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Self-Guided Bullet Can Hit Targets a Mile Away
New submitter jpwilliams writes "Gizmag reports that researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have tested a 10-centimeter bullet that can be fired from a smooth-bore rifle to hit a laser-marked target one mile away. The bullet 'includes an optical sensor in the nose to detect a laser beam on a target. The sensor sends information to guidance and control electronics that use an algorithm in an eight-bit central processing unit to command electromagnetic actuators. These actuators steer tiny fins that guide the bullet to the target.' Interestingly, accuracy improves with targets that are further away, because 'the bullet's motions settle the longer it is in flight.'"
Interesting. If you were looking for gun.nut and came to slashdot by mistake.
Sounds more like a dart than a bullet.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Of course, the laser (even IR) will give away the spotter's position. This is no sniper weapon. I wonder, then, what applications the technology does have.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Personally i don't believe it. A mile away? They probably couldn't hit an elephant at that dist
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Since soldiers will be using this, I can enable auto-aim without being called a noob.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Where's the Tom Selleck slashdot icon when you need it
Life is not for the lazy.
Congratulations. You've invented the laser guided missile launcher.
If everything went metric we wouldn't have these problems. The bullet is 10cm not 10in.
At least the article says that the dart is 4 inches or 10 centimeters, not 10 inches. (IE it's a little smaller than the 120mm canon the M1 uses.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
accuracy improves with targets that are further away,
Farther. Actual distance is farther. Metaphorical distance is further, like furthering one's goals. Thanks, I feel better now.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
At last, our technology is starting to catch up to 1940s cartoons! I can't wait for my portable hole...
Demented But Determined.
smooth-bore rifle
"Smooth-bore" and "rifle" are mutually-exclusive terms. Pick one.
10 *inch* Bullet that's Guided using Laser and has Fins? I think those are also known as Missles!
.50cal snipers have some serious kick and that's about a 4 inch bullet. This is at the high end of what a personal weapon can fire. Increase its size by 2.5x and you no longer have a rifle you have an anti aircraft bullet. At the rate obesity is going the next generation might just be able to handle the recoil from a 10in anti aircraft shell........
My story title was: The Future of War... and Assassination!
(I think it was the word Assassination that got the slashdot editors to remove it from the "recent" listings. It was on the "recent" listings one second at "yellow" and then *poof* gone! Do they think various government agaencies don't approve of such topics?). Anyway, here's what I wrote:
"From TFA: "This self-guided bullet can chase you down from over a mile away"
A long LONG time ago, I remember reading something that claimed that in every successive war (WWI, WWII, Korean War, Vietnam War) the amount of bullets it took to kill someone was INCREASING, that is (maybe) an average of 100 rounds was spent per soldier killed in WWI whereas by Vietnam it was maybe 10,000 possibly due to smarter tactics and better protection. The commentator said the only way this would change is if they somehow managed to put a VAX (kiddies, that's an old computer) into a bullet.
Well, it looks like that's been done now, here's a bullet that has computer, sensors and fins that is fired out of a rifle. It requires a laser designated target and it doesn't guarantee pinpoint accuracy but an 8" miss instead of 30ft. at half a mile is a HUGE improvement. Fire a few rounds in quick succession and chances are a body sized target will be hit.
Of course it will be much more expensive than "dumb" ammunition but I'd guess it'd still be a lot cheaper than the aforementioned 10,000 rounds. What's more it's falling into the Pentagon's plans for a military focused upon small "hit" teams, drones and special ops. For this strategy, this kind of weapon is invaluable. For example; instead of a huge $100 million Global Hawk drone carrying big (heavy) hellfire missiles designed to wipe out a vehicle or house; just use a small (hand launched?) drone carrying a gun with a few rounds of this ammo. (I would imagine such a drone would be a lot quieter so it could get within the shorter range easily). Much cheaper, equally capable of carrying out its mission (killing a few insurgents).
Unfortunately another use would be to have a forward "spotter" at a public event with an infra-red laser pointer/binocular. The shooter could be quite distant and just has to shoot the bullets (in quick succession mind you) on a ballistic trajectory that will get them near the target. They will home into the (invisible to the naked eye) illuminated target by themselves.
You'll see security agencies beginning to see this as a threat when they start carrying sensors capable of detecting infrared lasers. The next step though is when enough computing power is available to put face recognition algorithms into the bullet...
*What really intrigues me isn't the computer power in the bullet but rather how do the fins work! How do they get such tiny (and rugged) motors into a bullet?
**So is this the kind of invention that Larry Niven was thinking about when he invented the U.N. ARM? It was an agency who's goal was to stop technological innovation that would lead to anarchy (like things that would make murder legal)."
Isn't that an oxymoron?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
It it's smooth-bore, it's a musket, not a rifle...
Don't worry, the next version will have a flash pan.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
I've been watching season 4 of Chuck and just saw this episode. We have nothing to worry about, the CIA will have no problem recovering the bullets. Also the female CIA agent will develop a severe clothing allergy half-way through.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
Who said anything about people? That troublesome bear invading your neighborhood is also a likely target, especially if the animal control officer knows he won't have ANY collateral damage because every bullet hits every time.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Rifling increases accuracy for a 'dumb' bullet. However, this bullet is receiving updates and making adjustments in flight, so rifling wouldn't make sense here. Doesn't matter. Until a box of cartridges sells for less than $30, it means nothing to me anyway.
just less of a boom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser-guided_bomb
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
I'm guessing every enlisted sniper will be begging his commander for one of these. Especially this guy.
Very scary.
my mom posts on slashdot.
Nice tech! I think I saw the same movie these guys did, Runaway with wall climbing robotic killer spiders, and self guiding bullets from handguns, and Tom Selleck!
Damn I hate wall climbing robotic killer spiders... Those must be next :/
Well as long as they don't make a self guiding robotic Tom Selleck, I think we will be OK.
IR chaff - IR LED throwies are cheap compared to these bullets and will be brighter than any IR laser (that you can't actually feel as 'hot')
I doubt the bullet can do more than steer a few degrees... it certainly couldn't look behind itself.
But I assume all the enemy would need is a bunch of very bright LED's on a board around the intended target and the projectile would get confused...
Made me think of the gun in Fifth Element. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pxjnl1yuXk
I think it's amazing that they had circuitry that could survive the forces exhibited on it by the sudden acceleration of a gunshot. Am I wrong in thinking that this is one of the first successful applications?
What, no mentions of 'Wanted' yet? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0493464/
another amazing weapon that will be used against us in 20-50 years.
If you look at the final video in the article, this thing isn't even really a bullet. All it is is a scaled-down KE sabot round of the type fired by tanks as an anti-tank round. This is especially true when you consider it is fired from a smooth-bore, as pretty much all modern tanks use smooth-bore cannon as well. It's almost as if they took the 2 main weapons of the modern Western MBT (sabot round and a Hellfire missile), combined them, and shrunk it down for use against personnel. I think it would be interesting to see what type of rifles they would use to fire this round. Would the design and specifications of this round require the development of a new weapon system, or can existing sniper rifles be modified by changing out the barrels from rifled to smooth-bore?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
It would probably be better if they had the whole thing in proper measurements. Showing technology in hogsheads and furlongs etc seems to mislead some people into thinking that "imperial" measures are a valid idea.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
Obviously, it's the control logic and fins which are guiding the bullet.. Presumably, the sensor isn't selective to phase coherence, and one could just as readily have an emitter of some other sort attached to the target, no laser involved. I would expect the target spot to be modulated in some manner, to help avoid false positives.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Not if it is breech loading. Then it is a smooth bore long gun.
I guess it has to be pretty steady for the time it takes to fire this bullet (and for it to reach target), and "shot" from relatively remote location, which seem to require sniper-type skill on behalf of the "painter", but not shooter.
One scenario where it can be feasible though if "painter" position is closer to the enemy, and it is harder to determine where laser is shot from than were that bullet just flew from.
Paul B.
I can't wait for my portable hole...
You're married, aren't you?
Just what the world needs: more weaponry. Don't these people have anything better to do with their lives than inventing new murder equipment?
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Ahh, that is why we have the laser guided grenade round too, for the wise arse who lights up all around his intended target with lasers...
...
I'm not gonna spycrab a whole mile. I'm going sniper.
Archaic rule. Most writers use them interchangeably.
Look at the pictures, it's 10mm, the article got that and a whole lot of other shooting terms wrong. 10CM would be closer to something you'd mount on an M1 tank :-P
With a bullet where you can literally point a laser at a spot and it hits the spot, it seems to me that the only ethical decision would be to shoot enemy troops in the kneecaps or somewhere debilitating but not life threatening.
A fairly major difference is that this new thing is not self-propelling, it's more like a guided bomb.
Its either this or an iPhone 6.
Have gnu, will travel.
But you ain't Angelina Jolie.
Have gnu, will travel.
I wonder what kind of MEMS sensors for accelerometers & gyros it uses that aren't destroyed by the initial acceleration when fired?
If pointing a laser at something guides the bullet towards/away from an object...what prevents someone from *points laser at someone*...um...whoops...hey, it's alright, you have two kneecaps, right? I can see some serious repercussions for having this be attracted just to some general laser beam. Also, will there perhaps be many unexplained shootings at rave parties now due to military testing...? Just when you think laser light effects are harmless to all non-feline mammals unless shone in the eye... :/
The laser and shark meme is tired, unoriginal, old, and far overused. Any discussion on this site involving lasers has the majority of the posts referencing the same unoriginal, old, and tired meme. And for some reason, all of you mod them well up to +5 funny when they should all be modded redundant or offtopic.
Slashdot is complete stagnated. There is no longer intelligent or worthwhile discussion here.
Don't let the shark bite you on your way out!
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
the scourge of grammar nazis was getting farther away from slashdot. i said farther. i also didn't capitalize
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
a bullet made of hope diamond that shoots a laser out of its tip, whose photon pressure is used to guide a piranha in a miniature hang glider, holding a sign that says "pull my finger"
c'mon people! get it made!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
peace is an artificial invention of civilization, requiring a constant outward implied threat of force. take away that outward threat and chaos ensues and someone walks in and starts waging war, warlords. until someone consolidates power, a police force maintains internal equilibrium and a military maintains an outward hostile tension, and so a new peaceful equilibrium is established
i'm sorry, but that's the reality you live in. the natural world is a state of constant terror and violence. the peace you love and cherish is something artificial that mankind invented, and that is a good thing. but you need to understand how peace actually works, rather than make up myths about it being some sort of effortless state. no, peace is an expensive luxury of civilization that requires constant tension and maintenance to exist
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
On a nerdy note, I designed something about like this for a roleplaying game back when I was in Junior high.
I have to wonder, if you're using a later spotting and a laser-guided bullet, and shooting for greater than a mile away, wouldn't the shot resemble something more like an artillery gun - wouldn't you have to point the gun like 40, 45 degrees in the air (to account for the drop from gravity which would occur over those sorts of distances, even with a high-velocity bullet), fire, and let its guidance bring it down in the right spot, as opposed to the "flatter" trajectory of a traditional rifle shot?
All snipers are marksmen, but not all marksmen are snipers. A sniper is someone trained in the COMPLETE art of infiltrating an area and eliminating a target. Marksmen are people who can simply hit an object with a gun.
Marksman is someone who can hit a target *reliably*.
Sniper is any marksman who is concealed, not really infiltrating and eliminating, unless you are thinking of a ninja marksman, that would be awesome...
What's wrong with a little fun with memes? The concept of comedy through popular imagery, even when it gets repetitious, is far older than the Internet. How long, exactly, have we been talking about chickens crossing the road? How many of the jokes in Shakespeare still resonate with English-speakers today (substitute equivalent literary references for other languages as needed; they all work)?
If you think about it, we've really just all been telling the same basic jokes for thousands of years. The forms are different, but the archetypes and general situations are the same. Despite this, they don't get old. Why pretend, when different tellings of the same joke remain funny, that the same or similar tellings don't likewise remain so?
Seriously, man. Come on. Come to think of it, maybe I can best illustrate with a story, so I'll tell you how I became the prince of a town called Bel-Air. In West Philadelphia, born and raised, on a playground was where I spent most of my days: chilling out, maxing, relaxing all cool and all shooting some B-ball outside of the school, when a couple of guys who were up to no good started making trouble in my neighborhood. I got in one little fight and my mom got scared and said "You're moving with your auntie and uncle in Bel-Air."
I whistled for a cab, and when it came near the license plate said "FRESH" and it had dice in the mirror. If anything I could say that this cab was rare, but I thought "Naw, forget it. Yo Home, to Bel-Air!" I pulled up to the house about 7 or 8 and I yelled to the cabbie "Yo Home, smell you later!" I looked at my kingdom: I was finally there, to sit on my throne as the prince of Bel-Air.
This is not exactly a bullet.
100mm is not a personal weapon.
This is artillery
This is not exactly new
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M712_Copperhead
This is just a smaller, newer version.
Many people have commented that 10cm is up there in artillery-shell caliber. This new bullet is 10cm long. The pictures show something that's in a typical small-arms caliber, probably 9mm or smaller. It will require a special gun that can chamber an unusually long cartridge, but not an artillery piece.
The real win with this thing will be hitting moving targets. No more estimating range and leading the target. Just keep pointed at it. Sighting and designator system that can lock onto a target already exist, and shrinking them down to rifle-scope size isn't all that hard. There's more video processing going on in any modern video camera or phone.
Surely if you can put a dot on a target with the laser, why not just shoot the target with the laser?
-Turn it to setting one for aiming and all the way up to eleven for killing. -Simple!
I know some tanks guns are breech loading smoothborse because certain kinds of shells are less effective when spinning, but are there any small-arms that use the principle?
I thought breech loading originally came about because muzzle loading a rifle is bloody awkward.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Now Zorg really CAN invent the Replay Button!
If you are shooting from great distances wouldn't you still need to actually keep the laser on the target if the target moves?
Usage of aimbots is considered cheating. How is that solved in the Geneva treaty?
The muzzle velocity of an SA80 (which isn't exactly modern anymore) is 940 m/s, or about 2100 miles per hour. That means that it takes 1.7 seconds for the bullet to travel one mile. For vertical distance, s = ut+0.5at^2, where u is 0 and a is g, gives us 0.5g*1.7^2, or 14.2m. Now some basic trigonometry. You have a triangle 14.2 metres on one the opposite side, 1609 on the adjacent. arctan(14.2/1609) is about 0.5 degrees. So, you'd have to aim very, very slightly above the horizontal.
Of course, the SA80 isn't designed for this kind of range, and a weapon designed for this kind of range would have a faster muzzle velocity. I'm also fudging the calculation slightly by assuming that there is no air resistance - in practice the bullet would be slowing down a bit. I doubt you'd need more than 1 or 2 degrees elevation, however.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
One step closer to ZF-1
Sounds just like the movie Runaway... Then I started thinking how many other things out there have copied movies...
DARPA is working on cloaking technology like the Predator & Star Trek (someone from DARPA actually called the movie studio in 1986 to ask how they made the predator invisible, apparently the person calling from DARPA didn't know much about Hollywood Special FX
MIT & DARPA - Remote controlled bugs like the dragonfly in Lexx
DARPA, Air Force, South Korea & Others Drones & Robots Like Deal of the Century, Robocop's ED209,
XBox Kinect - Minority Report Computer Interface
Gecko Robot & Wall Climbing - Spiderman
If life keeps copying art we're all in deep s**t! Who's looking forward to our robot overlords ?
Give me some of these: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbRZKrvAZ7U
Interesting tech, but a bit pointless in it's current garb. If you can get a clear line of sight to point a laser at a target, you can get a clear line of sight to shoot a bullet at the target.
I suppose it may be possible to more easily hide a laser pointing device that is painting the target compared to a gun, but considering that the weapon still needs a clear (and presumably pretty wide) flight path to the target, which also has the ability to see the laser dot the entire time this is really just an exercise in "cool but not very useful" tech.
Just another ignorant American.
Thanks Sandia for that great gift to humanity....
From the article: "an eight-bit central processing unit to command electromagnetic actuators..."
The 6502. Is there anything it can't do?
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
I have commented twice in email to friends about this story already.
You could unscrew the barrel from the receiver of a modern .50 caliber rifle and substitute a smoothbore. The "you" being a gunsmith in this case. Then you either let your spotter paint the target with the laser, or you attach a laser to your rifle, get some kind of a laser designating scope.
What SHOULD happen is for them to develop a rifle where the entire purpose is to get this round to maximum velocity that the electronics can control. Then incorporate the laser designator into the scope and isolate the scope as much as possible from the recoil of the weapon, the scope would no longer need to be directly inline with the barrel as you only need to be in the general vicinty and the round will converge with the laser over time.
What should also happen is that they build an Unmanned Drone that loiters over battlefields for Ground Assault support armed with a .50 caliber or similar munition, load it with thousands of these rounds and allow soldiers on the ground to designate targets on the ground that they need eliminated without any civilian casualties. As the round has an 8 inch drift from target, you can assume a 16 inch group. If your badguy is at starbucks, nobody else at the same table would be harmed when you took him out. Compare that to the "we killed the whole wedding party to get one guy" and you'll see this is a marked improvement for bystanders.
That's hardly necessary. I figured out that it was a joke without even needing to know where it came from. Granted, I thought it was more or less yet another "the FBI will never find me here - brb doorbell" post. Also, candleja
I'm the real Vorokrytin P. Winterbuttocks.