Palestinian "rockets". what are they

it sounds so general when news reports just say rockets. does anyone have any info on what types of rockets, who makes them, and how do they get them

i believe they are katyusha rockets, which were invented in ww2 so we are talking top of the line cutting edge technology here.

here is some info:
www.globalsecurity.org...

they are using Qassam rockets

www.aerospaceweb.org...

60mm in diameter 160 cm in length , weighs about 6kgs , has a range of about 5km`s and made on gaza strip or the west bank iteself - they are not imported as its cheaper and easier to make themselves.



apparantly they have the BM-21 GRAD , a soviet era , wheeled MLRS with a range of 40km - there was around 40,000 made byt up to 20 countries , heck even israel have some in storage.

but thats only apparantly - as the grad is also one of the `square mile removal service` weapons , you know when those things are in bound

Guys, you forget about the Palestinian rockets made and used by the Israelis.

For the second line, I forget what I was going to say.

Hamas: Qassam Rockets with no targeting capability at all

Israel: GPS and Laser guided EVERYTHING


If you want Hamas and Palestinians to cut back on the civilian casualties, give them GPS and Laser guided munitions too


But really, this is not a fair fight

If they're making all the components themselves how are they powered?

I've wondered if they're powered by some kind of fertiliser/sugar propellant, but you do have to wonder at the ingenuity to manufacture such a thing thats capable of a range of 5km from locally available materials under strict embargo

reply to post by Harlequin

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Hey, I want some of those babies. My cats would look so cool flying on top of those. I would take out the explosives and add a parachute though so my cats could come back down in one piece.

Maybe we could get the Israeli's and Palestinians to settle this with a cat launching competition?

I had wondered the same thing: Where is Hamas getting its rockets?

They seem to have quite a few of them, but for all that have suposedly been luanched at Israel, there seems to have been very little death/destruction resulting from them (Yes every life is precious, but the current ration of dead/ injured Israelis to dead/injured Palastinians seems to be running 100:1 against the Palastinians).


If the rockets were being imported by Hamas, why haven't the shipments been interdicted by Israel before this?


And yes, if the rockets are being built in Gaza, where are the Gazan Palastinians getting the materials?




Very curious.



I'm not pointing any fingers, but I would like to relate a rather coincidental anecdote that has been bothering me since this Gaza-thing started.


Specifically, since it was put forth that the Israelis intended to pursue this aggression "until the rockets stop flying into Israel".



Many years ago I helped start a small aerospace firm. It was (and remains) a private company; which at that time had no government ties or funding.


As a private firm, we were amoung a number of such groups participating in what was then called the C.A.T.S. (Cheap Access To Space) Prize: a competetion, in the late 90's- 2000, to see who could be the first Private group to build a rocket capable of reaching space (aprox 62 miles straight up).


We didn't win the competetion, but we did design and build a series of very successfull, very cheap, very portable rockets: most with full on-board instrumentation.




Skip ahead to last year (2008); it's just after the conflict in South Ossatia, between Russia and Georgia. A colleague of mine, who knows of my prior association with the "rocket world", relays a message to me from an old Navy buddy of his (Who I've never met) who is, I'm told, still attached to the Pentagon as a civilian "consultant".



The message:

"Would it be possible for me to contact my old cohorts and have them arrange the construction of several thousand! rockets on a government contract over the next one to two years or so? And could they be built "without any indentifiable features"?



"Black Ops" most assuredly. But I passed the inquiry to my friends at the old company, as requested,




Now this was mid-last year, and to my knowledge nothing further has developed from this odd incident; but now I'm wondering.



The description of the rockets used sound very much like a version of the ones we developed and launched.

(Most of our rockets required nothing more of an "infrastructure" than the foam-board box we used to transport the rocket.)

Given the size and carrying capacity of the rocket, not much of a "warhead" would be possible (accounts for the low number of deaths and injuries suffered by the Israelis?).

And a simple rocket wouldn't have much to identify its maker by, especially once it was destroyed on impact.


Especially if the "victims" of the "attack" weren't terribly curious to pin down the rocket-maker!



So here's a wild idea:

Could the US be supplying these "Palastinian terror rockets" in support of an Israeli-hatched scheme to "justify" an incurrsion into Gaza, with the goal being "Regime Change": route out Hamas and install a more Israeli-friendly regime in Gaza?

This is possible. However the war was started to jack up oil prices so we can finally reach stagflation

Those three guys in the pic could be the rocketry club at a community college if circumstances were slightly different. I could almost be jealous of them having such nice rockets to play with.

They're almost exclusively Qassams, homebuilt, with minimal range and a payload in the 5-10 lb range.

Picture making one of those "kit" rockets with a length of signpost and some copper tubing, and you've got it. There's not much more to it.

The accuracy and effectiveness of them is so low, Hamas would probably achieve better results by carrying them to Serdot and wielding them like baseball bats in hand to hand combat.

Here's a fairly decent overview

[edit on 6-1-2009 by vox2442]

Actually this post got me thinking about something, what if Hamas and the Palestinians were backed by the US and Israel was the enemy. Imagine what would the Arab Nation do in reverse to the Jewish Nation ?

why?

Why not imagine if Shakespeare was a woman or if rain fell up or a world where sneezing was foreplay?

Fantasy is nice and all, but it's pretty pointless to apply it with the topic at hand.