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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."
Or just mount hellfire missiles on a long-range UAV, for added range and field of vision. Wait...
Emotions! In your brain!
http://208.116.9.205/10/content/25627/1.jpg
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
Yes this 1 million year long trend is quite disturbing. Except for hand to hand combat let's get a stone so if you get a blow to the head you win. Let's use a big heavy stick so you hit further away then you oponenent so he can't hit you with the rock.
Much of our civilization is from the fact if we break the rules there is retribution that we cannot fight back. Yes it is opression to an extent. But if you thought you had a fair fight more people will be willing to take their chance.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Well, that's also because at the time, scopes weren't really that great.
Especially in Finland, which I have never been to but I imagine as a very cold, very damp country. WWII-era scopes would be prone to fogging in those conditions, and hell, most of them were low-power optics anyway, with not-very-large objective lenses.
That means light gathering was less than ideal, parallax was not all that great, magnification was minimal, and it would've been likely that after being covered with snow the scope would be fogged and unusable anyway. I don't blame him for not using a scope!
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
What's next, wallhack?
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
You're mishearing. It's actually the war on tourism. They're trying to make airports so unpleasant that no-one uses them.