Qfyilyi

In this story I am creating, there is an airborne infantry that specializes in disabling small ships, rapid reaponse deployment, and supporting ground forces with a large number of them. For reference they are called the Hawks.

I am a little at a loss to how a concept I came up with would work. With their fast flying and small amount of time to aim, I thought of a solution. A micro-missile rifle.

I understand that a missile has blowback, and that it's explosive yield would be a bit small if fitted into a rifle form.

You might say "why not just make a grenade launcher, or a rifle with explosive rounds?" Well what would be helpful about using Micro missiles? Would the yield be great against armor? Is it possible to strafe an entire area in a quick succession?

Would the ammunition hamper the flight capabilities of the Hawks?

Edit: The goal of the weapon, is to be able to consistently hit targets at high speeds with a minimal amount of time required to aim. Also to create a versatile weapon against aircraft, armor, and infantry. A weapon that would also enable the Hawk to still fly.

Its already a thing.

Its called the Gyrojet.

The Gyrojet is a family of unique firearms developed in the 1960s named for the method of gyroscopically stabilizing its projectiles. Rather than inert bullets, Gyrojets fire small rockets called Microjets which have little recoil and do not require a heavy barrel or chamber to resist the pressure of the combustion gases. Velocity on leaving the tube was very low, but increased to around 1,250 feet per second (380 m/s) at 30 feet (9.1 m). The result is a very lightweight weapon.

Even thought the gyrojet had issues, they would most likely be solved given serious funding:

Versions of the Gyrojet that were tested were inaccurate, cumbersome, slow loading, and unreliable. At best, a 1% failure rate was suggested

The main advantages that I see with gyrojets are lightweight as mentioned above, and that they could potentially carry avionics that allow the user to guide the missiles, especially given compact modern computers. However. the gun had very little energy at close ranges and the small size of the weapon, though given that the users will be flying, close range engagements won't be very common.

Is your mini missile a rocket propelled grenade?

https://www.militaryfactory.com/smallarms/detail.asp?smallarms_id=10

I envision your hawks having a quiver full of these little rockets. Sort of like the archer superheroes, not every rocket is the same. There would be shrapnel antipersonnel rockets, shaped charge antitank rockets, white phosphorus rockets etc.

How to distinguish these from generic old RPGs? I am digging the idea of rocket powered arrows. The flying archer would shoot and then the rocket turn on a second later, propelling the explosive arrow forward.

Make it SMART

The key is to turn an RPG or Gyrojet or other missile into a smart weapon.

• Use laser sight to pick your target.


• Location is determined based on location of the rifle combined with angle & distance (radar?) of the target.


• Press the trigger and location information is updated into missile and it is sent on its way.

This really shouldn't be much different from the way a much larger missile might be fired from a fighter jet today. The difference is miniaturization. But I think a Raspberry Pi would be powerful enough to handle the computations involved, so the only big (physical size) additions to an RPG would be some sort of additional inflight steering mechanism controlled by the onboard computer.