Stinger Missile FIM92A

Initial work on the missile was begun by General Dynamics in 1967 as the Redeye II. It was accepted for further development by the U.S. Army in 1971 and designated FIM-92; the Stinger appellation was chosen in 1972. Because of technical difficulties that dogged testing, the first shoulder launch was not until mid-1975. Production of the FIM-92A began in 1978 to replace the FIM-43 Redeye. An improved Stinger with a new seeker, the FIM-92B, was produced from 1983 alongside the FIM-92A. Production of both the A and B types ended in 1987 with around 16,000 missiles produced.

This weapon is manufactured in the United States of America. Each missile weighs 35 pounds. During the Afghanistan war against Russia the United States supplied the Taliban and other forces with these missles. The Taliban at one time had up to 100 of these missiles stored. The missles can be fired from a standing or riding position. This makes them easy to use and to get away from enemies quickly. When the missile is fired it can move at mach II which is twice the speed of sound. Each missile can shoot 11,500 feet high and has a range of 5 miles. Enemy forces are careful to fly higher than the missiles can be shot.

The missile is 1.52 m long and 70 mm in diameter with 10 cm fins. The missile itself weighs 10.1 kg, while the missile with launcher weighs approximately 15.2 kg (33.5 pounds). The Stinger is launched by a small ejection motor that pushes it a safe distance from the operator before engaging the main solid-fuel two-stage motor which accelerates it to a maximum speed of Mach 2.2 (750 m/s). The warhead is a 3 kg penetrating hit-to-kill warhead type with an impact fuse and a self-destruct timer.

In order to fire the missile, a BCU (Battery Coolant Unit) must be inserted into the handguard. This shoots a stream of argon gas into the system, as well as a chemical energy charge that enables the acquisition indicators and missile to get power. The batteries are somewhat sensitive to abuse, and only hold so much gas in them. Over time, and without proper maintenance, they are known to become unserviceable. The IFF antenna receives its power from a rechargeable battery. Guidance to the target is initially through proportional navigation and is then switched to another mode that directs the missile towards the target airframe instead of its exhaust plume.

There are three main variants in use; the Stinger basic, STINGER-Passive Optical Seeker Technique (POST), and STINGER-Reprogrammable Microprocessor (RMP).

The Stinger-RMP is so-called because of its ability to load a new set of software via a ROMRAM for each processor; since the downloaded code runs from RAM, there isn't much space to spare, particularly for the processors dedicated to seeker input processing and target analysis. The RMP has a dual-detector seeker: IR and UV. This allows it to distinguish targets from countermeasures much better than the Redeye, which was IR-only. inserted in the gripstock at the depot. If this download to the missile fails during power-up, basic functionality runs off the on-board ROM. The four-processor RMP has 4K of