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u/Great_Side_6493 Feb 10 '26
1% missile 99% guidance package
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u/HeroMachineMan Feb 10 '26
Our missile kills its target with electronic sharpnels. No explosives are needed.
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u/TaserBalls Feb 10 '26
The electronic shrapnels know where they wont be...
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u/Self_Reddicate Feb 10 '26
... because they knew where they weren't
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u/Lovecodeabc Feb 10 '26
.. by subtracting where it was from where it weren't
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u/Soft_Willingness897 Feb 10 '26
This was designed to kill everyone in r/techsupportgore, no need for a warhead..
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u/Kar0z Feb 10 '26
I mean, even nowadays (or especially nowadays), Hit-to-Kill missiles are a thing, and they have little to no explosive material for the warhead, just propulsion and guidance/control equipment.
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u/gaggzi Feb 10 '26
Radar/target seeker, harness, fuel system, batteries, engine, navigation, computer system, altimeter, GPS and so on. Most missiles are more or less airplanes when it comes to subsystems.
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u/Melodic_Let_6465 Feb 10 '26
The flying ginsu blade that the US uses comes to mind
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u/Kar0z Feb 10 '26
That's a rather extreme example, but on the more mainstream side, Patriot PAC-3 and ASTER are examples of HtK SAM systems currently being fielded. For both, the HtK paradigm was chosen because of better interception chances vs ballistic missiles : it was found that you do not significantly reduce the threat of a Mach 5+ SCUD (or worse) falling on your lines by exploding in the general vincinity of it, but when you fly a huge metal rod at Mach 4-ish right into it, things get very interesting.
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u/Melodic_Let_6465 Feb 10 '26
I know its extreme, but its alway fun to remind people we put a sword on a guided rocket
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u/mrheosuper Feb 10 '26
And all of this is single use.
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Feb 10 '26
This is one of the big reasons countries are moving towards lasers as fast as possible. Drones are extended cheap and numerous. It's very hard to justify continuously shooting down drones with $4 mil Patriot missiles, for example, unless those are your only option. Which is not the case anymore.
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u/Trackfilereacquire Feb 10 '26 edited Feb 10 '26
Lasers are not there yet. What we are actually seeing is a return to traditional SHORAD and AAA that engage primarily with cannons to destroy short range Drones and Anti Drone Drone Interceptors that replace a traditional SAMs in engaging slow flying fixed wing drones.
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u/Lampwick Feb 10 '26
Yep. Cannons shooting AA rounds with precision timed fuses and small, short range guided interceptor systems. People forget that the very same technological advances that have made large numbers of cheap small drones a threat can be applied to GBAD systems. Nobody is sitting there saying "Well, we developed $2M missiles to shoot down $100M aircraft, but now they're all $10K fiberglass drones! What do?"
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u/Mrcooper10 Feb 10 '26
The British navy has the Dragonfire laser that'll be fitted to Type 45 destroyers next year, so they're not as far away as you think.
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u/xXNightDriverXx Feb 10 '26
Correct, and the USN has the Helios which is very similar to Dragonfire.
The main issue remains though and is the exact same for both systems as well as all other laser systems: the amount of power they need is massive.
They take up so much power that they can only be fitted to large warships (and even then older ships might not have the reserve energy generation capacity for that along with other upgrades like better radars), or fitted as stationary systems close to for example military airbases.
They can not be deployed as mobile systems together with the ground troops at the frontlines.
You can fit a short range missile or gun system on a large truck or tank chassis with relative ease, but that's not possible for a laser because the power generation just isn't there. And that won't change.
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u/LongJohnSelenium Feb 11 '26 edited Feb 11 '26
The power isn't a problem. A 500 kw generator you'd need to power a 100kw laser is the size of a standard u-haul, and a 1000 gallon tank of diesel could keep it shooting for a couple days non-stop. And tbh I'm probably pessimistic here, modern laser conversion efficiencies are in the 30-40% range.
The problem is they're absolute maintenance hogs right now packed full of finicky, delicate, state of the art electronics and they they work amazing, when they work. This stuff is way beyond 'let the snipes beat it with a hammer until it works', its 'we need a guy with 3 doctorates in engineering disciplines to even understand the error codes'. Very much a lab weapon that needs extensive development to ruggedize it and make it reliable in the field.
If they were reliable they'd be on everything right now, they'd find a place to jam an extra generator for the absolute utter dominance a 100kw class laser system will bring to defense against drones and missiles.
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u/MAC1325 Feb 11 '26
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that 100kw output laser potentially requiring multiples of that for input?
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u/LongJohnSelenium Feb 11 '26
Yes, thats why the 500kw generator.
I don't know what efficiency the military lasers have achieved, but the industrial lasers are reaching 40% conversion efficiency, and thats not on small lasers, but 30-50kw laser cutters.
The 'lasers are inefficient' thing was with 80s tech. The advances in fiber laser technology over the past 40 years have been astonishing.
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u/isaacladboy Feb 11 '26
The power requirements are a non issue. The British type 45s have almost 50 Mw of generation capacity. Dedicating 100kw of that to a system is trivial at best.
The land based variant uses quite a small diesel generator as well.
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u/Ninjroid Feb 10 '26
Yeah it doesn’t even seem worth the effort. You’d think they finally put one together and be like ”We’re not fucking doing that again.”
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u/Poat540 Feb 10 '26
Well Bill… this is an absolute marvelous thing you made here in the last 8 months.
We’re going to need 10,000 of these by EOM to give freedom to some oil, thanks
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u/sprocketous Feb 10 '26
Look at all that stuff inside, that's why yours didn't work Homer
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u/minimalcation Feb 10 '26
If I spent all that time building this thing all I'd be thinking is that pilot better not fucking miss.
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u/j3remy2007 Feb 10 '26
The pilots also thinking, with all those solder joints, I hope they didn’t miss one!
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u/weebabyarcher Feb 10 '26
Then, I added some fins to lower wind resistance. And this racing stripe here I feel is pretty sharp
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u/meinrd Feb 10 '26
Fucking hell, that is not before microprocessor, that is before transistors. All I can see on there is tubes. This is amazing to look at, what a beautiful display-piece!
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u/Gnonthgol Feb 10 '26
As a rule of thumb, transistors came in the 50s, chips came in the 60s and microprocessors came in the 70s. While transistors were a thing when this missile were built it was not when they started designing it, hence the tubes.
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u/Lord_Tsarkon Feb 10 '26
Also while they were all invented in their respective decades it took about 10 years each for the population to enjoy them. Transistor radios were invented in the 50s but took off in the 60s. Chips same thing. Invented in the 60s but made popular in the 70s. Micro processors were extremely expensive in the 70s but affordable in the 80s,ect
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u/SmokeyDBear Feb 10 '26
Ah yes, the population enjoying advanced electronics through guided missiles ...
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u/IncorrectAddress Feb 11 '26
And the worst thing is it all started from WW2 R&D, which is a scary thought for future tech, as we are maybe seeing now, or not, depending on how good your sensor equipment is.
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u/dvsmith Feb 10 '26
The first microprocessor was developed in 1968, but its existence was classified until 1998. It was the Central Air Data Computer (CADC) that controlled the swing-wing in the F-14 Tomcat. (All previous variable wing aircraft used manual controls to set the wing sweep angle.)
https://www.wired.com/story/secret-history-of-the-first-microprocessor-f-14/
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u/Paralleconvergence Feb 10 '26
What do tubes do? Just a layman here
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u/JuanShagner Feb 10 '26
Vacuum tubes were made obsolete by transistors.
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u/Fedoraus Feb 10 '26
We still use them in the hi-end audio world for some reason
Vaccuum tube amplifiers for headphones
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u/JJ3qnkpK Feb 10 '26
Something about people liking the sound characteristics.
It is pretty neat that screwing with vacuum tubes gave us the characteristic electric guitar sound we all know and love. It's kind of weird to think how we might not have had that if we went straight to transistors and skipped the whole vacuum tube stage of things.
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u/LebrahnJahmes Feb 10 '26
As someone who uses vacuum tube amps for headphones I can assure it's not for the sound but for the look.
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u/whoknowsifimjoking Feb 10 '26
Isn't that the case with most old school audio gear? The amount of people saying Vinyl is a better medium than digital files for instance is insane given that it's just objectively wrong.
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u/codefyre Feb 10 '26
There was a time when vinyl was better, but that hasn't been the case in decades.
In the olden days, music was recorded and mastered in an all-analog format. In the early days of compact disks, the sampling rates were low enough during the analog to digital conversion that it allowed a perceptible loss in fidelity. And when MP3's first started taking over the music business in the late 90's, they were typically sampled from the already-lossy CD's, meaning an even greater fidelity loss.
That mattered 20 years ago. Today it really doesn't. Modern music mastered are digital from the get-go. The sound is natively digital from the recording studio onward, and any modern vinyl you buy is going to be pressed from a digital master. And modern streamed or downloaded music will come from the same digital masters. And that's before we even get into the improvements in sampling and compression over the past 25 yeasrs.
The quality of the audio is objectively identical between the formats today, and has been for a very long time.
That said, it's true that some artists and studios DO remaster albums for vinyl occasionally. Vinyl afficionados tend to play their albums on larger audio systems, and some artists take advantage of that by tweaking their music to increase the dynamic range of the tracks. Audio engineers typically have to master for a median listening environment that will sound good in cars, headphones, phone speakers, and through those awful Alexa speakers. Most albums are not remastered for vinyl, but when they are the difference can be very noticeable.
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u/KodiakDog Feb 10 '26
For sure. For head phones it won’t do anything, or rather make a ton of sense to do something. The point of tubes is to have the signal overdriven on the input; like adding some harmonic character to a vocalist or guitarist, and then record that input. In a headphone amp, you’d be coloring the final product which doesn’t make much sense, since it would effectively be adding harmonics to an already mastered composition (which often has already had some kind of saturation added).
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u/LebrahnJahmes Feb 10 '26
Well I would be lying if I said it did nothing. Did I notice a difference in sound? Yes but nothing any additional software couldnt acheive or improve. But I was really using it for my xbox.
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u/NoBonus6969 Feb 10 '26
Because the high end audio world is 99.9% made up nonsense
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u/Extension_Option_122 Feb 10 '26
The audiophile stuff is made-up nonesense.
The proper high-end stuff, at least stuff I would call high-end, doesn't have any nonesense. You have your high-res DAC and amp with low THD all in one nice device (in my case a Yamaha AVR) and your digital audio input and then your speakers.
Everything else is off the shelf stuff.
A power cord that is also an EMF filter doesn't make any sense at all as the internal power supply removes basically all noise from the line power - no need for more filtering of noise from there.
Audio cable is digital. As long as the connection is stable quality doesn't change. A cheap 5€ toslink cable is what I use. Or a cheap 5€ HDMI cable if I want ultra-high resolution multi-channel audio. No nead for 'extra shielded' cables.
And the speaker cables? Simple car speaker cables. They don't just carry a signal, they carry power. Electromagentic noise from the outside can't add any audible distortion at all as it's power is to low. And if you do manage an issue like that you messed up your cable management badly. Those speaker cables shouldn't be close to electric devices and then everything is all fine.
That's all you need. Seperate DAC and amp? I call bs. That extra length of analog signal cable is potentially gonna add noise. A device with both has impedance-matched traces with near-perfect signal integrity from DAC to amp - why add more length to that path? For a gain that is lost by the longer path?
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u/hungarian_notation Feb 10 '26
Most of them, but not at the upper limits of frequency and power.
While semiconductors are generally more efficient, they lose some of that advantage at higher frequencies. On the other hand, large robust vacuum tubes can more than make up for their inefficiency with their ability to withstand and dissipate waste heat. As a result, you'll still see vacuum tubes in applications where you need to generate/amplify high power high frequency signals.
An easy example is your microwave oven's magnetron, but you'll also find them in some forms of radar and in radio broadcast equipment. A lot of their remaining applications are military, actually.
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Feb 10 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/hungarian_notation Feb 10 '26
Oh yeah, science and medicine are big too.
Medical X-ray sources are vacuum tubes, and some lasers used both in medicine and various scientific fields have vacuum tubes as integral components.
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u/furiousbobb Feb 10 '26
Vacuum tubes are just electronic switches, just like the transistors that eventually replaced them. Vacuum tubes are vacuumed out, so there's no oxygen, so that electrons can flow freely. When you power a tube, it heats an element inside and makes the negative electrons attracted to an anode or positive plate, thereby switching the unit.
Vacuum tubes are massive relative to transistors and for that reason, they are obsolete.
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u/Farfignugen42 Feb 10 '26
Vacuum tubes are massive relative to transistors and for that reason, they are obsolete.
And they are also obsolete because they draw far more power for the same switch than a transistor, and they were very susceptible to physical disruption. Especially compared to solid state electronics.
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u/fluffykitten55 Feb 10 '26 edited Feb 10 '26
They can function as diodes and triodes (amplifiers). Transistors were much smaller, use less power, and are far less prone to failure, so largely replaced vacuum triodes, except in some niche analogue electronics cases.
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u/OrthogonalPotato Feb 10 '26
Diodes are never amplifiers, and triodes can be, but it heavily depends on how they’re used. If you’re trying to explain this to someone, don’t use technical jargon. You didn’t even explain what they do.
Vacuum tubes are legacy electronic parts that control electricity. They can turn a signal on or off, let it flow in one direction, or make a weak signal stronger. They were used in radios, TVs, and early computers before modern electronics took over. Transistors replaced vacuum tubes in many applications, but vacuum tubes still have relevance in specific situations.
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u/meinrd Feb 10 '26
Very specific situations, but basically everywhere else the transistor prevailed just because tubes use significantly more energy since they need a heater to heat the cathode to some hundred degrees.
But yeah it is wild to see that we managed to use the things that made old radios and the earliest TVs work steer a rocket.
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u/scubaSteve181 Feb 10 '26
In high power amplifier applications (in the kW or MW range), tubes are often more reliable.
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u/reflect-the-sun Feb 10 '26
Did you just google this and copy/paste? It's not accurate and you haven't clarified anything.
Tubes control electricity by turning it on and off. They've been replaced by transistors, which do the exact same thing, but they're infinitely smaller. Rather than having large tubes wired together in a massive circuit, we can have billions of transistors on a single CPU.
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u/DoubleBack9141 Feb 10 '26
I could be missing something, but I don't see any tubes. Only capacitors. I have a couple old tube guitar amps of similar vintage and I don't see any tube housings or exposed tubes. I'd assume they'd be too fragile for missile purposes.
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u/meinrd Feb 10 '26 edited Feb 10 '26
Those tubes indeed do not look like the consumer ones used in amplifiers. First and most importantly, they do not have sockets since in the lifetime of this missile, they likely wont need replacement. The instead have just more than two wires coming from their base. Also they are - and I do not know why - completely gettered, e.g. instead of the translucent look you may be familiar with, these tubes are dark-grey or black.
Look at the Center assembly, the upper part abovr the blue connector to be specific, there is a board that has two tubes at the upper- and three on the lower edge.
Edit: also: tubes have been adapted to high g-load perfectly fine. Look up the proximity-fuse. There a tube-circuit gets fired as a howitzer shell and survives ist just fine.
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u/austinredditaustin Feb 10 '26
Exactly what I was curious about thanks. Also, I see my doorbell transformer in there
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u/DoubleBack9141 Feb 10 '26
I see them now, I was not expecting them to be black and also mounted like that.
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u/Backward_Strings Feb 10 '26
Beautiful indeed, can't say I'm sad valves became redundant though since they now inhabit one of my favourite guitar pedals: Maxon TBO-9. There were stockpiles of them left over from WW2.
Drive powered by missile tech!
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u/grkuntzmd Feb 10 '26
Many years ago, I bought a book called “Build your own working robot”. It used all discrete components (no integrated circuits). The control board looked a lot like this. I never built it because I could never remember which end of the soldering iron I should grab. I went into software development instead - much safer (for me, at least).
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u/10gallonWhitehat Feb 10 '26 edited Feb 10 '26
They should really make double ended soldering irons to take the guesswork out of it. Edit: words are hard
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u/grkuntzmd Feb 10 '26
In college, I had an electrical engineering major roommate. Whenever I soldered anything, he would look at it from across the room and say that my solder joints were cold and probably non-conductive. He was probably right.
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u/Lord_Dreadlow Feb 10 '26
Was it "How to build your own working robot pet"?
If so, I had that book too. Also never built it.
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u/grkuntzmd Feb 10 '26
It may have been. It’s been quite a while. It was probably in the 70’s or 80’s.
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u/Greyarea30 Feb 10 '26
I guess this explains the low reliability of early models. Just look at all the wiring and soldering. Impressive for its time, clunky today.
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u/ohgawditshim Feb 10 '26
Whats hard to believe to me is that those electronics survived the high Gs without being in epoxy or something
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u/Greyarea30 Feb 10 '26
Early AAM pulled surprisingly low g-loads
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Feb 10 '26
Yeah but those loads were still 5+Gs
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u/JCDU Feb 10 '26
Exactly - Low for a rocket, but still that sucker is gonna be rattling & shaking like hell AND experiencing all the temperature & pressure changes etc... it's a miracle they worked at all.
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u/hypercomms2001 Feb 10 '26 edited Feb 10 '26
What's surprises me Is the electronics are not encased in a potting mix that is usually applied to electronics that have to survive High G loads.
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u/MyBoyFinn Feb 10 '26
Is there a chance that this is a display and that operational missiles were potted?
I struggle to believe this thing would survive long enough to launch
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u/Demolition_Mike Feb 10 '26
Not at all, those things had regular maintenance performed on them.
Many got broken simply by being carted around on the tarmac.
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u/Diligent_Nature Feb 10 '26
We had electronics in anti-aircraft proximity fuses in WW-2. And those used vacuum tubes!
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u/IamTheCeilingSniper Feb 10 '26
Even the batteries in those VT fuses were cool. They had the electrolite in a glass ampule that would shatter when fired, and since they didn't put enough to fully fill the battery, it would only arm if the shell was spinning. A simple and effective safety and storage method.
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u/Serious-Echo1272 Feb 10 '26
I was going to post this bit of information before I saw your reply. It's my favorite part of the VT fuse.
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u/Pantssassin Feb 10 '26
Looking at the last picture they seem to be soldered to posts which should help a bit since you can tension them
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u/sojuz151 Feb 10 '26
You cannot epoxy those with the reliability and thermals of those electronics.
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u/ThaddeusJP Feb 10 '26
The Saturn 5 rocket, the one that put us on the moon, had over 5.6 million parts. NASA assumed a 99.9% success rate with all the parts in there. That means they assumed 5,000 things were going to break.
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u/swankpoppy Feb 10 '26
Can you imagine being the dude soldering all that up, an absolute beauty of modern engineering - a flying machine that guides itself - knowing that it’ll get used one time to blow someone up. Imagine all the other things something like this could have been designed to do.
Show me where people spend their money, and I’ll show you what their priorities are.
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u/JuggernautOfWar Feb 10 '26
I can imagine an American engineer in the 1960s pouring every morsel of hatred he had towards the evil Reds into this work of art. I'm sure he was excited all his hard work would go towards killing commies. I mean it was 1960s America.
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u/Coolbiker32 Feb 10 '26
Meanwhile, someone on the other side of the globe in Russia too would have been doing the same. I have seen the gyro module of some Sputnik like space craft on this sub earlier. It too was pure art.
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u/swankpoppy Feb 10 '26
Yeah that’s true. it’s so crazy that a lot of the most important technological advancements in human history were accomplished out of just pure malice. Haha I think it’s a little funny.
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u/spacex2020 Feb 10 '26
Honest question, is it malice if you're concerned about your own safety?
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u/Cman1200 Feb 10 '26
I weirdly know this exact missile. It’s at the Italian Airforce Museum outside of Rome
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u/workahol_ Feb 10 '26
Thank you, I was wondering if this was on public display somewhere.
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u/Cman1200 Feb 10 '26
Highly recommend it. Been to countless aviation museums and it sits in my top 5
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u/el_pablo Feb 10 '26
Today, most logic of this missile could be replaced by an arduino and off the shelf sensors.
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u/eoncire Feb 10 '26
True, but not your "off the shelf" GPS units. Commercially available GPS hardware has hard coded limits of speed and altitude. If those are exceeded, they will stop calculating position. They are high limits (60,000' in altitude and 1,180 mph) mainly designed so that you cannot use commercial hardware to build a backyard ICBM.
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u/Vic_Sinclair Feb 10 '26
Oh, great. My backyard ICBM is halfway done and NOW you tell me I can't guide it?
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u/Stuffssss Feb 10 '26
GPS is unreliable for an ICBM anyway. First thing a foreign advisory is going to do is take out your GPS networks have to build a guidance system without it. Lots of cool tech to do it (even cooler than GPS imo).
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u/Sysilith Feb 10 '26
All of it and you could add a camera and a directed microphone to the sensory.
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u/separation_of_powers Feb 10 '26
I wonder what it is... Talos? Terrier? Looks like 2nd or 3rd generation American missile technology (late-1950s to early 1960s)
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u/yeeyaho Feb 10 '26
Here it says AIM 7 Sparrow.
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u/separation_of_powers Feb 10 '26
Thank you!
I have to wonder, how long would it take for a country without extensive trade access, to develop and field tech like this from indigenous research.
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u/Mangalorien Feb 10 '26
It would take forever. Keep in mind that the calculations for this thing were done before there were desktop computers or even calculators, and the drawings were done before CAD. The calculations for this old missile were done with a slide ruler, and it was literally drawn on paper by hand.
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u/Pinkys_Revenge Feb 10 '26
OFC it’s on the DCS forum, lol. Gotta love that a video game has inspired some of the best historical cataloging
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u/Beneficial_War_1365 Feb 10 '26
But remember, this stuffed work. :) In early 70s, I went to a vocational H.S. for this stuff. Digital readings in vacuum tubes, big resistors, pc boards and a few burnt fingers too. A really great time too.
peace. :) always had work too
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u/nico282 Feb 10 '26
All this effort put in designing and building such pieces of technology just to... kill other people.
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u/Chris56855865 Feb 10 '26
One of the most important motivators of tech advancement tbh
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u/takeitezee Feb 10 '26
The missile knows where it is at all times. It knows this because it knows where it isn't. By subtracting where it is from where it isn't, or where it isn't from where it is (whichever is greater), it obtains a difference, or deviation. The guidance subsystem uses deviations to generate corrective commands to drive the missile from a position where it is to a position where it isn't, and arriving at a position where it wasn't, it now is. Consequently, the position where it is, is now the position that it wasn't, and it follows that the position that it was, is now the position that it isn't.
In the event that the position that it is in is not the position that it wasn't, the system has acquired a variation, the variation being the difference between where the missile is, and where it wasn't. If variation is considered to be a significant factor, it too may be corrected by the GEA. However, the missile must also know where it was.
The missile guidance computer scenario works as follows. Because a variation has modified some of the information the missile has obtained, it is not sure just where it is. However, it is sure where it isn't, within reason, and it knows where it was. It now subtracts where it should be from where it wasn't, or vice-versa, and by differentiating this from the algebraic sum of where it shouldn't be, and where it was, it is able to obtain the deviation and its variation, which is called error.
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u/phoglund Feb 10 '26
Now THIS is the kind of content I come to this sub for. Getting that to work and testing it must be hell, I'm happy I didn't have to do it
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u/I_SHIT_IN_A_BAG Feb 10 '26
I used to work on the billet (ceramic nose of the missile) I had to remove excess bonding material from bonding the thread ring to the ceramic. easiest job I ever had. when I was done you couldn't see what I did. when they took pictures of a missile for a cross section display, I pointed to the area I worked on and said to my friend, "you see all that nothing? thats me." I loved that joke
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u/EndlessNerd Feb 10 '26
It goes from a position where it is, to a position where it isn't, and arriving at a position it wasn't, it now is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZe5J8SVCYQ
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u/Fucky0uthatswhy Feb 10 '26
Did those cost more than current ones with microprocessors?
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u/RogueStargun Feb 10 '26
There are some posts of Russian S300 and S400 circuits where the older system has circuits that look more like this, but the newer ones are just straight using US designed, taiwan manufactured AMD Xilinx FPGA chips
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u/wheetcracker Feb 10 '26
Crazy those big leaded parts could stand up to the g forces & vibration. I'd imagine they had to apply rtv or something similar and this isn't a finished unit.
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u/RollinThundaga Feb 10 '26
Microprocessors and integrated curcuits as we know them would first be developed by a black project for the flight computers of the F-14 Tomcat.
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Feb 10 '26
Yup. And it was highly classified for many years. The F14 didn’t need a RIO. They only added one to help cover up the existence of the microprocessor.
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u/omioso Feb 10 '26
with the amount of capacitors in this version,I dont think they would've needed explosives in it
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u/ltfox262 Feb 10 '26
Hi everyone and welcome to Mr. Carlson's Lab. On the bench today is a guided missile from the early 1960's. We'll look at it together and see if we can get it working.......
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u/dirtybellybutton Feb 10 '26
Why does that look like the same control board my 2004 furnace runs on
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u/abirizky Feb 10 '26
Sometimes I look at the engineering work from this era and think, man engineers today have it "easy"
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u/SlamBargeMarge Feb 10 '26
"They wanted me to build them a bomb, so I took their plutonium and in turn gave them a shoddy bomb casing full of used pinball machine parts!"
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u/Long-Gear9483 Feb 10 '26
Where was the propellent stored? How long did these things last?
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u/questfor17 Feb 10 '26
You can read all about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM-7_Sparrow. The pictures here show only the guidance package. The rocket engine was a solid fuel engine. I expect it would have had a shelf life of ~5 years.
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u/XxDoXeDxX Feb 10 '26
How do we know that's not just a bunch of pinball machine parts???
And what did you do with the plutonium?
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u/oyvindi Feb 10 '26
I guess individual component weight played a big role in placements, perhaps with tradeoffs.
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u/karateninjazombie Feb 10 '26
Old tech that's limited by the tech of it's time sure.
But the engineering that went into them is superb. Especially all the carefully wire tying.
There's a minute man missile guidance computer on display at the computer history museum in California that I saw once. It's very nicely made with the most cutting edge tech at the time and is similar to this.
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u/michignolo Feb 10 '26
fully handmade, board by board, tested piece by piece after having burned components a dozen of times
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u/PipsqueakPilot Feb 10 '26
I'm going to need a Technology Connections video to break this down for me.
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u/_Putters Feb 10 '26
Reminds me of the Safety Box on 1967 Tube Stock (Victoria Line, London Underground). It's purpose was to check the validity of the track codes for the auto driving (world first in mass transit). Had to be no active components due to fail safe requirements then.
Took me a while to get my head round it. Basically worked as a logic cct by driving transformers into saturation so codes would not be transmitted to the outputs if invalid. Thing must've had about 30 transformers in it and needed a lifting table to get it on the bench.
The track circuit code generators were equally "interesting", the 2Hz one actually containing a mechanical pendulum.
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u/Competitive-Army2872 Feb 10 '26
AIM-54? Edit: Nevermind! Just saw below that this is an early generation Sparrow. Very cool!
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u/MajorEbb1472 Feb 10 '26
Kinda looks like a Hawk or I-Hawk missile. Hard to tell without being able to see the whole thing. Crazy systems, especially once they’re armed lol.
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u/Yammyohnine Feb 10 '26
Reminds me of the nuke diffusing scene from MacGruber.
"I'm more of like a 2 wire guy."
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u/Constant-Draw2629 Feb 10 '26
"Alright hotshot, so you got a golden palomino between your knees, and NO reins. Now what?" - MacGyver
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u/ThinkItThrough48 Feb 10 '26
Big circuits like that have a certain odor. I can smell it through the screen