoking cigarette, drinking tea, moving sandbags, etc, 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'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.
Times have changed since then but the first Chechen war heavily works against the theory of your second paragraph. Instrumental was their seizure of anti-tank and heavy weaponry during ambushes of Russian forces entering into Grozny and other chokepoints. Eventually they used these weapons to capture even more heavy weapons and then won a few years of outright independence.
It didn't exactly matter in the end. Russia eventually encircled them with artillery and pounded them until they gave up and brokered a deal. Their fighting skills and spirit have since been added as an asset on the Russian military's balance sheet.
In order for that to happen, there has to be a way for regular people to live good lives without needing a revolution. Unfortunately, the Epstein class has and is doing everything in their power to get rid of those alternatives.
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:
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:
you could have started a war with your neighbors using only sticks and stones - indeed, much of human history is people starting wars with their neighbors using weapons that we today would call primitive.
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
In the two test launches shown in the video, the "missile" doesn't fly straight nor does it demonstrate ability to be "guided" by the launcher towards any particular target.
It's also incredibly slow. There are children's rocket kits that fly significantly faster than this.
Yeah, neither article nor the video itself talks about "accuracy" AFAIK, which seems like a kind of important thing in this whole concept, otherwise it's just a "horizontal rocket launcher" which is cool I guess, but not so close to a MANPAD.
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
The engine and the warhead are two of the biggest challenges in making a missile, in large part because anything high performance is also going to be spectacularly dangerous to manufacture.
I frankly would care little about the speed; it can always be improved with a better propellant. I would care about a cheap ability to guide the rocket. If it's there, it may be consequential for a real (para)military application.
(A quadcopter is perfectly guidable, but it must be slower than a rocket, and costs more than $96.)
I think this violates ITAR. You aren't allowed put a guidance system on a rocket. And even if you were allowed to do it for your own fun/education, you certainly aren't allowed to provide instructions to foreign entities about how it do it.
It's life imprisonment just to possess a launcher (not even the rocket) that is intended to launch a rocket/missile that guides towards an aircraft. And the guy has another youtube short where he explicitly says the intended guidance system is cameras that update the location of a missile and then he shows a real drone and also the emblem of an aircraft as intended targets for this guidance system, while also calling it a MANPADS launcher.
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.
I think ultimately it's a consequence of weapons manufacturers in the US is trying to make their products sound more impressive, and in general military terminology is a huge nonsensical mess.
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...
Guided missile launchers are weapons systems, because the projectile and the launcher each are a component of a complete system which requires significant technology. This is in contrast to a firearm, which has all of the technology in the gun and not the ammunition (for the most part) or more simply a knife or sword.
I suppose I'd say: well, no, a gun's ammunition does something significant, but also even if that disambiguation were necessary in a particular circumstance, this article is not that.
I will be a negative yancy, and regurgitate things from the previous thread in combination with my pattern-matching brain and experience with making UAS firmware/hardware etc.
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.
A slingshot is a MANPADS. It's not a very good one, but it's portable, and an air defense system. The Fliegerfaust was a manpads, and it just yeeted a few tubes into the air.
Regardless of whether this actually works (I have my doubts, but also understand it might be difficult to get range time on a device like this :)), it exposes a fundamental issue with arms control today.
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.
These discussions always focus around enforcement and never on alignment. The moat for this stuff historically has never been strict enforcement; it has been that the people who have the know-how on how to do it have nothing to gain by doing it, since they are well-educated and benefit from the current socioeconomic order (they have no motive to change it; rather, they want to climb it).
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.
> The root of the issue is that the government does not trust its citizenry to follow the law without Big Brother watching.
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.
your argument here rests on whether someone with the know how to do these types of things will not be able to find a job in the near future. I’d call this unlikely
I am certainly pro T2A but your argument doesn't hold - laws to regulate arms are not effective only in a binary way - if they reduce the number of arms they are doing what they say on the tin.
Whether we should be trying to regulate arms is another issue.
I am not arguing laws need to be binary-effective. You are right, most of the current laws are designed to slowly erode public support for the 2nd amendment by making the barrier to entry so absurdly high that the average person cannot feasibly own firearms.
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 see it the other way round: there's no way to achieve public safety without drastically reduced gun ideology and availability, but there's no way to do that while the second amendment is in place, so you get both illiberal, ineffective and irrelevant laws and regular mass shootings.
Obama and Biden were the best gun salesman the USA has had in awhile. It's not clear they reduce the number of arms, depending on the culture. In USA culture we've seen the number of arms in civilian hands expand even as regulations increase.
I think with the proliferation and effectiveness of countermeasures passive target acquisition and first shot accuracy with traditional ballistic methods might be a better place to focus but I understand that's very hard to do nonprofessionally as an individual thanks to the rules and laws.
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.
When everyone started working on 3D-printed guns, I was sitting here thinking that if it comes to actual revolution, one is going to need anti-tank/anti-air a whole lot more than (relatively easy to acquire) small arms... Nice to see movement on this front
In the American context, hopefully it never comes to an actual revolution, because life for everyone will be much, much worse with little prospect of anything being better afterward. We should do what we can to avoid one, especially because while it's fun to fantasize about your side being the one to start a revolution, there's no reason to think that the other side won't also think the same way and maybe they'll beat your side and make your life really, really awful.
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.
> hopefully it never comes to an actual revolution, because life for everyone will be much, much worse with little prospect of anything being better afterward.
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.
Exactly. Revolutions are awful things that are only defensible if the conditions are brutal enough. And even then, there has to be the caution that the revolution can be co-opted by infinitely worse people than those that were overthrown (take the Russian revolution, for example)
If its a revolution you probably aren't hitting them 40k in the air, your hitting them when they park similar to how Ukraine sent drones after bombers behind enemy lines. I really hope we can avoid any kind of conflict, with the way American's think I could see one or both sides resorting to biological/chemical weapons faster than they start making missiles. There is also no reason to assume what starts out as your side will remain such, revolutions are crazy risky.
Everyone with the “only solution is revolution” mentality needs to read this comment. Anyone salivating over/romanticizing armed conflict has never experienced it and can’t fathom how awful it is. I know I can’t, and that’s why I don’t want to find out.
Anyone salivating over/romanticizing surrendering to a dictatorship hellbent on committing genocide has never experienced it and can't fathom how awful it is. I know I can't, and that's why I don't want to find out.
From my experiences with the YPG in the Syrian Civil War --- You'd be surprised how many people that have seen combat absolutely loved it. There was one guy that would go in a state of ecstasy while being shot at, literally expressing happily "ha ha they try to shoot me" and this is a guy who had seen many of his comrades die. Once you accept you are dead it's actually far less mundane than normal life, while at the same time you have a fairly straightforward sense of meaning and purpose. Plus life is much simpler -- 99% of (that) war is just standing guard, smoking cigarette, drinking tea, moving sandbags, etc, 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'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.
Times have changed since then but the first Chechen war heavily works against the theory of your second paragraph. Instrumental was their seizure of anti-tank and heavy weaponry during ambushes of Russian forces entering into Grozny and other chokepoints. Eventually they used these weapons to capture even more heavy weapons and then won a few years of outright independence.
It didn't exactly matter in the end. Russia eventually encircled them with artillery and pounded them until they gave up and brokered a deal. Their fighting skills and spirit have since been added as an asset on the Russian military's balance sheet.
Right but seizing military equipment and building your own are very different things.
In order for that to happen, there has to be a way for regular people to live good lives without needing a revolution. Unfortunately, the Epstein class has and is doing everything in their power to get rid of those alternatives.
America is not going to have a Tahrir Square. It just about managed Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter.
On the defensive side, see perhaps this phased array radar system with an 20km range:
* https://github.com/NawfalMotii79/PLFM_RADAR
Expanding on that, for interest:
* 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...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_E-7_Wedgetail
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_E-7_Wedgetail
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-...
What a time to be alive.
In fact, I think I now have all I need to start a war with my neighbours.
you could have started a war with your neighbors using only sticks and stones - indeed, much of human history is people starting wars with their neighbors using weapons that we today would call primitive.
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
For the non-Americans, the modern technology you're referring to is the HOA.
Lol!
> you now can annihilate them [...] from a comfortable distance
The problem is: they can, too.
How is DIY radar regulated by the FCC?
Emitting in the regulated part of the spectrum must comply with the regulations, regardless of the origin of the transmitter.
You need a license for most frequencies.
In the two test launches shown in the video, the "missile" doesn't fly straight nor does it demonstrate ability to be "guided" by the launcher towards any particular target.
It's also incredibly slow. There are children's rocket kits that fly significantly faster than this.
Yeah, neither article nor the video itself talks about "accuracy" AFAIK, which seems like a kind of important thing in this whole concept, otherwise it's just a "horizontal rocket launcher" which is cool I guess, but not so close to a MANPAD.
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
Baby steps ... with a few more contributors, this could be turned into, say, a $500.00 missile that works quite effectively.
The engine and the warhead are two of the biggest challenges in making a missile, in large part because anything high performance is also going to be spectacularly dangerous to manufacture.
I frankly would care little about the speed; it can always be improved with a better propellant. I would care about a cheap ability to guide the rocket. If it's there, it may be consequential for a real (para)military application.
(A quadcopter is perfectly guidable, but it must be slower than a rocket, and costs more than $96.)
Guidance systems have speed limitations. Just because it works when slow does not mean it will work if you upgrade propellant.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47385935 (439 points 3 days ago, 388 comments)
I think this violates ITAR. You aren't allowed put a guidance system on a rocket. And even if you were allowed to do it for your own fun/education, you certainly aren't allowed to provide instructions to foreign entities about how it do it.
It absolutely does. So many youtube projects do! Autonomous drones? Sorry, that's a guidance system.
(Edit: ^f 'itar' brought me straight here)
It's life imprisonment just to possess a launcher (not even the rocket) that is intended to launch a rocket/missile that guides towards an aircraft. And the guy has another youtube short where he explicitly says the intended guidance system is cameras that update the location of a missile and then he shows a real drone and also the emblem of an aircraft as intended targets for this guidance system, while also calling it a MANPADS launcher.
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.
That man must really hate his dog. I'm sure there's some ATF agents just salivating to Waco this guy.
Here's a link to the actual video:
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 expect the Yautja to file a patent infringement.
> Despite the tech-cool factor of the project, Tom's Hardware does not condone making your own weapons system at home.
Not that this matters for the topic, but I don't see why people have started saying "weapons system" instead of "weapon".
price bump -> value alignment
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
lmao so true
I think ultimately it's a consequence of weapons manufacturers in the US is trying to make their products sound more impressive, and in general military terminology is a huge nonsensical mess.
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...
Guided missile launchers are weapons systems, because the projectile and the launcher each are a component of a complete system which requires significant technology. This is in contrast to a firearm, which has all of the technology in the gun and not the ammunition (for the most part) or more simply a knife or sword.
I suppose I'd say: well, no, a gun's ammunition does something significant, but also even if that disambiguation were necessary in a particular circumstance, this article is not that.
> This is in contrast to a firearm
This changed long ago. Optic, light, IR illuminator, IR pointer, NVG/thermals. The rifle or carbine is now a component of the weapon system.
Nobody has started saying weapon systems instead of weapon. Its just precise terminology.
I will be a negative yancy, and regurgitate things from the previous thread in combination with my pattern-matching brain and experience with making UAS firmware/hardware etc.
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.
A slingshot is a MANPADS. It's not a very good one, but it's portable, and an air defense system. The Fliegerfaust was a manpads, and it just yeeted a few tubes into the air.
Regardless of whether this actually works (I have my doubts, but also understand it might be difficult to get range time on a device like this :)), it exposes a fundamental issue with arms control today.
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.
These discussions always focus around enforcement and never on alignment. The moat for this stuff historically has never been strict enforcement; it has been that the people who have the know-how on how to do it have nothing to gain by doing it, since they are well-educated and benefit from the current socioeconomic order (they have no motive to change it; rather, they want to climb it).
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.
> The root of the issue is that the government does not trust its citizenry to follow the law without Big Brother watching.
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.
your argument here rests on whether someone with the know how to do these types of things will not be able to find a job in the near future. I’d call this unlikely
I am certainly pro T2A but your argument doesn't hold - laws to regulate arms are not effective only in a binary way - if they reduce the number of arms they are doing what they say on the tin.
Whether we should be trying to regulate arms is another issue.
I am not arguing laws need to be binary-effective. You are right, most of the current laws are designed to slowly erode public support for the 2nd amendment by making the barrier to entry so absurdly high that the average person cannot feasibly own firearms.
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 see it the other way round: there's no way to achieve public safety without drastically reduced gun ideology and availability, but there's no way to do that while the second amendment is in place, so you get both illiberal, ineffective and irrelevant laws and regular mass shootings.
Obama and Biden were the best gun salesman the USA has had in awhile. It's not clear they reduce the number of arms, depending on the culture. In USA culture we've seen the number of arms in civilian hands expand even as regulations increase.
A prototype without an explosive warhead? Congrats on doing the easy bits.
And this is why it will soon be a felony to possess hollow cylinder CAD or CNC files in the state of Washington.
Your used wrapping paper tubes are munitions.
why? what's happening with the world?
This guy is so preoccupied with whether or not he COULD manufacture his own guided missile, he didn’t stop to think if he SHOULD.
Of course he could, anyone can these days. So the most important question is the latter.
If he can get a good cheap design to Ukraine - without Russia getting a hold of it - he should.
old article but still relevant. some things don't change
I think with the proliferation and effectiveness of countermeasures passive target acquisition and first shot accuracy with traditional ballistic methods might be a better place to focus but I understand that's very hard to do nonprofessionally as an individual thanks to the rules and laws.
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.
> $1k active countermeasures
Sure you didn't forget a few zeros there bud?
They are currently trying to shoot down Iranian drones with $4 million Patriot missiles
>Sure you didn't forget a few zeros there bud?
The IR flare or 30mm bullets or whatever, not the whole system that fires it.
This is called the shot exchange problem and is a very, very active area of work.
We might want to prepare ourselves for the fact that the Strait of Hormuz might not be reopened to US traffic any time in the near future.