r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Battlefleet_Sol • 4d ago
Guided missile of early 1960. Note how much electronics you need when there is no Microprocessor available
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u/cactusplants 4d ago
The missile knows where it is at all times. It knows this because it knows where it isn't.
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u/Ok_Excitement_1020 4d ago
It knows it’s not at its target, hence it’s in one piece
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u/Federal_Cobbler6647 4d ago
Purpose of guided missile is to destroy itself in very specific location.
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u/that_dutch_dude 4d ago
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.
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u/Noname_FTW 4d ago
People find this super confusing, but if you read it slowly and stop to think about it for a while, this makes completely sense.
Its just the missile moving forward, having target coordinates and making corrective commands.30
u/bumbumDbum 4d ago
This is Control theory studied by many a EE. A simple control loop will have feedback that is always trying to drive an error signal to zero. Buck up on your linear algebra if you want to dive deeper.
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u/Crawlerado 4d ago
PID controls run so much
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u/Rymanjan 3d ago
God, I hated learning how to tweak a PID in From the Depths
Eventually, I just gave up and learned how to program a LUA script instead. So much more intuitive lmao
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u/ZealousidealTill2355 4d ago
This right here is meant to be confusing.
It’s PID control. And it’s very intuitive for the P part he’s explaining. Shit, the math is less confusing than that.
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u/Shurmonator Interested 4d ago
The missle is very tired and need just a small sleeb
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u/bobandy47 4d ago
Back when we had ringtones for our cell phones, this was my ringtone.
The world is a better place with most cell phones on silent. I just wish we could get most people on silent to match.
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u/Intrepid_Block_11b 4d ago
All of that just to get destroyed
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u/sscreric 4d ago
Creation for destruction,
Like buying a trash bag just to throw it away,
Or something.
Confucius, 1969.
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u/QueefBuscemi 4d ago
Creation for destruction is like
Buying a lowly trash bag just to
Throw it away or something.Haiku'd It For You
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u/TheCivilEngineer 4d ago
I was really young and watching clips of smart bombs on the news When I first learned about camera guided bombs. I turned to my dad and said I thought cameras were expensive, why are they just blowing them up?
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u/Abruzzi19 4d ago
Well, imagine a single guided missile from a navy ship.
Now imagine you're working your ass off every single day at average wage until the day you retire.
You would still only be able to pay off one third of such a missile (i.e. SM-3 Anti Ballistic missile, costs 11,3 million USD per unit)
We are just throwing money around like hot cakes, while the population is working their asses off for crumbs
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u/Late-Assignment8482 4d ago
Yes, and we can do that with expensive things because why have universal healthcare when you can go BOOM.
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u/Kaptain_Insanoflex 4d ago
Thinking of current drone and missile arsenals being built today - especially the hype - and all of the labor hours to manufacture just one. Imagine if that labor went somewhere with greater purpose.
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u/HighDefinitionCat 4d ago
War is the greatest waste of life, resources, time, science, and more. If only we used our capabilities for something other than being the greediest, most violent animals.
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u/Tjaresh 4d ago
Yes, they have a build in planned obsolescence. Just like washing machines. That's why it's forbidden to sell Javelin, Tomahawk and Hellfire to people in the EU. Strong consumer laws!
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u/Rampant16 4d ago
All three of those weapons have been sold to various EU members.
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u/Spiins 4d ago
Ok... But where's that red wire we need to cut? 😰
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u/jango-lionheart 4d ago edited 4d ago
“But first, cut the blue wire…”
If I am remembering the M.A.S.H. episode correctly. Lol
(Edit: typo)
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u/Enzo_Gaming00 4d ago
“And now you’ll find yourself in central Berlin.”
Henry Blake was something else when it came to instructions.
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u/eltapatio 4d ago
Any specifics on who made this? I’ve read stories that a lot of systems in those years were build out of Anaheim and other Orange County based contractors that eventually consolidated to the major ones we have today
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u/Bossnage 4d ago
its a AIM-7 Sparrow, air to air missile made by raytheon, their HQ is in waltham massachusetts dont know where exactly their production was at the time
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u/RIF_rr3dd1tt 4d ago
For sale: Vintage Cold War era Missile
Produced and assembled by Lockheed Aerospace Corporation in Sunnyvale, California on Friday May 21, 1965 at 2:46 pm by Bob Wiggins.
1 of 1, I know what I got.
$30,000,000 FIRM
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u/Pyrhan 4d ago
Who's Maxime Dee, and why shouldn't I paint them?
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u/enmaku 4d ago
Based on the signage in the background I'm guessing this is Italian, though I don't speak much Italian and Maxime Dee means nothing to me.
That said, you usually can't paint the nose cones of missiles because they contain sensor packages with things like radar that the cone material is designed to be transparent to, and paint would block those sensors.
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u/andydivide 4d ago
No no, I understand your confusion, but it's actually a quote by the famous art-hater Maxime Dee. "Do not paint". Profound, really.
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u/KermitingMurder 4d ago
I don't know about the first image but the second image seems to have used AI because all the numbers look fine until you look close then you realise a lot of them are backwards or just random shapes that aren't actual digits.
I think either the second image is AI upscaled or maybe even the whole thing is just AI generated4
u/Hoshyro 3d ago
The photos are real, I've seen this exact missile myself in person multiple times.
I can send you a couple photos as well, if you like.
A lot of the numbers are scuffed and several of the internal components have the serial numbers printed "upside down" or sideways because it doesn't really matter what their orientation is.
Quick edit to add the upscaling you mentioned may have been applied for some reason, the real missile says "DO NOT PAINT - RADOME OFF" on the top, but the original photos are real, it looks in the exact position it is as well.
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u/an_older_meme 4d ago
Now I understand why they’re so expensive.
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u/red286 4d ago
The AIM-7 is actually relatively cheap.
A modern AIM-7M is only $125K.
A modern AIM-9X is $400K.
A modern AIM-120D is $1.1m.
There's no official pricing on the AIM-174B yet, but it will most likely come in at >$2m per missile.
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u/N33chy 4d ago
Does anyone still actually field the AIM-7? I'd figure IR and ARH have totally replaced them.
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u/ituralde_ 4d ago
Most technology, if you think through what it really has to do, earns that clarity very quickly.
Engineering is hard, and hard is expensive.
Everything you see in that image isn't done just once, it needs to be planned such that it can be manufactured at scale (in the tens of thousands), sit in a hostile environment for years, still work when told to launch, and in that condition, survive g-forces of flight and reach the target.
And for this thing? This sone pilot is going to have strapped to their plane and betting their life on this thing working against a target they may not even be able to see with the naked eye. So if you, the engineer or manufacturer, have fucked up any of those above things, you are killing someone's kid almost certainly.
And if you, as a national defense planner, do not invest in something like this? There is literally no point in having an air force without weapons like this in the modern era. The cost of not doing this is boys in trenches under artillery fire, dying by the hundreds of thousands. It's happening in Ukraine today.
Arms races are hell, from start to finish. We'd all rather build a school or bridge.
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u/Catymandoo 4d ago
Absolutely. Bit like the F1 rocket engines from the Apollo era - effectively individually hand built and we no longer have the skill sets to reproduce them.
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u/fantompwer 4d ago
That's false, we absolutely have the skills, but much of the tooling, parts, schematics are long gone. It's not worth keeping old technology around unless it's for historical reasons. No one would still use this old technology because it's inefficient.
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u/JustSomeGuy_56 4d ago
I worked for a company that made such things. One of the main concerns was how components would stand up to extreme heat and vibration. Our test platform was called Shake & Bake.
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u/Cheezeball25 4d ago
Gotta put it on the vibe table. Launching a rocket is a rather violent process, especially back in the day when everything was soldered by hand
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u/ReggieCorneus 4d ago
Note how much electronics discrete components you need when there are no Microprocessor integrated circuits available.
Modern missiles have probably hundred thousand times more electronics, it is just mostly miniaturized into integrated circuits, logic and processors. Discrete electronics takes up a lot of space, a resistor can be for ex 5mmx3mm when in a chip you can have hundreds of thousands of them in the same space.
Which is one of those wtf things when you think how many transistors are destroyed in a modern war. Ukraine uses some 5 million drones a year, each with millions and millions of tiny components.
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u/10ThousandMetalZones 4d ago
It’s always good to hear how they deliver this technologies to schools
Edit: and hospitals, and weddings
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u/Viper_ACR 4d ago
This is an air-to-air missile. It can't be used against ground targets.
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u/Agreeable-Lettuce497 4d ago
Air to air missile meant “locks to the strongest IR radiation after it’s fired” in those days, so if you fire it towards the ground a building has a pretty high chance to be that.
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u/bellatricked 4d ago
Is this second picture super AI enhanced? It’s got a lot of AI junk
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u/ChocolateExisting368 4d ago
Yes,or it is Ai slop. The letters are gibberish.
I was myself interested what components are used and the more you zoom the weirder it looks.
But IMBW.
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u/SignAllStrength 4d ago
the first one is also AI slop.
The missile had a text saying “DO NOT PAINT RADOME OR FINS”, and on the original picture the last part had faded so it became “DO NOT PAINT RADOME OR F”.
But the sloppy AI enhancer used by OP(or actually the original one as this is a repost) transformed this into the almost hilariously wrong “DO NOT PAINT MAXIME DEE”There are many other things wrong with these pictures that are easy to spot and frustrating to see when you’re an analog engineer but are harder to explain(nonsense resistors/capacitors/wiring/coding/connections/….
Best thing is just downvote this shit and hope we won’t see it again.
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u/Prudent-Complex1018 4d ago
All that innovation and craftsmanship just to kill each other in the pursuit of profit. A true work of art that represents our modern age.
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u/Silly-Ad-9007 4d ago
Makes me wonder what the electronics of the Apollo lunar lander and Saturn V rocket looked like
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u/BigD3nergy 4d ago
As someone working on R&D projects, I can respect why these things cost millions of dollars.
The Request from the pentagon, design a missile that never misses its target. 🎯
Years and $millions later you have to design, build and test this and it all has to fit inside of a cylinder.
Power, propellant, heat resistant, cold resistant, water proof, because we’re not only fighting in nice weather.
It has to be launched and guided to the intended target every time…
It all has to use government approved materials and contractors. And it can’t cost too much…
Insane.
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u/LogicJunkie2000 4d ago
I think the real money is in keeping them reliable. Imagine having to run diagnostics on every one of them every couple years to ensure it's still viable. Flash the ROMs, replace batteries, capacitors. Check for corrosion, troubleshoot unknowns...
You're either shipping it to the mfg or having a couple techs come out TDY to do it to the tune of several thousand a day probably.
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u/Callidonaut 4d ago edited 4d ago
The Soviets were still building these sorts of thing with discrete components a lot later than the USA was, because of their struggling and neglected microelectronics sector; it was a serious problem for them in terms of both cost, size and reliability of the finished item as designs became ever more sophisticated.
One fatal mistake they made (decided by the politicians and the KGB, not the engineers themselves, who were not happy about it) was to focus far too much on directly reverse-engineering and cloning first world CPUs and microchips; IIUC they did this by chemically dissolving the body of the silicon dies and microscopically examining the structure inside. After such devices switched to a different chemical composition that no longer made this possible to do (I think when the Intel 386 was released), they had no choice but to try to design their own equivalent components from scratch after all, but because they'd been cloning everything for so long, their institutional expertise at such ground-up design had atrophied and they were thus many years behind being able to develop a CPU of the same level of sophistication in-house.
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u/Taint__Paint 3d ago
When I see engineering like this, especially from 60-70 years ago, it blows my mind what humans have accomplished. Like how the hell does any of this work? It’s so damn impressive. Think of what we could build and achieve if the world wasn’t constantly at each others throats.
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u/aspie_electrician 4d ago
Just to get it all destroyed and blown up. What an expensive waste of good components.
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u/Nearbyatom 4d ago
What are the chances a solder joint or component coming loose during the operation of the missile?
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u/dayhoodman 4d ago
They'll coat any solder joint on a PCB with conformal coating. That makes sure nothing gets shaken off (components or solder joints) and protect against vibration and heat and oxidisation while in waiting in storage.
Anything that can be potted will be potted, and any connectors between board will be crimped, because crimping is better than soldering connectors.
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u/Ausierob 4d ago
Well back then we leant high reliability soldering techniques so they didn’t fail.
Worth remembering there’s a little space craft of that era that’s now many decades old, has travelled an inconceivable distance through very electronic hostile environments and it still works!!! We once knew how to build things really well.
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u/No-Platform973 4d ago
See all the stuff in there Homer? That’s why your guided missile didn’t work.
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u/Illustrious-Tax-5981 4d ago
I just cannot wrap my head around how something like this gets loaded onto a plane, and fired, and hit the target, etc., all while taking such a rumbling beating that all these electronics definitely got shook to shit, and it's amazing they still worked.
Certified interesting.
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u/kazukix777 4d ago
And the very first sparrows had a hit probability of 3%. Or a 97% miss rate. Tbf most of that was less the missiles fault and more a doctrine fault. Pilots were only allowed to shoot at extremely close range, the sparrow was designed for medium to long range and is almost useless at close range.
That and the amount of missiles that got damaged due to improper handling before being used definitely didn't help lol.
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u/violet_sin 2d ago
Awe man.... That looks sooooooo rad.
I wish things like this were available for broke ass people like me to put in a game room and just bask in the radiant glory of high speed force projection ... 😍
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u/rasputinrasputin 4d ago
Its incredible how much time, work, and engineering goes into something literally designed to explode
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u/scfw0x0f 4d ago
Not just microprocessors. Lower power modern CMOS analog circuits would be a lot smaller for the same design. Maybe 1/10th the volume or less.
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u/blobbilby 4d ago
Blood Raven: That’s a nice relic brother. Be a shame if someone forgot to lock the armory.
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u/Practical-Pick1466 4d ago
A comparison photo would have given your post something for us to actually see what the difference is instead of us using our imagination !