Can terrorists use RC mini cruise missiles?

That's an interesting question. If IT technology is so common today and rocket technology is so advanced, Bin Laden could have his boys make him mini-homemade RC cruise missiles. They could study in a country where you could get computer programming/engineering for a cheap price like the Philippines ($1,000.00 per semester) and they could build small Katyusha-type cruise missiles that could hit short range targets. Like as far as about 5,000 ft. above So lets see what you have to say

ooo its perfectly posible for terrorist to arm them selfs with RC flying bombs.


When you say rc most people think little light 3 foot wing span aircraft.

With pulse jet tech for model plains at the state it is in it can give out 130lb of trust at a weight of 8 pounds. mount 2 of these on a plain and you could fly at 200+ miles a hour and carry 150-200lb of high order explosives with out much problem. Or if you in the drug smug biz then 150-200 lb of weed/coke/meth.

There was a guy, I believe in New Zeland, who was doing just that to prove a point. He was building his own cruise missile, with commercial GPS for autonomous flight.

We did a sort of mini cruise missile at work a few years back. The prototype was an RC plane with a camera up front and a roll autopilot that kept it flat in the turns. The final design was about three feet long and 4" diameter. Electric powered with a thermal battery putting out 50V at 100A for several minutes. It was fiber optic guided and quietly launched from its tube with an air bag. Very low signature.

The payload was pretty small, a few pounds, but the plan was to fly through a window or something similar, so a large warhead wasn't needed.

It was a lot of fun. Did a lot of flying and testing.

It's definatly a plausible idea. Of course you don't even need for it to be a rocket. A simple propeller plane could do the job just as well at a lower cost. Either way I could see this happening. The only two factors limiting such an idea are payload and range.

Payload could be negotiated by the use of video cameras for high precision, such as flying through a window as somebody mentioned. That coupled with some more advanced explosives, C4's pretty good, could do plenty of damage. Plus the concept of terrorism doesn't need really big blasts. Just so long as they can hit the target in a dramatic way is all thats needed.

As for range, well that can't be helped. Short of some pretty high grade military technology, you'll probably need to be within a few miles tops. Of course so long as you're in the same country I don't suppose that range matters, so long as you're not attacking a military base.

My final analysis is that they may not be capable of bringing down most buildings, they could definatly cause quite a bit of panic. Thanks to the ease of such an attack, quite a few coordinated at once could cause massive problems if let lose in several major cities.

that said, i think that guidance is not much of a problem, and therefore payload and range are grately increased. i mean, if you lanch a simple modle rocket, with some nitro glicerin in it, and your launching it where it will do the most damige nomater what ( a big city ) it dosent realy matter WHERE it hits its more a question of HOW MUCH it does when it hits. if its mini and homemade you cant expect huge amounts of casualtys, but you could cause a HUGE panic, in addition to lots of property damidge.
imagine you had built a rocket with wingflaps on the sides, aim it in the general direction of a city, arm it with some explosives, and send it on its way. if its a big city, say NY, and since its so small, no one would notice, or if they did they wouldent care what it was, and since NY is so big it would have to hit SOMEWHERE, therefore doing lots of damidge and causing a panic

Is it possible? Yes, Is it probable? NO.
Terrorist probably won't do this, they want destruction a big scale like 9/11 a few RC planes is not going to suffice them.

Originally posted by bj
There was a guy, I believe in New Zeland, who was doing just that to prove a point. He was building his own cruise missile, with commercial GPS for autonomous flight.

We did a sort of mini cruise missile at work a few years back. The prototype was an RC plane with a camera up front and a roll autopilot that kept it flat in the turns. The final design was about three feet long and 4" diameter. Electric powered with a thermal battery putting out 50V at 100A for several minutes. It was fiber optic guided and quietly launched from its tube with an air bag. Very low signature.

The payload was pretty small, a few pounds, but the plan was to fly through a window or something similar, so a large warhead wasn't needed.

It was a lot of fun. Did a lot of flying and testing.

What was the range??
Looks more like a guided missile than a cruise missile..
What thernal battery did you use??
50V/100A

Well, it probably was more of a guided missile, though we thought of it as a mini-cruise type because it was very manuverable. Range was several kilometers, not exactly continent-spanning, but we had to carry all that fiber. Since the design was a pusher prop, we mounted the fiber forward of the motor/prop area and fed it past there in a small tube as it unspooled. The motor was mounted off axis which helped it grab some cooling air through a small vent in the skin.

The battery was designed and built in-house. It was about 3.5" diameter and 3" long. We used to joke that we didn't need a warhead, we'd just short the battery when it hit the target...

When we were testing the motor and speed control, we'd use a bank of four 12V truck batteries on a pallet to supply the voltage and current required. That allowed us to run more frequent and extended tests.

Like I said, it was a fun project. Definitely designed for point targets, not taking out buildings.

The problem is that if a terrorist got a hold of say a suitcase sized nuke we'd be in trouble. In theory a terrorist could use the plane to fly the nuke to a higher altitude, therefore increasing the amount of damage.

Their patheic Madrassa brains will never ever have the capacity to do any of this.

No reason to worry.

Originally posted by shadarlocoth
Or if you in the drug smug biz then 150-200 lb of weed/coke/meth.

Dude, that perfectly demostrates than it's easier said than done!

200 lb of coke have street value of between 5 and 10 million dollars. Essentially just one run would pay for the construction, and probably many times over. The fact that we don't see a lot of missile-based drug traffic in our skies is IMHO the best evidence that it's a hard nut to crack.

LMAO

I can imagine the scene at the opening of the first Baghdad Wal-Mart. All the boys from Al-Karaoke rushing to the RC and household chemicals section.

I have not seen anyone address this possibility before, and it has kept me awake all night on more than one occassion.

Moderator, you may want to pull this post if you think it is too dangerous.

For some time I've worked with Rocoons, rockets launched both by remote control and automomously from high altitude platforms lofted to 80KFT or more by simple weather balloons.

Since loft weight has always been a concern we learned to build the rocket body, largely by hand, out of carbon fiber/epoxy. A 12FT long rocket body, no motor or payload, weights less than 10lbs. We used solid fuel propellent: it's cheap, reliable and readily available from commercial sources. With a 40lb payload of electronics (including full telemetry and GPS) we could hit Mach3 and 200-300KFT, in theory. From a launch at 20KFT we hit better than Mach 2 and 74KFT. Ours was an unguided rocket; full, active guidance systems were on the drawing board.

Compared to aircraft, especially planes, rockets are easy.

They are also sloppy, limited, and for terrorist purposes, unnecessary.

OK, this is were the nightmare begins.

High altitude air is cold. Freezing cold, Below 0F cold. Solid rocket fuel does not like the cold, so to keep our rocket motors from pranging we developed an insulated launch tube; some devisively refered to it as a "Launch-Box" as in a sandwich and a Thermos of milk. The tube allowed us to store and transport the rocket, served as the attachment point for the weather balloon array (several would be used in tandem to provide enough lift to acheive the desired launch altitude), protected the rocket from the intense cold at high altitude, served as the launch gantry and even provided passive launch azimuth control. The launch tube was IMHO, one of the keys to the success of our program.

As you might of guessed, I was largely responsible for the design and construction of the launch tubes we used. No fancy materials, no great expense. Each tube cost $40-50 US in materials, took 2 days to build, could support a fully loaded 100lb rocket inside and 50lbs of equipment strapped to its outsides.

The whole thing was built of packing tape, 2-part 5 minute epoxy, and Foam board, like you'd use to mount photographs/posters.

Simple, and completely invisible to radar.

Think about it; a vehicle costing less than $1000, capable of ferrying 100lbs of C4?, Anthrax?, radioactive cesium dust from an old Russian "battery"? Hauling its payload hundreds, possibly thousands, of miles from its launch point to a pre-determined, on-board GPS confirmed (picked it up at Radio Shack) drop point.

All while floating virtually undetectable by sight or radar, at 100KFT or more, high above the defenses of virtually every nation on earth. To spy sats it would look like nothing more than one of hundreds of weather balloons released every day all over the world. Benign. Innocuous.

Until.....

It's going to be a long night.

I fail to see why a terrorist would even bother building something like this. It sems to be alot of time and efort for very little result.
A 120mm mortar in experienced hands can put a round through a window at 6-8km and carry a heavier HE load.

Besides, how would they cnotrol it some guy with a radi control impossible espoecially if it's meant to be travelling at cruise misile speeds.

Actually the more I think of it the more rediculous the idea is, no offence.

I suppose a terrorist cell could construct a homebuilt CM, but that seems like a lot of effort for little or no affect. Dumb weapons such as mortars would be far more useful and accurate. Since the rate of fire of mortars is at least 15 rounds per minute I think the terrorists would opt for such a weapon. If my memory serves me correctly the mortar is their weapon of choice aside from car bombs. I think the RC Cruise Missile is too elaborate and hard to control.

I have a ranch in New Mexico and keeping tabs on the 1500 head of cattle spread out over 100,000 is a real problem. I am thinking of using a RC Cruise missile type aircraft to search for the little critters. Or, if each cow had a RFID I could locate and track them that way as well, but the RFID wouldn't be as much fun. We have a large RC park at the ranch and I think the guys would like the idea of building a RC Cruise Missile just for grins. But for someone to use the RC CM for a weapon, I don't think so.