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Printer The Military United States Technology

US Army Unveils 3D-Printed Grenade Launcher Called RAMBO (ibtimes.co.uk) 82

Posted by BeauHD from the reporting-for-duty dept.
New submitter drunkdrone quotes a report from International Business Times: The U.S. Military has a new firearm in its itinerary: Meet RAMBO, the 3D printed grenade launcher that could revolutionize the way soldiers are equipped for battle. RAMBO, or the Rapid Additively Manufactured Ballistics Ordnance to give it its proper name, is based on the U.S. Army's M203 underslung grenade launcher for firearms including the M16 and M4A1 carbine. But RAMBO is unique in that all of its parts save for the springs and fasteners have been produced by 3D printing -- and that includes the grenades themselves. The breech-loaded grenade launcher consists of 50 individual parts, the majority of which were developed through the additive manufacturing process. Additive manufacturing is a form of 3D printing whereby layers of material, commonly photopolymer resin, are printed on top of each other to create a 3D object. During testing, RAMBO successfully fired 15 shots without showing any sign of deterioration. The ammunition itself was also 3D printed, based on the M781 40mm training round. U.S. Army researchers selected this particular round because it doesn't require any explosive propellants, the use of which are have not been proved safe with 3D printed objects.
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US Army Unveils 3D-Printed Grenade Launcher Called RAMBO More

US Army Unveils 3D-Printed Grenade Launcher Called RAMBO

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  • nobody should be allowed to use (Score:3)

    by _Shorty-dammit ( 555739 ) on Saturday March 11, 2017 @02:31AM (#54017175)

    Nobody should be allowed to use acronyms anymore. Heh. (Whoops on the AC post. Don't know why I wasn't logged in...)

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I christen thee: NSBATUAA

  • How come portable turrets aren't a thing for the military? I mean, when you have some cover say behind a wall, rooftop, or in a building who wants to be facing the enemy face to face if you can mount ur weapon on a turret and control, aim, and fire from your iPhone, Nintendo Switch, or Xbox controller? It doesn't even have to be on a robot, something the size of a portable tripod oughta be good enough.
    I feel like there are tons of companies that would be able to make them cheap in sufficient volume.

    • That's actually an interesting idea.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It could also use a spring mechanism to fire the entire shell.
      That's 65% more bullet per bullet.

    • Cheap? This is the military.

      Also the thing would have to be rugged, and fairly sophisticated. Aiming using a controller is going to be slow and crappy, especially on a moving target. You'd need to add multiple cameras and perhaps a VR helmet to make this effective. Guy peeping out a window has instant 90 ish degree situational awareness and can bring his gun to bear on any target in a fraction of a second. A simple turret isn't going to come close.

      • Aiming using a controller is going to be slow and crappy, especially on a moving target. You'd need to add multiple cameras and perhaps a VR helmet to make this effective.

        Silly Star Wars misconceptions...people wouldn't be aiming manually, they'd be using computer/machine vision, and at best direct the system towards which detected targets to shoot at.

      • Also the thing would have to be rugged,

        So true. There is NOTHING a soldier can't break....

      • Actually, a few heavy duty servos driven by a ruggedized laptop taking input from a camera can do a pretty good job of movement / face detection and can aim faster and more accurately than a human.

        The problem is lugging them around and setting them up (and the not insignificant issue of Friend-Or-Foe detection...) Ultimately you have a lot more flexibility just handing a rifle to a human... which is why real military sentry guns are for major fixed installations like the Korean border.

    • Check out the Davey Crockett portable nuclear weapon launcher [wikipedia.org]. Not sure I'd want to be the guy using that weapon.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DarkOx ( 621550 )

        Yea that seems like it could go really badly for the operators if the winds are blowing the wrong way. Sounds like this thing would have produced quite a bit of fallout. Even though you probably wont get direct effects from the initial detonation, Its not hard to imagine some pretty hazardous dust blowing back on your position from where this thing lands a couple miles away a short time later. Better make sure the target is down wind.

        • Dialed to maximum yield and using the smaller of the two recoilless rifles, the maximum range of the weapon was inside the minimum safe range for the nuke. You were encouraged to trigger it remotely, from next to a bunker (that you could dive into quickly, and planned on abandoning as soon as the shockwave had passed twice), or on the back of a Jeep for some serious shoot-n-scoot action.

    • They are a thing, as other posters have pointed out. I think you probably are underestimating the weight and bulk of this thing:
      1. It needs to be heavy enough (or have anchor points) to resist the kick of the rifle.
      2. It needs to be rugged enough to operate at least once after being exposed to the combat environment (impacts, dirt, water, etc)
      3. The servos need to be strong enough to precisely orient a bulky rifle plus ammo. An m16 is around 4kg loaded with 20 rounds. Compare that to the roughly 1kg weight

    • Take a look at YouTube. The Syrians and Iraqis take vehicles like Toyota Landcruisers and just weld a ton of metal sheet on them that will stop a bullet and hey presto a mobile minigun/machine gun. You must be stupid or too old to use the internet.

    • Remote-controlled turrets have recently become a trendy upgrade for military vehicles - the M1's TUSK system (Tank Urban Survival Kit) includes a remote-controlled 12.7mm machine gun, to allow it to be operated by the crew without exposing themselves.

      Autonomous turrets are deployed along the Korean DMZ, and are equipped with a 40mm grenade launcher and a 5.56mm machine gun. They are claimed to be configured to require human authorization to fire, but are widely suspected to have fully-autonomous capabilitie

  • don't think this is a good idea (Score:4, Interesting)

    by LostInTaiwan ( 837924 ) on Saturday March 11, 2017 @03:17AM (#54017229)

    Technology cuts both ways. I will sleep better at night if I know the advance killing equipments all require billions of R&D and billions more in manufacturing supply chain/infrastructure, rather than something that can be 3d printed in a cave. Of course, if you're the person in a cave with a 3d printer, this is probably an uplifting news. . . .

    • It's an inevitable idea.
      Also: this 3d printer itself needs a big logistics chain. Not only the printer itself which you can probably buy in 10 years from AliExpress COD Shenzen, but the things like the resins, stable power source, etc.
      And they haven't made anything that goes boom yet either, cause a 3d printer is not a good chemical laboratory. Even the propellant is lacking. What good is a grenade that doesn't go boom?
      Shooting training grenades isn't very scary.

      Just like producing a normal rifle or other f

    • The equipment needed for this kind of additive manufacturing is on the order of 300.000 -1.000.000 USD. Furthermore, it is only viable for special parts that cannot be easily manufactured by traditional techniques, e.g. turbine blades and such. Grenade shells abso-fucking-lutely would be cheaper made by traditional metalworking. I would say a traditionally fabricated mortar shell is about 500 times cheaper than additively manufactured.

      • Reading the very first (short) paragraph of the TFA reveals that printing is only being used for rapid prototyping. They are not going to be manufacturing deployed weapons this way.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by bongey ( 974911 )

        Don't know about the training shells, they are basically big paint balls, with bright orange powder. Also there is supply issue at times, when preparing for a deployment there aren't enough training rounds to go around for all branches.

    • It's much cheaper to build simple weapons with conventional tools than to 3d print them. The 3d printed version must have some special properties to be worthwile.

      • Yeah, and that special property is that it is "just" a rapid prototype, revealed in the second sentence of TFA.

        • Yeah, 3d printing is perfect for rapid prototyping. So why worry about it if it is just for that? Conventional mass production is faster and cheaper.
        • 3d printing can have other advantages too, for example it can create very lightweight parts with a mesh structure, or other structures that are impossible to make out of one part conventionally. It can also be worthwhile for very complex parts, which would have to be made out of many parts otherwise.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DarkOx ( 621550 )

      That is the problem with all this technology though isn't it? Whenever our knowledge of chemistry and physics advances we tend to weaponize it first. Than we find the civilian applications and the tech trickles out. Once its out its often not all that hard to re-weaponize it.

      Think of all the commercial space business today. None would exists without standing on work down for the V2 rocket program. The heavy lifting, pun intended, was done by militarizes for killing people. Now there is a lot of acces

      • Even the space race was all about missile capacity. When Sputnik was launched, the US realized Russia had the ability to put a nuclear warhead down anywhere in the US. Up until the 50s, their tactic had been long-range bombers, but that was scaled back significantly (and ICMBs emphasized) once the space age began. The manned Mercury program was an evolution of this, launching on a converted ICBM rocket for Mercury 1 and 2. We likely would never have put a man on the moon without the military leading the way
  • Someone in the army's been playing too much SC2: http://starcraft.wikia.com/wik... [wikia.com]

  • Did they print pictures of naked servicewomen on the weapon as decoration?

  • Not so new of an idea (Score:3)

    by Registered Coward v2 ( 447531 ) on Saturday March 11, 2017 @08:40AM (#54017725)
    The US military has been working with 3D printing for quite some time, at least since the early 2000's. The were doing additive printing using metal to make thins such as vehicle replacement parts. One one was printed it was then machined to the required tolerances an used; the printed parts were as, if not more, durable than the original. One of the uses was to reduce the supply chain by forward deploying the printing capability with instructions rather than having to procure, ship and stock replacements at various locations; or having a unit wait a few days while one was sent from the US. In addition, rarely need parts ould not need to be procured and stocked. A ship could carry one as well greatly reducing the time needed to procure a spare. If instructions weren't already available a lab in the US could create and send them.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by TWX ( 665546 )

      Trouble with this approach is it requires a lot of steps in the field, and requires a lot of time in the field. It moves the production line closer to enemy action to destroy it, and if they really do have to form the rough shape in a 3d print process then machine it, that's presumably a lot of space and a lot of time being committed in a vulnerable position, and is also presumably much more dependent on electricity and functional computers that a conventional machine shop.

      We can transport just about anyth

      • > It moves the production line closer to enemy action to destroy it,
        Please read up on how warfare works. There is The Front, The Road to the Front, The Border, and usually miles away from all that: Where vehicles refuel.
        Why on would anybody have a 3D printer on front, instead of just having one in a supply area?
        Also: I don't think you understand just how much Logistics a 3D printer removes, if it can print ANY reasonably replaceable part.
        Instead of a of a forward supply depot with random parts that will

      • Trouble with this approach is it requires a lot of steps in the field, and requires a lot of time in the field. It moves the production line closer to enemy action to destroy it, and if they really do have to form the rough shape in a 3d print process then machine it, that's presumably a lot of space and a lot of time being committed in a vulnerable position, and is also presumably much more dependent on electricity and functional computers that a conventional machine shop.

        You make some good points but they would not necessarily forward deploy them beyond a secure base and ship parts from there. Granted, shipping from a logistic base is an option, and our logistics capability is pretty amazing, especially if cost is not a concern. I see this as more of a stop gap whne you can't get priority but need something' or if spares aren't available.

  • Additive manufacturing is a form of 3D printing whereby layers of material, commonly photopolymer resin, are printed on top of each other to create a 3D object.

    First of all, this is Slashdot. I don't think you need to define what additive manufacturing is.

    Second, photopolymer resin is not common. The most common 3D printers use fused deposition modeling, not stereolithography.

  • 3D-Printed TOY Grenade Launcher (Score:3)

    by Hognoxious ( 631665 ) on Saturday March 11, 2017 @09:27AM (#54017843) Homepage Journal

    "During testing, RAMBO successfully fired 15 shots without showing any sign of deterioration. The ammunition itself was also 3D printed, based on the M781 40mm training round. U.S. Army researchers selected this particular round because it doesn't require any explosive propellants the use of which are have not been proved safe with 3D printed objects. "

    So the headline should read: US Army Unveils 3D-Printed Toy Grenade Launcher Called IOAFTR

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bongey ( 974911 )

      There is still a .38 round in the printed shell, it still has explosion for the propellant. Note practice round shells are much lighter , they don't have nearly as much kick as an HE round.(former US Infantry). https://fas.org/man/dod-101/sy... [fas.org]

  • It is interesting to see though 2 stories on /. almost side by side: Russians 3d print a house. Americans 3d print a grenade launcher. Just saying...

  • Maria Hill: What does S.H.I.E.L.D. stand for? Agent Ward: Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement and Logistics Division Maria Hill: What does that mean to you? Agent Ward: It means someone really wanted our initials to spell S.H.I.E.L.D.

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