- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Despite the tech-cool factor of the project, Tom’s Hardware does not condone making your own weapons system at home.
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How does it perform? Besides propelling itself forward? Is there constant thrust maintained with that SRB and is the nozzle holding up? For the fins have any control authority, can it correct course reliably?
It is really cool, but there are a lot of things that need to be either shown or need to be developed further.
He built this in a cave, using scraps? 😯
Honestly I figured an open container of gasoline and a Roman candle could do the job but requires placing the gasoline can. And within Roman candle distance.
Gasoline is an explosive.
Many people don’t really know this. They think it’s like alcohol or lighter fluid.
It is not.
Cue politicians calling to ban 3D printers in 3 … 2 …1 …
Already trying to
Sure, ban hardware stores after that.
Reminds me of a time when I went to a maker space open house, and they were showing all kinds of cool stuff, including fairly advanced 3D printers for time. They mentioned there was programming to halt prints of things like gun parts, so it would be very hard to make guns using them. I commented, “Besides, you can make better ones in the metal shop in the other room.” He replied, “Yeah! <brief pause> No!”
People have been making versions of zip guns forever.
Four Winds Shotgun is a good thing to know about. I don’t think you even need a machine shop.
Is that the sliding pipe gun? I think all you need is materials, a hack saw, and a drill. But with a machine shop, the materials list is just steel and some springs, and you can have a gun as good as any we had prior to the last century.
Stop. Giving. Them. Ideas.
(Kidding. Kindof.)
Philip A. Luty smiles
While I am fully opposed to a 3d printer ban (and abhor the efforts of Bambu et al to sneak that in), it is very important to understand why that is not a fair comparison and, if anything, sets a threshold that can be used to argue FOR a ban.
I’ve ranted in detail before so I’ll do the short version this time:
You are not going to make a barrel or springs yourself. And the good news is that you don’t need to. None of that is a controlled/registered part (for the vast majority of guns) and you can literally buy those at a walmart equivalent. And there at least used to be pre-packaged bundles available online for your ghost gun needs.
So that mostly leaves the receiver and fire control unit. I will bet you money that giving a rando off the street 24 hours to figure out how to go to the local communal machine shop and make even a frigging sten and they will fail miserably. Whereas there are videos (fuck vice for how they abused their workers but old-vice has a really good video where they literally made the gun Luigi allegedly used) of people going from 0 to glock in 12 hours of print time and 4-5 hours of filing. I forget if they actually made a silencer or not (since that is a really dark grey area legally) but that is also very printable.
And that is the big difference. How much that matters when you are considering a country where you can buy the same gear that Tier 1 Special Forces use to abduct (admittedly really shitty) world leaders for under a thousand bucks is a HUGE question. But from the “ghost gun” perspective? There is VERY much a big difference between having a CNC and machining a receiver+FCU versus doing the same with an Ender 3.
Why don’t they make firing chambers and barrels out of plastic? Are gun makers stupid?
Washington state already started making moves against it, as an attempt to prevent 3D printed firearm components. Specifically, it requires 3D printers sold within the state to have firmware-based scanning to cancel prints it suspects are used for firearms, alongside criminalizing the possession of files ruled as ‘firearm compoments’.
One bill is in the House, the other passed into law. Gonna make it a real rough ride ahead for tinkerers into 3D printing, especially if we’ve gotta design around “Oh boy, I sure hope my pencil holder doesnt get flagged as an illegal item.”
Edit: One of two bills passed: HB2320 and HB2321. HB2320 is currently law, and HB2321 is awaiting presentation to the House.
I’m imagining a bunch of first amendment challenges to these laws
In this shithole? Good luck. They do whatever they want regardless of whatever rights you think you have.
Yea that’s true
California is joining in too with AB-2047 and New York has AB-2228 requiring a criminal background check for buying a 3D printer.
Good fucking luck. That’s completely impossible
One passed, the other has yet to be presented. These legislators have no clue how they’d even do it, but circumventing the scan is also made illegal.
So yeah, flashing Open-Source firmware is something they dont like either, but fingers crossed they just choose to not allocate resources to enforcement. Wouldn’t be surprised if this 3D printed missile mentioned in the article above comes up ad a taking point during the legislative hearings.
Sounds like something that wouldn’t be worth going out of the way to enforce. But rather used to tack on extra charges when someone commits another crime where the extra level of investigation would uncover the flashed firmware. Not that it would do much to deter or prevent what they’re afraid of from happening.
Doesn’t matter if it’s passed or not. It’s not possible to implement, and therefore completely unenforceable. Legislation cannot change the fundamental limits of software.
This is either a blanket ban on all 3D printers, or none of them.
Or a way to arbitrarily charge anyone or to add to anyone’s charges in case they own something that fits the bill.
GitHub gives 404. Only the tracking nodes is available.
I wanted to see if they actually made something.
https://github.com/novatic14/MANPADS-System-Launcher-and-Rocket
That link on the video is bad. Just look at his profile.
Thanks!
Ignoring the legal repercussions of this:
Most of this makes sense. Stingers go back to the late 70s (?) and most of what we see used in Ukraine is closer to a decade old than not (and based on even older tech). Tech advances and what used to be hard becomes cheap.
That said? I would be very curious how this handles inclement weather. Wind and rain are a mofo and that (among other reasons) is why model rockets and the like are only ever really flown on beautiful clear days. And I don’t know enough about how the communication with javelin et als work these days but wifi seems REAL questionable.
Still. This is a really cool project and really speaks to the changing nature of warfare. And, once again, highlights the real reason so much money has gone into FDM processes.
highlights the real reason so much money has gone into FDM processes.
That’s really a stretch. Fdm printing was held back for decades because of patents. If militaries/governments actually knew what it was worth they would’ve worked to fix that a lot quicker.
More likely is that fdm printing became so popular because of how easy it is to make a cheap printer and how useful a tool it is for, frankly, most anything. Weapons are only a small slice of what a good printer can actually do.
Of note, the reaction to having 3d printers capable of making weapon parts has resulted in legislation to limit 3d printer access, not to expand it.
https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/05/ghost_gun_legislation_3d_printing/
Additive manufacturing (of which FDM is one of the most accessible techniques) has been a MASSIVE funding source amongst world governments over the past 20+ years. And much of the research that made Reprap (et al) came out of scientists who specialized in those technologies for those grants.
Why? Because NO country is ready for a war. The US military is the most bloated military on the planet and Iran (and supporting Ukraine prior) has made it clear that we are desperately terrified of actually using our stockpiles.
Because, as Ukraine has reminded us, basically EVERYTHING is a consumable. The numbers get murky and depressing but I want to say I saw reports that small arms had a lifespan of less than a year under heavy use (either lost due to casualties or just degraded to the point that full replacement parts become a need). And if you roll back to the last time there was such mass industrialization to support war efforts… it is basically WW2. And there is a reason the guns in 1939 had wood furniture and were “built to last” and the guns in 1944 were basically stamped sheet metal where you were more likely to die of tetanus than lead poisoning (I mostly kid).
So what does that have to do with additive manufacturing? Because the push to convert factories meant basically ANYTHING with a lathe or even an early CNC machine were required and the only way to convert those factories involved incredibly expensive processes as essentially the entire floor was rebuilt and restructured to shift from cars to tanks or saxophones to stens.
Whereas additive manufacturing? Regardless of process, the Dream is that you just upload a new STL file and that gets you 90% of the way there. You still need to do some reconfiguring for finishing processes but it is MUCH MUCH MUCH cheaper. And, in theory, you can have the same factory output tank, jet, boat, and gun parts depending on the need.
And… from a homefront defense perspective, you can have hitler youth groups or resistance fighters making a lot of their own replacement parts in a closet rather than an automotive garage. Let alone print farms. Need a new upper receiver because yours caught a bullet? Go ask the kid from Home Alone 5 to print you one and you are back in action.
But, much like with drones, the inevitable happened. By using consumers to subsidize so much of the R&D work (there is a reason bambu et al insist that EVERYONE needs a multi-filament system and the ability to switch toolheads and…) means that the capability of the hobbyist caught up really quick. And, much like with drones, there is a frantic attempt to use legislature to put the genie back in the bottle.
Additive manufacturing (of which FDM is one of the most accessible techniques) has been a MASSIVE funding source amongst world governments over the past 20+ years.
I’d love your sources for this.
If you want to do a deep dive into funding and grant structure, I suggest actually looking up your favorite country’s call for proposals venues. In the US that used to be the NSF (https://www.nsf.gov/focus-areas/manufacturing). Or you can look up how big various research groups are (the UK have some truly massive additive manufacturing groups).
Or just plug your ears because… I don’t even know why. You do you.
Or just plug your ears because… I don’t even know why. You do you.
If you ever received any pushback on this theory, this is why. Asking for evidence is not “plugging my ears”. Incredible claims require incredible evidence, and you have provided nothing beyond a single link to the NSF, which is literally a government agency made for funding research into making literally everything. That’s not funding additive manufacturing for war purposes. That’s funding for all of the manufacturing methods because it’s just good fucking sense as a government to keep your technological edge.
You also included all (or many) of the wofld governments, not just the USA in your claim. Your half ass source doesn’t even include any government other than the USA.
Forgive me for not immediately trusting that the world governments are all funding additive manufactueing specifically to make war more efficient when you can’t even try to source anything beyond just the USA nsf.
Incredible claims require incredible evidence,
Because it isn’t an “incredible claim”. ANYONE who has done STEM research in the past 20 years has likely worked on or known someone who worked on a grant related to additive manufacturing. Like, even a lot of the more pure math/CS folk have likely gotten some funding related to that. Even if it is just stealing food from a material science/mechanical engineering buffet table (or they weren’t paying attention to what kind of science those big computers were supposed to run…).
Not to mention the massive rise of additive manufacturing in the consumer space which comes from the industrial space which is what said government funding drives.
I told you how to look things up. I didn’t look up the specific funding source and country you live in because you have google. And, honestly, you seem like you are just looking for an excuse to not believe this for whatever reason. So I could have used archive.org or whatever to get a list of all the NSF grants from 2005 related to this. And it is very obvious you would have then gotten angry that i didn’t do it for 2004 or 2006 and I only did the NSF and not the French equivalent or… We call that “arguing in bad faith”, by the way.
Being skeptical is good. Rather than throw a hissy and ignore everything else (where I explained WHY governments want this and even put it into the context of what happens when a war moves beyond subjugating Brown People™), consider actually doing some basic research yourself.
I can’t be arsed to remember the major funding sources that UK researchers rely on (been quite some time) but “queen liz science org additive manufacturing” is a good search string.
But hey, if you want to keep believing nobody could possibly have foreseen any of this and all those mechanical engineers with a focus on manufacturing who drove RepRap came out of nowhere and Bambu Labs is the entire reason that there is a pretty big industry based around smaller versions of industry tools… have fun?
Sorry. Do you need me to prove that Bambu Labs exists for you? Or that the UK had a Queen named Liz? Or has royalty at all? Because your tuchus has google.
… Shit. Did you need me to document that there was a World War 2 (which would, of course, require proving that there was a World War 1. And then explaining that most documents on that refer to it as “The Great War” until after the 1940s and…)? Or that stamped metal guns existed? Oh, except that is irrelevant because rifles still tended to have wooden stocks all throughout the war so obviously a discussion of cheap machine guns is irrelevant and people are trying to get one over on you.
You’ve missed my point. Obviously governments fund manufacturing stuff, including 3d printing. Obviously governments also fund research into better war technology, like with boing and everyone else. You’ve proved the point of that several times over.
What I’m asking for is evidence that 3d printing was funded specifically with war in mind, especially from 20 years ago (as compared to five years ago with the advent of the ukraine/russia war).
When I first asked about this, I didn’t think it would be such a hassle, and I had actually hoped to see a neat article about the history of 3d printing and how it’s been specifically developed as a way to make better weapons for over twenty years. What I got was scorn, mocking, and questioning of my basic mental capacity because I … Couldn’t do the research myself?
Correlation is not causation. The government funds boatloads of shit that doesn’t work out, in the hopes that it becomes eventually useful. The covid19 vaccine was under development since the early 2000s because of swine flu. Is it right for me to say that government expected the swine flu to be used for war purposes because they funded research into it, or would you ask for more details about how the swine flu vaccine was specifically war-related research before beleiving my wild claims?
