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Robo-Gunsight System Makes Sniper's Life Easier
An anonymous reader writes "Military and police marksmen could see their rifle sights catch up with the 21st century with a fiber-optic laser-based sensor system that automatically corrects for even tiny barrel disruptions. Factors such as heat generated by previously fired shots, to a simple bump against the ground can affect the trueness a rifle barrel. The new system precisely measures the deflection of the barrel relative to the sight and then electronically makes the necessary corrections. With modern high-caliber rifles boasting ranges of up to two miles, even very small barrel disruptions can cause a shooter to miss by a wide margin."
http://www.darkgovernment.com/news/self-guided-sniper-bullets-wanted-by-us-dod/
This is an example of self guided bullets. The technology might not be around yet but the promise is there. Apparently there is a US Patent on the tech: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5788178.html. Interesting.
liberare massarum ex ignorantia, clausa descendit molestie.
Or just mount hellfire missiles on a long-range UAV, for added range and field of vision. Wait...
Emotions! In your brain!
External guidance would invite jamming, but the idea of fins is within the realm of the realistic since Sabot rounds on tanks already work in a similar way:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armour-piercing_discarding_sabot
Smaller scale and if you can miniaturise laser guidance to the same level then you'd have self-guiding bullets.
That would imply guidance wings, which makes me think of a gyrojet-style weapon. But with enough miniaturization, maybe you could make a bullet that assymetrically shed parts of an outer layer by command from a directional antenna on the barrel or something?
A simpler option would be a bullet with a universal joint in the middle - by deflecting the rear end up-down and left-right enough force would be generated to alter the trajectory. At the speed and roll rate a rifle bullet travels wings would mostly just create drag...
Even so, I don't really see guided bullets become a reality for calibres less than 12.7mm - not only is smaller calibres less lethal on the rages where guided bullets makes sense, but you'll also run into the problem of the cost/benefit ratio.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
http://208.116.9.205/10/content/25627/1.jpg
Being some kind of military person with more experience than the entire user database of dash slot. Learn one lesson..... always walk away from conflict and violence.
If you see muzzle flashes, then the rules of engagement has been broken. Commando's then unleash such fire power we do not care if your wife, children or pet gets hurt as collateral damage.
YOU SHOULD HAVE THOUGHT ABOUT THAT BEFORE YOU STARTED THE FIGHT!
Lesson of life!
All cows eat grass!
Am I alone in feeling disturbed at the trend to separate the combatants by ever increasing distances? It is separating the human cause and effect so that the soldiers are increasingly disconnected from their actions. What motivation is there to peacefully settle the argument when you can just continue to blast the opposition? We see the same thing happening with Predator Drones that are controlled by soldiers on the other side of the planet. This can only result more people being needlessly hurt. Everyone, sooner or later, acquires the technology and another round starts.
I suppose that the rot really started when kings stopped leading their troops into battle; they appointed generals to do it; the generals later sat a few miles behind the lines and sent the private soldiers to meet the enemy; now these privates are increasingly separated from their opponents.
How can we ensure that those who have the power to stop wars become motivated to negotiated by personally feeling the consequences of their own intransigence?
If a high-caliber sniper rifle with such improved self-correcting optics (which would practically render the barel trueness a non-issue) falls in the hands of the bad guys, high-ranking political figures will be at much higher risk. The only thing that will hinder the marksman will be wind.
Which, to be honest, is actually a rather big obstacle still. A bit too stochastic to completely eliminate uncertainty at long (over 1000m) distances.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
small bullets could be made to be guided by laser
This is ambiguous, it could mean either of two completely different weapons systems:
First, we can consider an auto-aiming system with conventional "dumb", non-steered bullets. TFA discusses a tentative step in this direction, but it's easy to imagine a fully automated kind of system with a point-n-click interface. The rifle would be mounted on a computer-controlled, precision servo motor mount, with a a telescoped camera sighted along the barrel instead of a normal eyepiece. On a video monitor, the computer presents a crosshairs superimposed over a live camera image. The computer can incorporate various sources of ballistic data to correct the sight picture: sensors measuring (e.g.) barrel droop due to heat; a laser or microwave rangefinder for calculating elevation adjustments (b/c bullets drops as they travel); a wind gauge for calculating windage adjustments. If the computer performs real-time image analysis, it could also "mask" targets out from the background and analyze their motion, which would allow the operator's mouse aim to be pretty vague--kind of like a FPS game with an auto-aim cheat enabled.
With quality mechanics, sensors, and code, this kind of weapon could allow a novice to out-shoot a good trained military shooter, as long as the target is stationary. Based on existing, real-life systems that I've seen and worked with, I think this kind of weapon could be built, today, for less than $5,000 using slightly modified off-the-shelf equipment and software. Would it beat a trained, experienced military shooter? Maybe not, but I don't see any reason why the implementation couldn't be refined to that point--there's no theoretical reason why the pure man-plus-gun system has to be better.
The second possibility, here, is to introduce "smart" steerable bullets into the mix. Like a guided air-to-air missile, each bullet would be able to adjust its course in midair in order to track a target that is moving, or simply to correct for the normal vagaries ballistics. This kind of system's one clear superiority over dumb bullets is that it can account for variables that crop up *after* the bullet leaves the barrel. For instance, a particularly small, fast, and continuously, erratically moving target (say, a hummingbird at 1 km) can easily foil the best shooter, human or computer. The hummingbird can trivially move out of a bullet's path during the flight interval, and the position changes are too chaotic for meaningful predictions (unlike, say, a man walking along a stretch of road). If each bullet carries its own target-tracking sensor (like an air-to-air missile) or obeys remote commands from the gun's targeting system (like a TOW missile), then the possibility of hitting that hummingbird grows larger.
The mechanical implementation of steerable bullets is a bitch, though. The fundamental problem of non-powered, controlled flight is that course corrections increase drag and diminish your velocity. The more drastic of course changes you want, the more you hurt your aerodynamics, which proportionally hurts your kinetic energy, range, and damage potential. There may be a practical sweet spot, trading just a little power for just enough steering. Or, you might be forced to trade your unpowered bullets for powered rocket-like projectiles. Either way, you're talking about a hell of a lot of tough engineering R&D, like designing rocket engines or jet bodies, where you need an immense amount of experimental data and trial-and-error. To me, this sounds like big defense-contractor stuff--who else can afford time on a supersonic wind tunnel?
And then there's the problem of cramming a steering mechanism and whatever targeting control equipment you need into the space of a bullet. Electronics and mechanical designs may be hard or easy, but a sure way to make them maddeningly frustrating is to mandate an especially tiny physical package. Oh, and your mass di
The famed Finnish sniper Simo Häyhä (505 kills, over 700 counting his machine gun badassery) preferred plain old iron sights.
What's interesting there is that he preferred it because of the concealment factor. His typical kills were done at 400+ m which is pretty close by modern standards, but he got that close by not lugging around a huge bling-bling scope and having to poke his head up to use it.
abot rounds on tanks already work in a similar way:
check our the steyr AMR, it has been done before in rifle form. semi-auto too.
I'm pretty sure you have the terminology wrong: We are the infidels. They are either the terrorists(establishment clause compliant term) or the heathens(for the "American is a Christian Nation" enthusiasts).
What's next, wallhack?
As anyone who hunts knows, the hardest part about putting a bullet on target is getting there and if you're a sniper getting out after the trigger is pulled.
In GOD we trust, all others we monitor.
You're not alone: I understand and share your feelings, and I'm sure many other people feel much the same.
But let me put a twist on this. The military also knows it's a problem.
For most of the history of warfare (I'm riffing here on War by Gwynne Dyer), soldiers were usually in close company with their fellow soldiers -- a line of a dozen (or a hundred, or a thousand) men, carrying spears or muskets, facing a line of men similarly armed. This was true right up through the First World War: men packed into trenches.
The Second World War changed the pattern: increasing lethality of weapons, combined with motorized troop mobility, dictated dispersion of soldiers -- large numbers of them -- into individual, isolated foxholes.
After the war, the US Army did a study: how effective were the foxhole-isolated soldiers? How did those men actually behave? What percentage fired their rifles?
It turned out that a large number of soldiers never fired their weapons. They stayed down in their holes, stricken by fear. And ashamed: each soldier thought that he was the only one, that his buddies from Boot Camp must be doing their duty, but me, I'm cowering in my own shit in a hole because I'm so fucking scared of death.
Courage in the face of death. Not an easy thing to muster. But most men can do it, if they're in the company of their fellow soldiers.
So, naturally, the Army -- the most pragmatic institution Humankind has ever devised -- asked: what do we do about courage in this new age of dispersed warfare?
And the answer was: train men to greater levels of violence. So that, even when isolated from his fellows, the individual soldier will still be capable of killing and dying as ordered.
-kgj
Having a remote operator push the button is really no more scary than having a human on-site and full of adrenaline. Now, automated sniper robots, those are scary to everyone. So far AFAIK nobody has admitted to having them, only sentry guns (closer range) and sniper detectors. I would not be surprised if someone had put together a sniper robot with fully automated long-range target ID, acquisition, and termination, though. It seems like a fairly trivial exercise given relevant open source projects in the wild.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm tired of the hype in the media created by non-shooters. For example, just because a rifle has a "range of two miles" doesn't mean you can hit anything. A friend of mine (now deceased) Skip Talbot who many long distance world records to his name (eg 5 shot group @ 1000 yards = 2.6 inches) found it challenging hitting a 12 foot tall rock that was 5 feet wide at two miles. In fact at two miles, a .50BMG's bullet is dropping at approximately a 45 degree angle. Even Skip's world record shots involved his showing up days before a match and taking notes on what happened to the wind flags (every 50 yards) throughout the day. Even there Skip had a whole mini weather station strapped to his shooting bench. By comparison a very good championship shooter would expect a group of 3-4 feet across. (That is what I was getting and I'd place about 1/3 down at the world championships.)
The point being, the shots that you see in the movies can be made but only by world-record class shooters only under very specialized conditions. (Known distances, known wind conditions, and on a range with which they have lots of experience, etc, etc, etc....) Beyond that is skill and a bunch of luck.
The US has land borders with only two other countries, both of which it is on fairly good terms with. Further, no other power would dare invade - because at best they'd lose, and at worst they'd pose enough of a threat that the US was forced to put it's nuclear weapons to use.Also, I'm British.
With the cost of education and training for each individual soldier and the pensions to be paid if something should happen to them, expensive ammunition is the least of financial worries to a modern army of professionals. Getting the mission done with all your men coming out unharmed is worth a lot, not only financially, but also strategically: you can influence and take part in battles you've never could before, because the risk is higher for a spectacular failure. Wounded soldiers always cause public inquiries on exactly why The Army of One needed to be there. When it's more likely that all the blue guys get home unharmed, you can take much more chances in ethically/morally/economically questionable settings. And that is worth not only the insane cost per bullet for some...
I am surprised that no one else commented about the extreme rotational forces involved in rifle bullets.
Take, for example, the M855 ball round used in most US M4's. It has a muzzle velocity of 3025 feet per second. A standard M4 barrel has a 1 in 7 inch twist, meaning the bullet completes a full rotation every 7 inches. Simple stoichiometry follows: 3025 feet/sec * 60 sec/min * 12 inches/1 foot * 1 rotation/7 inches = 311,142 rpm.
Remember those old videos of CD's exploding when they are rotated too fast, even when they are wrapped with wires to increase their tensile strength? Same applies here. As a matter of fact, this is used as a design feature: ball ammunition is designed to "tumble" end over end when it hits flesh which pushes the centrifugal forces on the bullet over the tensile strength of the bullet's jacket. This causes the bullet to fragment into tiny particles in the flesh, which results in the full force of the kinetic energy being deposited into the target.
Anyway, while the MEMS approach might be feasible from a size perspective, imagine the forces operating on one of these fins and the energy required to move any given fin even a tiny amount when it is feeling the pressures involved while moving through a fluid at 311 krpm. Now imagine what kind of materials would be necessary to implement this without the fin deforming or the armature of the fin simply shearing off.
These are cool ideas, but I think the physics & materials science aren't there.
Hell, we already have computing devices for most of the stuff you discussed, and it doesn't make amateurs into decent shooters.
.50 for $8000 but the M14 shoots quite well at 1000yd
.177 airguns are ~$300) and learning from your mistakes before moving up to larger calibers.
I think OP was thinking more along the lines of a benchmount rifle than augmenting a standard rifle. In that case, this idea is feasible (but the price is probably a bit low). Let's do a very rough breakdown:
M14 (.308) - $1800*
Laptop - $1000
Optics - $2000 (good optics are easily $1000, and making is adjustable to read mirage, etc might double the price).
Servos - $300?
Stock material - $500?
Various gears / connection hardware - $500?
Fabrication costs - $0 (if you DIY).
Programming - $0 (if you DIY)
Total: ~$6000
*You could use a Barrett
As with any project like this though, it's a good idea to double your budget for unexpected costs (~$12,000) and then double** it again if you need someone else to do the work.
So let's say $25,000 for a computer-controlled, 1000yd capable benchrest rifle, with lots of budget padding.
**I have no idea what this would realistically cost. Anyone know better than me?
Of course, you could always bring costs down by starting small (decent
- "Nobody came out that night, not one was ever seen. But Old Man Stauf is waiting there, crazy sick and mean!"