Capability Brief · Unclassified · Private Beta

OSINT Ordnance Database

An open-source intelligence (OSINT) reference for ordnance identification, built to be searched by what an item looks like rather than by what it is called. Every entry that carries a source reliability rating prints it on the page.
Open published sources only · Personal project on personal equipment
No government systems, networks, or duty-derived data · No unit, force, or location tracking
The Problem

References are indexed by the one thing the item does not carry

  • References are indexed by designation. An unidentified item does not carry its designation. What is available is a shape, a colour, a body material, and a diameter.
  • Sourcing is usually invisible. Most public ordnance references print a specification table without saying which document it came from, or how far that document can be trusted.
  • Current-conflict material is scattered. Loitering munitions, submunitions, and one-way attack systems appear in reporting long before they appear in any structured reference.
  • Imagery carries a rights problem. The photographs that actually identify current items are largely social media posts, republished by aggregators that hold no licence to pass on.
1,157
published entries, one page each
18
ordnance types across three domains
29
countries of origin recorded
537
source citations recorded, 258 carrying their own reliability rating
OSINT Ordnance DatabaseUnclassified
The Capability

A reference that answers from the object

  • One page per item. 1,157 published entries built from 60 open source documents, each carrying hazards and disposal notes, specifications, operators, alternate names, and citations.
  • Filtering built for the safe-distance question. Shape, colour, body material, and a diameter range narrow the corpus before anyone gets close enough to read a stencil.
  • Provenance on the surface. Source reliability is graded with the Admiralty scheme and shown wherever the entry is shown, not buried in a footnote.
  • Structured, not prose. 12,676 recorded facts and 2,702 measurements sit behind the pages, which is what makes the corpus filterable rather than only readable.
  • Three domains, one taxonomy. Surface, underwater, and chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear, holding 18 ordnance types, holding the items.
12,676
structured facts recorded behind the entries
2,702
measurements recorded
744
alternate designations and nicknames indexed
208
photographs hosted with attribution and licence
OSINT Ordnance DatabaseUnclassified
Feature · Identify by Sight

Filter on what you can see from a safe distance

FILTERS Type 18 ordnance types over 3 domains Shape 9 buckets, derived from the recorded description Colour 10 buckets Body material 6 buckets Diameter / calibre numeric range, minimum and maximum Country of origin 29 countries Chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear 159 entries flagged capable Has a photograph 208 entries FREE TEXT matches designation, North Atlantic Treaty Organization designation, nickname, and summary VIEW grid or list; default sort places photographed entries first
The filter rail as built, with the count each facet can currently reach
  • The visual facets lead. Shape, colour, and body material sit in their own labelled block, ahead of country, calibre, and the flags.
  • The buckets are derived, not typed in. They are extracted from the recorded description of each entry, and an item deliberately lands in more than one bucket where the source supports it.
  • Photographed entries sort first by default. Alphabetical order opens on a wall of entries with no picture, which reads as an empty database.
OSINT Ordnance DatabaseUnclassified
Feature · The Entry

Every entry prints its sources and its gaps

ENTRY PAGE, TOP TO BOTTOM Header designation, type, country of origin, chemical- biological-radiological-nuclear flag, source rating, conflicts Summary written prose (41 entries) or assembled from the recorded fields (1,005 entries), labelled either way Disposal relevance why the item matters to a disposal technician (286 entries carry this panel) Hazard notes hazards, render-safe considerations, dud behaviour, detection, recovery, visual identification, safety Specifications measurements, then 46 ordered fact keys, then manufacturer, service, and status Operators recorded countries of use Further detail every recorded fact not mapped above, nothing hidden Sources citations, each with its own reliability rating Source record raw collected notes, collapsed Sidebar hosted photographs with caption, attribution, licence
Entry page structure as built, in the order a reader meets it
  • Assembled summaries are labelled assembled. 41 entries carry descriptive prose from the source material. 1,005 more print a summary built from the recorded fields, under a line that says exactly that. The remaining 111 have no summary recorded.
  • Disposal-relevant facts are pulled forward ahead of the specification table, so hazards and render-safe considerations are not buried in a list of dimensions.
  • Nothing is dropped. Facts that do not map to a known key still print under further recorded detail, and the raw collected notes sit at the bottom in a collapsed block.
OSINT Ordnance DatabaseUnclassified
Feature · Provenance

Who says so is printed on the page

  • Admiralty grading, applied as defined. A letter for source reliability, from A completely reliable to F cannot be judged, and a digit for information credibility, from 1 confirmed to 5 improbable. It prints as one chip, for example B-2.
  • Two levels, recorded separately. 358 entries carry an entry-level rating. 322 entries carry per-source citations, 537 citation rows in total, of which 258 have a rating of their own.
  • The chip travels with the entry. It appears in the entry header, next to each citation in the sidebar, on list rows, and on grid cards, so a rating is visible before the entry is opened.
  • Absence is stated, not implied. Where no citation is recorded, the page prints that no per-source citations exist for the entry rather than leaving a blank that reads as confirmation.
358
entries carrying an entry-level source reliability rating
B-2
most common rating, on 119 entries
258
individual citations carrying their own rating
60
open source documents feeding the database
OSINT Ordnance DatabaseUnclassified
Feature · Country and Theatre

The same corpus, read three ways

  • By type. 18 types over three domains. The largest are uncrewed and loitering systems at 229 entries, missiles at 197, landmines at 119, aircraft bombs at 109, and submunitions at 103. Most type tiles on the front page lead with a sample photograph. Three types have no photographed entry yet.
  • By country of origin. 29 countries, each with a page: Russia 168 entries, China 163, the United States 116, the Soviet Union 75, North Korea 74, Iran 36. The twelve largest sit as chips on the front page.
  • By theatre. Five conflicts recorded: Iran and proxy forces 90 entries, Yemen 22, Russia and Ukraine 20, Israel with Hamas and Hezbollah 2, and the Myanmar civil war 1.
  • It records ordnance, not forces. Country pages are origin of manufacture and recorded operators. No unit or force disposition is tracked. No location data is recorded or published.
229
uncrewed and loitering munition entries, the largest single type
159
entries flagged chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear capable
319
recorded rows linking an entry to a country that operates it
5
conflicts recorded, the largest holding 90 entries
OSINT Ordnance DatabaseUnclassified
Feature · Imagery and Rights

Hosted photographs are licensed, the rest are only linked

  • 208 photographs are hosted, every one of them from Wikimedia Commons, each stored with its caption, attribution, and licence and displayed with all three. That is 18 percent of the corpus.
  • Licences recorded per hosted image: public domain on 74, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 on 60, Attribution 4.0 on 33, Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 on 16, Attribution 2.0 on 7, Creative Commons Zero on 7, and eleven images across five smaller variants.
  • What cannot be licensed is linked, never copied. 56 entries carry an outbound link to a third-party aggregator holding 815 further photographs. Those images originate on social media and no licence exists to pass them on, so the database points at them and hosts nothing.
  • Nothing enters the site until it is checked. 208 image candidates have been accepted. A further 183 image candidates and 46 further outbound links are still unreviewed.
208
photographs hosted, licence and attribution shown on each
18%
of entries currently carry a hosted photograph
815
further photographs linked at their source, none copied
183
image candidates held in review, not published
OSINT Ordnance DatabaseUnclassified
Architecture

It builds to files, so there is nothing to run

  • Static export. The database is read once at build time and the output is 1,217 plain pages. Nothing queries a database when a page loads, so there is no service to keep alive.
  • No search service. The corpus ships inside the page. Every facet, numeric range, and free-text match runs in the reader's browser, which means no query leaves the reader's machine and no search history accumulates anywhere.
  • Small enough to move. 182 megabytes including all 208 photographs. It can be served from any static host, including a local server on a laptop with no network at all.
  • One publishable database. The build reads one publishable database. Controlled Unclassified Information sources are excluded by design. The build cannot reach them.
1,217
pages in the current export
0
queries served at read time; every page is prebuilt
182 MB
complete site including all hosted imagery
8
route families built: entries, types, countries, conflicts, search, and the rest
OSINT Ordnance DatabaseUnclassified
Honest Limits

What it does not have yet

  • Fragmentation and hazard distances are absent. Only 30 entries carry a fragmentation fact. The reference material that would fill that gap has not been mined, and no fragmentation range or hazard distance should be taken from this database today.
  • The entry count is not clean. The 1,157 includes about four known duplicate pairs and roughly 30 section headings that the parser published as entries in their own right. Both are known defects in the ingest, not editorial choices.
  • Most summaries are assembled. 1,005 of 1,157 summaries are built from recorded fields rather than written from source prose. The page labels every one of them.
  • Most entries carry no source rating. 799 of 1,157 entries carry no entry-level rating. The chip is absent rather than assumed.
  • Recorded gaps. 355 entries have no country of origin. There is no gun-system type, so naval and close-in weapon mounts land in miscellaneous. There is no glossary linking, the layout has not been verified on a narrow phone screen, and the image and link review has no tooling yet.
30
entries carrying a fragmentation fact; the rest carry none
~34
known bad rows inside the entry count: duplicates and mis-parsed headings
355
entries with no recorded country of origin
1,005
summaries assembled from fields rather than written prose
OSINT Ordnance DatabaseUnclassified
Foundation and Status

Private beta, gated, not published

  • Status. All eight route families are built and the current export is complete: entry pages, type pages, country pages, conflict pages, and whole-corpus search, with all 208 photographs in place.
  • Access is closed on purpose. It runs in private beta on owned infrastructure behind a password. Search engines are blocked and no address is published.
  • Sources. 60 open published documents. Entries and individual citations carry an Admiralty rating where one can be assigned. Controlled Unclassified Information and distribution-restricted material are excluded from the corpus and from the build.
  • Scope, stated plainly. It records ordnance: designations, specifications, hazards, imagery rights, and citations, including 116 entries of United States origin. It does not track units, forces, operations, or locations.
  • Next work is data, not code. Clearing the parser defects, adding fragmentation and hazard-distance data from published, publicly releasable standards named on the entry, and working the image and link review queues.
Beta
private, gated behind a password, address not published
1,157
entries across 18 types, 29 countries, 5 conflicts
60
source documents, all open and published
0
Controlled Unclassified Information in the database or its build
OSINT Ordnance DatabaseUnclassified
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