What's really irritating about the LCS is that the Danish StanFlex system is exactly the capability the LCS was supposed to offer, and StanFlex works. Pure NIH syndrome. In addition, someone has already done the legwork to make sure that a half-dozen different hulls compatible with StanFlex modules are proven technology…
We have much greater ship sinking capacity. Uncle Sam's Misguided Children have even practiced putting truck-mounted launchers on the decks of under-armed ships and using them from that platform; in tests, I believe it worked well.
I'm not the only one who has doubts about Chinese missiles, both their numbers and their performance. I think it's probable that only the high end of their systems will work, and of that, the precision components will all have to be made in Russia because the extreme precision and insensitivity required of missile guidance systems is silly hard to get right.
Low-tier systems don't need precision parts to work acceptably, so they'll have plenty of that.
But all the medium-tier stuff like Harpoon equivalents will be hamstrung by a lack of Russian parts because they're a little … ah, distracted right now by current events.
From the article, they moved to Louisiana for the humid climate, which prevents static electricity buildup and reduces the risk of the whole plant blowing itself sky-high.
Lead-free primers are a thing. The US military prefers to minimize lead wherever reasonably feasible, because the VA is expensive, and when they have to pay to clean up their ranges during routine maintenance, extremely high amounts of lead dramatically increases the price of this scheduled maintenance.
Their primary objective is still to close with and destroy the enemy, so if they still need to use lead or uranium to get the job done, the mission comes first. But if they can save money by using lead-free training ammo, that's more money they can spend on training the troops and ammo for them to practice with. And more money to issue everybody a bazooka of some flavor or another, as Ukraine is demonstrating is a really useful idea right about now.
Remember: Amateurs study tactics. Professionals study logistics!
Black powder is used in booster charges. In artillery fuzes, there can be up to four different types of explosive in the explosive train which ignites the main charge, according to my half-assed Googling and Wikipedia.
In this image, the olive-drab component is the warhead-and-rocket assembly, and the forest-green component is a full fucking pound of black powder which launches the rocket to a minimum safe range before the ignition of the main propulsion motor.
I'm presently unsure about the propellants used in other recoilless systems, but I can presume that there exist designs other than the RPG-7 which are currently being provided in bulk to Ukraine, while simultaneously utilizing some amount of black powder in the propulsion system, while some further subset of those will prove difficult to redesign to use more modern double- or triple-base smokeless propellants due to the much higher operating pressure of these propellants, especially in the context of thin-walled light-weight launchers.
Well, I guess by my standards, it IS broken.