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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
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.
If everything went metric we wouldn't have these problems. The bullet is 10cm not 10in.
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.
.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........
I was thinking Bullet Bill.
So don't be all day about it - aim and fire and let the bullet do the rest of the work, that's what it's for.
The 'other side' already has someone with night-vision goggles scanning for muzzle flashes of sniper weapons. He will easily see the IR laser too. In fact, that laser will give him a short warning that a sniper is about to fire. At 1.5 kilometers range, a second's warning is enough to yell "down" so nobody's torso is in the same place that it was when the trigger was pulled.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Isn't that an oxymoron?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Application? How about an overhead drone carrying a payload thats roughly the same weight as now, except instead of blowing things up it just shoots you in the face. You dont have to carry a huge amount of munitions when 95% of the bullets will hit the target.
From now on, whenever you see a new military technology you should think about how it works with drones. For example, it probably isnt a coincidence that our new magnetic launch systems on carriers will allow lighter, more fragile aircraft (read, composite drones) to be launched. The official line is it does less damage to tradition aircraft, which it does. But the guys calling the shots on this stuff make war for a living, and the writing is on the wall as far as the future goes. "Lighter. Cheaper. Disposable"
Hunting.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
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.
No, the only way you would see the origination point of the laser is if it were pointed directly at your goggles. Otherwise you can't tell where the laser scope is situated.
This is absolutely a sniper weapon. It's just not a sniper weapon to be used against prepared military assets.
It'd do a fine job of assassinating unprepared civilian targets, though.
-Hentai [in vita non pacem est]
Can't you put a hood on a laser so that it would only be visible within a vary narrow angular range? You can't really do that with a muzzle flash.
As long as the guy with the laser can keep the laser on you, that's not going to help a lot.
How about an LED decoy thrown to the side?
You do bring up an interesting point, though. Who is responsible for the kill, the guy pulling the trigger or the guy pressing the button on the laser?
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
"The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots."
A) there doesn't need to be a human at the laser's position, it could be pointed by robot.
B) the laser doesn't need to be continuous. You could PWM it with a small duty cycle and a decreasing aperiodic frequency, at the sacrifice of accuracy.
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
Soldier on the ground painting the target. Drone overhead shooting. Done all the time, but with larger weapons. This is a man-killer, not a building killer.
If the laser doesn't light until the trigger is pulled, whT is the point of a laser scope? I would do microsecond laser bursts. Good enough for the bullet optics and if you have the right goggles, but invisible to casual observations.
The perfect way to do war, would be to just assassinate each others leaders over and over again until at some point one side get's one, that thinks getting assassinated is not really worth whatever they started that war over. Then that side loses and the war is done.
Casualties should be about 5-10 politicians.
The lasers are pulsed anyways to prevent jamming or interference with other systems in the field. The round and designator accept a 3/4 digit laser "code" that tells them to modulate in a certain pattern.
The only really big thing in this story is the miniaturization of the technology we have had laser guided bombs and even laser guided cannon artillery for almost 40 years now.
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...
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Re Its pretty hard to sneak up on someone and plant an emitter "of some sort" on them :)
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/06/spy-chips-guiding-cia-drone-strikes-locals-say/
The going price was $122
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
That's the theory, but practice is frequently something else entirely. Is there any haze, dust, smoke, humidity -- basically any particulates -- in the air? That will scatter the laser light.
A guy I knew recently was showing off with a high-powered laser he picked up somewhere. It was pretty awesome -- he was lighting up mountaintops roughly a mile away. However, I was very surprised to see that there was a very clear, very distinct line from his laser to whatever target he was pointing it at. There was no way he could have remained covert while painting a target. Yes, this was a higher-end, visible-light consumer laser as opposed to a military-issue IR laser. While I would expect a military-grade laser to have more coherency than a consumer-grade laser, they both will be affected this way by atmospheric scattering.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
If you're covered in flat mirrors, you only get specular reflection, where the light travels in one singular path. If the seeker head is not directly in that path, it will not be able to see you, and will not track. Laser guidance required diffuse reflection, where the laser light is scattered in all directions, and the seeker head can see it from any location.
It requires the high tech 'sniper' skill of "setting up a tripod, pointing the laser at the target, and then taking your hands off". Seriously, a sniper's skill lies not in putting the crosshairs on the target, but in putting the crosshairs off the target... such that wind, bullet drop due to gravity, etc.. etc.. ends up putting the bullet where the amateur would put the crosshairs - and miss. But wind, gravity, etc... don't effect the laser, so an amateur can place the crosshair by eye.
Presumeably, if / when they get this perfected, the squad Sargent ( or whomever ) paints the bad guy with a computer controlled laser (the Navy version, of course, uses a shark) and the rest of the grunts pull the trigger on their AR-18 turbo rifles. The computer ( or shark )keeps track of the victim running away or getting into their tank. Then splat. $10,000 dollars down the drain. But we've used lasers. So it's cool.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
"I'm not claiming this is a target-guided bullet, I'm saying it's laser-guided bullet."
So, you're claiming that the laser spot isn't the target for the bullet? Now you're being silly, or trolling.
Of course the laser spot isn't the target for the bullet, who's trying to destroy a laser dot?! If you want to shoot someone standing in front of a wall and target them with a laser but they move out of the way before the bullet gets there the laser dot is going to be on the wall behind them, and you'll still hit the laser dot - because it is guiding the bullet - but did you hit the target? No, because the laser dot isn't the target, it's the guide!
This really isn't that difficult a concept to grasp, I can't see why you're having so much trouble with it so let me try this a different way:
If you are hiking with a guide what is that guide doing? He/she is 'guiding' you, and doing so not by moving you or positioning you, but by indicating where you need to go. Likewise the laser is indicating to the bullet where it needs to go, by definition it is guiding the bullet, if the laser weren't there the bullet would not know where to go because it has no guide, the bullet will go wherever the laser is pointing because the laser is the bullet's guide, if it were self-guided it wouldn't need a laser. Really it's not that hard.
If you still don't get it then explain to me what you think the purpose of the laser is.
Of course the laser spot isn't the target for the bullet, who's trying to destroy a laser dot?!
Probably a cat.
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...
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.
FA says it gets within 8 inches which still means you have to aim at their chest
Sniping is mostly about knowing the relationships between a complex set of circumstances. You could train a monkey to use a scope to paint a target with a laser. You know you're on target because you can see the laser on the target.
Knowing you're on target to sent a dumb bullet into a target a mile away is many orders of magnitude more difficult.
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Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Kind of, but you are missing an important point, since the point of this is to improve long range accuracy, well beyond the range of standard infantry weapons (SA80 400m, LSW 1000m) the squad who has this technology has a significant advantage against one that doesn't.
There is also another possibility. The laser needs direct line of sight, but the bullet following a ballistic path only needs to find a laser dot far enough out to have time to correct it's course. Stick a recon guy with a laser designator on the ridge of a hill, keep the rest of the squad on the far side of the hill and fire above the ridge line in the general direction of the enemy. Accurate indirect fire using infantry weapons from a position that the enemy could never hit (beyond a 1 in a billion lucky shot).
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
If you are shooting from great distances wouldn't you still need to actually keep the laser on the target if the target moves?
Putting the crosshairs off the target is called "kentuckying" or "kentucky windage"; it's for amateur hour. Snipers use scopes that let you dial in the range and windage so that the cross hairs keep the point of aim and point of impact the same. Some scopes for short range sniping use "mil-dots," which is an indexed system of little aimpoints up the vertical axis and along the horizontal axis. Those are typically used in telescopic sights of low magnification. (My hobby used to be long-distance target shooting; now I have a wife and kids; my hobby is dodging responsibility.)