Warheads Without a Heavy Gun: Rockets, Rocket Launchers and Recoilless Guns from the RS-82 to the Kestrel

The RS-82 was an unguided air-launched rocket whose number gave its diameter in millimeters. Work began in the late 1920s under Georgy Langemak at the Gas Dynamics Laboratory, with airborne trials in 1932 on a Tupolev I-4. Soviet fighters such as the I-16 and the Il-2 attack aircraft carried these rockets, and roughly 12 million of the RS-82 and RS-132 were used in the war.

The American Navy answered with the 5-Inch Forward Firing Aircraft Rocket. It began as a 3.5 inch anti-submarine rocket, and in December 1943 a 5-inch anti-aircraft shell was fitted to the same motor. It weighed 80 pounds, carried a 45-pound high explosive warhead, and flew from the Dauntless, the Avenger and the Corsair.

The Soviet S-13 is a 122 millimeter aircraft rocket, tried in 1973 and formally introduced in 1983. It was built as a penetrating munition to crater runways and breach bunkers and aircraft shelters, with a 21 kilogram warhead, and it is fired from the five-tube B-13L launcher by aircraft from the Su-25 to the Mi-24 helicopter.

The Qassam shows the rocket stripped to its simplest form: a steel artillery rocket made by the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades of Hamas. The first Qassam-1, with a range of 2,500 meters, was made in June 2001, and its parts are common materials such as fertilizer, sugar, springs and steel cylinders.

The Soviet B-10 is an 82 millimeter smoothbore recoilless gun that could ride on the back of a BTR-50 armored personnel carrier. It entered Soviet service in 1954 as a development of the SPG-82, was replaced in the army by the SPG-9 during the 1960s, and stayed with parachute units into at least the 1980s.

The American M40 is a crew-served recoilless rifle, marketed as 106 millimeter although the bore is 105 millimeter, to avoid confusion with an earlier failed design. Made at Watervliet Arsenal and type-designated in 1955, it carried an M8C .50 caliber spotting rifle, was used mainly against tanks, and was seen widely in the Vietnam War before the TOW missile succeeded it.

Argentina fielded its own 105 millimeter recoilless anti-tank gun, the Model 1968, made by the Rio Tercero Military Factory. It weighs about 397 kilograms, needs a crew of four, and reaches a maximum range of about 9,200 meters. As of 2000, 150 examples were still operational with Argentine forces.

The Soviet RPG-18 Mukha, meaning Fly, is a disposable 64 millimeter anti-tank rocket launcher designed in 1972 and based on the American M72 LAW. It was made by Bazalt in the Soviet Union and in East Germany, and it has been used by more than twenty armed forces in more than twenty conflicts.

The Polish RPG-76 Komar is a disposable 40 millimeter launcher, lighter and more compact than the RPG-7 and suited to airborne troops. Jet nozzles between the warhead and the fuel compartment vent the backblast forward, so it can be fired from inside buildings or vehicles. It was adopted in 1985, and more than 100,000 were made.

The Taiwanese Kestrel closes the path with a one-man shoulder-launched anti-tank weapon of fiber-reinforced plastic, weighing 5 kilograms with a 67 millimeter caliber. It was developed between 2008 and 2012 by the National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology and has been in service since 2015, effective to 400 meters with its HEAT rocket.