Clive Robinson • May 12, 2019 7:59 PM

@ cat,

With regards the “Ginsu missile” I realy don’t think that some journalists understand what they are being told, or someone is pulling their leg…

The quote from the WashPo of,

Designated the Hellfire R9X, the missile has no explosive warhead—instead, its payload is more than 100 pounds of metal, including long blades that deploy from the body of the missile just before impact.

Normal Hellfire missiles weigh ~100lb (46Kg) in total of which the warhead payload is actually a copper lined shapped charge that is not a big percentage at 18-20%.

Secondly the Hellfire IIRC gets upto around 950MPH or 425m/S. In terms of energy using Ek = 0.5MV^2, thats just over four million Joules liberated in around 2mS or ~2GWatt which is well into ‘crispy fried critter’ country.

The Hellfire was originally designed in the 1970’s to destroy mainline Soviet tank armour. Thus a Hellfire would quite happily punch it’s way through most buildings walls through a person and out the other side of the building… Sticking blades out the side of the missile would actually slow the missile progress down quite considerably, and would only add to the level of flying shrapnel, thus injuring many more people as collateral damage than just the missile with passive ballast replacing the usual warhead.

Clive Robinson • May 13, 2019 6:00 AM

@ MarkH,

That purported missile sounds like something from the comic books I read as a kid! I share your doubts about the whole story …

The quoted missile designation “R9X” does appear in other places but there is no usefull information as such. In some respects it’s like the CIA bombs during both the Korean and Vietnam wars. That is all you realy got was a designator and a form factor for basic requirments like what weapons racks it would fit into as they were delivered to the weapons loaders outside of the normal chain. The actuall purpose be it propaganda leaflets or chemical/biological weapons of mass destruction was not given.

Thus I suspect there is quite a degree of “chinese whispers” space to play in. Which is what appears to be the case,

https://taskandpurpose.com/cia-r9x-hellfire-missile

In one part they are talking about 6 swords, but the photographs of a car supposadly hit has only 4 potential cuts. Personally I do not believe that car was hit with a Hellfire missile of any kind. I suspect it might just have been a few Kg of free falling tungstan casing with the four cuts comming from the larger than average tail fins required for guidence rather than just stabilisation.

Because the basic logic holds, the all up weight for the standard Hellfire missile ~100lb give or take five pounds. Changing that is not realistic due to weapons racks/pylons etc. Of that weight ~20% is warhead the other 80% being motor, fuel, frame, guidence mechanics electronics and power source and seaker/follower sensors in the nose cone.

Thus we can safely say the 100lb of metal payload is an outright nonsense. Even if the journalist or person was talking about total mass on target, as you note it’s still not realistically going to be 100lb.

But even if there was just a lump of concrete in a HDPE wrapper to put in the payload bay of the Hellfire the impact at upto 950MPH is going to do one heck of a lot of damage just from kinetic energy and breakup into shrapnel. But worse is the rocket fuel. for those with longer memories back to the Falklands war, the missile that hit HMS Sheffield did not sink it by impact. What sunk the Sheffield at the end of the day was the fires caused by the remaining rocket fuel[1] causing her to be virtually gutted and thus abandoned and the hull not being made sea worthy before being put under tow[2].

For obvious reasons the amount of additional energy in rocket fuel is going to have a marked effect after impact regardless of any weapons payload.

So honestly I realy can not see any way that collateral damage is going to be significantly effected in a downwards manner.

And that’s all before we start talking about cutting blades being deployed outwards from what in reality is quite a small weapons bay in the missile, so I can not see them being the “long blades” of the article. Look at it this way to be long from a small bay they would not just need to be folded, they would need a support structure. So they might look somewhat like the inside of a small “hand bag umbrella”, and as many people know they have a habit of turning inside out in even quite moderate winds. At 450m/S as the saying goes “I’m not feeling it”.

But look again at that car in the photos, it shows no signs of burning or outward bowing you would expect from the energies involved of a rocket the size of a hellfire missile.

On what we have so far the story “is failing the sniff test”. So I guess we are going to have to wait and see if any extra information surfaces about the R9X at some point in time.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/oct/15/revealed-full-story-behind-sinking-of-falklands-warship-hms-sheffield

[2] There are still stories going around that the Sheffield was deliberately scuttled, if that is true or not the evidence for it is lacking currently.

Clive Robinson • May 14, 2019 6:07 PM

@ TIARA GNOME,

With respect to the quote you give,

two or more collaborating websites can compare how graphics and text are displayed by your computer and determine whether two website visits are coming from the same computer or not.

If you search back far enough on this site you will find I was warning about the potential for such attacks in web browsers with two or more windows/tabs open some time before Google even started talking about Chrome.

As I pointed out in a conversation with @Nick P back then, the problem was that web browsers were in effect a single process with all that implies about lack of segregation in memory and I/O thus even communications on the wire (traffic analysis etc by various “injection” techniques).

What web browsers did back then and still effectively do today is “short circuit out” the OS native privacy / security segregations you would get with seperate processes, data and communications stacks etc.

As I’ve also warned the lack of easy segregation of “user roles” is further a major privacy / security weakening.

The fact that Google and similar who rely on such weaknesses for their profit models, also pay for features in web browsers one way or another should tell you the real reason Web Browsers are so insecure, and worse why the W3C stuffed so much obvious further weakening of users privacy in the HTML5 standard.

Depending on who you listen to, it appears that something like 75% of HTML5 is ripe for abuse of privacy thus security in the use of HTML5. But ot is also compleatly unnecessary for standard browser functionality.

My advice as with javascript and cookies would be “Don’t support HTML5”. If web sites using it find they are loosing traffic because they use HTML5 then they will stop using it. Which means that it will get depreciated for earlier less intrusive standards.

Even the ‘alledged'[1] originator of Hypertext and Hyperlinks Tim Bearners-Lee is saying such lack of privacy is killing the Internet thus we should move on to greater privacy / security (which would also involve junking IP and the lower level network protocols as well).

However as long as the “data rapers” of Silicon Valley call the shots then we will never have privacy, security or the myriad of other things society needs to survive…

[1] As I’ve mentioned before there were well developed Hyperlink and Hypertext systems running in various places where Tim Bearners-Lee would have come into contact with them directly or indirectly. Two that I know off are the UK’s National Physics Laboratory (NPL), and the UK’s British Telecomm (BT) who used the work from NPL as the basis for their research and further development, some of which ended up in the Prestel System and later “ViewData” systems in the late 1970’s and 1980’s.