How to build a real home made rocket Launcher !

To start this article let me state categorically, that I wont provide any actual step by step instruction nor would I tell you where to acquire material needed for various parts of the completed assembly. This would just be a general outline, a kind of sub-urban vigilante’s guideline to this weapon of war. Also, I must state that I am an engineer and I really know what I am talking about, however I have never made one myself as i didnt really know how to proceed and I spent most of the infamous ‘”idle years of youth” in boarding school !

My motivation for writing this article is because of all the idiotic and asinine “home made rocket launcher” videos that stupid kids and other dumb rednecks have put up on Youtube and other sites. The nation that put the man on the moon has it idiot youth fooling around with no idea of how to go about doing a proper job. If you consider the worst case prospect of either having to participate in a civil war, insurrection, civil defense initiative etc. Building a workable rocket launcher would a great asset over the other side that invests thousands of dollars on fancy junk.

Now coming to the rocket launcher. First, to build something, people need to understand what they are building. Most people know that a rocket launcher is a rocket with an explosive war head but when they try to replicate it, they forget about either the rocket or the explosive. People spend more time on the launcher than on the projectile where as it should be the other way around. Another critically important thing is that a shoulder fired rocket is significantly different from a vertically launched rocket even thought they generally have all the same parts, they are set up differently.

There are three basic components of the rocket launcher. The explosive munition, the rocket and the launcher. Their order of importance is also as stated from greatest to least important and should be built in that order. The most important component is of course the explosive munition or warhead. There are many basic ways to go about building this. The most obvious method would be to combine existing small explosives together to build a more powerful explosive like putting together a lot of fireworks bombs or such ( There is a caveat here, if you are say an individual, who possesses plastic explosives based off RDX or have live grenades or breaching charges or any small explosive with a diameter of about 2 inches, you are in luck and skip the next sentence ! ). This however is a foolish approach because: a) the ultimate device would be heavier than an explosive made for the specific purpose and b) it would less effective (ie. have a smaller blast force ) than a custom explosive. The most obvious course is to prepare explosives custom made for the warhead. But there is one very important thing to consider while thinking of doing so. You have to consider that your warhead has to explode on impact, so your warhead has to be easy to detonate with a minimum (and SAFE) shock wave. This doesnt NOT mean you can use nitroglycerin or some thing equally unstable and dangerous nor should you choose something ridiculously stable like ammonium nitrate. The most easiest way to do this is to first choose an easy detonation method and then find the most easy and powerful explosive for that detonator. Here, the easiest method would be either a small charge of black powder charge or an electrical charge. Typically, it would be best to use something already prefabricated like a blasting cap or some sort of electronic sensor as a detonator. Remember, weight is a constraint that we are trying to circumvent and having a small detonator is something we are striving for. Coming to the explosive material, there are tonnes of options depending on your ability to make them and procure the ingredients. The  choice is left to you and I wont be  saying what to use expect that do not use Black powder as an explosive.

After you have chosen an explosive and have made it, make sure you have enough because you dont want to find out that the amount of explosive you’ve made is not enough or not as per your required needs. Your first job would be to test it ‘raw’ i.e without any forcing or focusing mechanism like a pipe etc. Here effort must be made to determine its stability, so you understand how stable the material is fully before you build the main device. The main concept behind this is for the builder to develop a better idea as to how to proceed in actually shaping a warhead for your rocket. Now, comes a critical step that will determine every step that follows it. Choosing the size of your warhead. By size I mean to imply, the space you are planning to use for the explosive munition part of your weapon; this includes impact detonator + explosive + shrapnel + forcing mechanism like metal pipe, a rigid sphere etc. Also take into account the fact that your explosive device should reasonably conform to either a small sphere of diameter 1-2 inches or a pipe of diameter 1-2 inches. I suggest going with a pipe as more explosive can be packed together along with the shrapnel. Also another advantage of the pipe assembly is that a smaller diameter pipe can be used with greater length without severely compromising the overall structure of the rocket vehicle. I mentioned shrapnel earlier and it is important to consider that I was thinking about an anti-personnel explosive. Should you plan on building an armor piecing explosive, you would need to be able to build your charge with a proper focusing mechanism that would increase the blast force on the frontal arc of the rocket. The shrapnel in this case would be unnecessary and would be replaced with a shaped metal projectile ahead of the explosive to penetrate the armor. But I digress.

Initially build at least 4-5 explosive rocket warheads from the explosive of your choice, the shape of your charge along with shrapnel/metal projectile, impact detonator, explosive and everything else that would essentially make up the warhead. Now, you would need to test at least 2 warheads from the lot you have made. You have to test them after you have built all 4-5 devices first. This is done so that you know that your warhead is a) reliable b) you have assembled your warhead properly and c) you understand clearly the effect of your warhead within its blast radius. Testing the warhead with the impact detonator is of critical importance in validating your design as well as the saftey of your device. There are a couple of standard and safe ways to test your warhead. The first and safest way would be to find an open ground and dig a small hole roughly half a foot deep. Bury the warhead pointing towards the sky with the detonator contact exposed. Now to set off the explosive one would need to set off the detonator. This can be done by two ways. Either use a pistol or rifle to set off the detonator or you can arrange a pole parallel to the buried warhead and rig a weight to drop onto the warhead with a pulley mechanism and rope from safety. There is yet another way which is easier yet also very dangerous to test your warhead. That would be dropping it from a height. You can do this from the top of an abandoned building or from the top of a cliff face. It is important to not gather attention towards yourself or do unnecessary damage to life or property during this phase.

Now, after successfully establishing the safety of your explosive device. You are ready to begin construction of your rocket mechanism. This is a very enjoyable phase of the development and much less difficult. The method I describe here would be mostly applicable if you reside inside the USA or Canada and have access to hobby and chemical stores inside the US. If not, you would have to spend more effort in manufacturing the propellants and assembling the rocket motor . Preparing rocket propellent is significantly easier than manufacturing explosives because the rate of combustion is not as high as explosives and he material is more stable, however all precautions during the handling process apply. I am now going to work with the assumption that one has access to rocket motors available in the US to all adults. I would say the best options for a beginner would be to start off with a B grade rocket engine model rocket. This rocket dissected would give all the basic mechanisms of a rocket in great detail and thus would be very helpful guide to basic rocketry should you be uninitiated. 

To be continued……………..

Twitter’s Quitters and Tumblr’s Bumblers; the inanity of the cyber persona

Anybody who has been concious for the last few months and has perused what today passes for “NEWS” would have undoubtably come across atleast 5 to 10 articles pertaining to the utterly inane and utterly pointless phenomena of “mico-blogging” (as they would like to call it! ); the narcissistic and lazy attempt at blogging about the minute of people’s pathetic everyday lives that truly offer no value whatsoever to the sane and the reasonable. I take umbrage at the very idea of “micro-blogging” at various levels.

Let me first start from a first person perspective.
The idea that one should/would want to share little 150 character snippets about your daily activities for strangers and friends to follow is quite frankly disturbing and borderline psychotic. To do this one would actually have to assume that the trivia of their lives is actually of some value to others and to have cultivated an unhealthy sense of self;  the first step towards egomania and the cult personality. And as if the world doesnt have enough “personalities” to contend with in the normal media, these services only seek to create new esoteric and trivial personalities with no real contributions or real accomplishments. One example I can think of is this guy called “Robert Scoble” a blogger who dabbles in technology and peddles services and software for anybody willing to write him a check. His only real contribution has been to manufacture his own celebrity as some kind of geek commentator.

Secondly, the idea that 150 charecters is sufficient to actually convey to your “audience” your little snippet of activities/thoughts/ideas/interests/discoveries etc is truly ridiculous. It is like hearkening back to the days of the telegraph where disjointed sentences strung together in a desperate bid to convey your message. It simply provides too little information at a time to be of any productive use to anybody. It would be understandable however if the service provided a condensed summary of blogs/news articles/analysis etc where a “user” could get a crux of the information and read more if it interested or concerned him or her, however n its present form of 150 charecters it is utterly useless beyond a doubt.