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DARPA Successfully Demonstrates Self-Guiding Bullets
Lucas123 writes: A DARPA-funded project has successfully developed a .50 caliber sniper round capable of maneuvering during flight in order to remain on target. The self-guiding EXACTO bullet, as it's being called, is optically guided by a laser that must remain on target for the bullet to track. The EXACTO round is capable of accurately tracking a target up to 1.2 miles away, DARPA stated. The technology, which is being developed by Teledyne Scientific and Imaging, is targeted at helping snipers remain at longer distances from targets as well as improving night shots. While DARPA's tracking bullet is the first to use a standard, small-arms caliber round, in 2012 Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) successfully demonstrated a prototype self-guided bullet that was more like like a four-inch dart.
Cheaters! Who's the admin? We need to ban those losers.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt00...
A .50cal round shot out of either a M2 machine gun, or M82 or one of it's many variants is scary enough.
Now to have a round that can guide itself? Downright creepy.
It's not a machine gun that shots at people behind you, but still.
Imagine a round that *avoids* a target. No more friendly fire!
Probably natural enough to try and develop one. Not so great to unleash it on the world. And that the announcement already does, simply by making clear it can be done. Anyway, the USA is still charging blindly ahead completely oblivious to the damage it does, so common sense is simply not to be had anywhere its tentacles reach.
That's pretty scary to be honest, especially given the range. A sniper squad could very effective with quick extraction available.
I wonder if the system supports a remote spotter (fire in general direction, bullet waits to find it's tracking laser at the remote point, the bullet would have to be able to handle dramatically different angles, and know where the spotter is I would think), someone closer in could more easily track movement or switch targets on the fly.
It's cool though, that's for sure. They don't mention it, but I wonder what the specs on the optics are.
BlameBillCosby.com
Lets test this in Syria and North Korea.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
And the real end-goal... armed satellites. Put one up with a couple of thousand rounds and you'd only need drones to take out heavy armor. Basically anyone not in a bunker would become an easy target.
I need this in BF4 immediately. I can't aim for shit.
So teledyne will be able to use this technology to improve their water pics!
>. bullet waits to find it's tracking laser at the remote point, the bullet would have to be able to handle dramatically different angles, and know where the spotter is I would think), someone closer in could more easily track movement or switch targets on the fly.
That sounds more like a job for a drone loitering overhead. A .50 round will be in the air for less than two seconds.
But as a taxpayer ...
And each bullet costs just two times the GDP of the entire village the terrorist is hailing from! And we will make up for it in volume too!
Some times I wonder if it would be cheaper to feed, cloth, provide healthcare and house all the Afghans than what we spent on military over there. Afghanistan hardly has 30 million people. Per capita income is 500$ a year. Just 15 billion dollars total. We spent 1 trillion dollars in the war over there. Our government is borrowing at historically low rate, 10 year t-bills go at 2.5%, the interest charges on that debt alone is 25 billion dollars a year!
I don't know if it would have worked. But the idea goes like, take a large well defended perimeter. Free food, clothing, hospitals and homes inside. Let people in after disarming them. Expand the area as more and more people move in. We might be able to take in 90% of the population inside, standing obediently at the breadline and the hospital waiting rooms. I don't know. May be an idiot slashdot keyboard warrior.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Or as Roger Waters put it: The Bravery of Being Out of Range.
Put a bunch of laser light sensors into the armys jackets, helmets and pants that would detect a laser light sweeping the person targetted and then immediately respond by shooting the same color laser down toward the ground from the helmet to make the bullet have to guess what the real target is (a bunch of dots preferably). While doing that the direction and location of the shooter could be determined by the sensors so retaliation could be swift. Or in cartoon style just have the sensors automatically make a laser of the same frequence that was detected shine a bunch of dots on the ground and direct the bullet back to the source laser transmission to take out the shooter :).
Hmmmm, if it has guidance in the bullet, does that mean you need to fire it out of a smoothbore barrel?
Also, where is the computer assisted laser pointer?
This system isn't guided but you can preselect your target and enable the rifle.
When you aim where the computer predicts impact it will automatically fire.
http://tracking-point.com/prec...
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Yeah, the world would be a better place if Democrat's NKVD* drones were controlling a disarmed, helpless population.
* New Kansas Vulture Dominators
I am not US taxpayer so I don't give a shit how much such bullet costs. All I know that sometimes the SEALS or other special ops. unit serves to protect civilians. Hard to belive but that is its function. Put aside "the bad terrorists" and just focus on some scenarios in which such weapon would be extremely useful despite its cost... like I don't know... maybe it is some stupid Hollywood style example but - Maersk Alabama incident. AFAIK snipers did excellent job then and if such weapon could help in such situations I like it.
This was my first thought as well. I feel like UAVs in particular from this technology, they could designate several targets from the sky and fire a few rounds, taking out the targets with no collateral damage. It could help save soldiers' lives as well, imagine them being able to designate targets from behind cover and shoot without revealing more than their hands. The potential really is limitless, hopefully this technology can be applied to less specialized uses than long-range sniping. Imagine computer-assisted targeting for police so they can target an assailant's weapon instead of killing them in a situation that might normally end with a death.
But, it'll probably end up only being used to kill more effectively.
... last Saturday was the 5th of July. Probably just people finishing off their fireworks stash.
It doesn't matter that it works. It matters that the "enemy" believes the kill shot can come from any direction unrelated to the shooter.
I could get tired of these click-bait sensationalized titles. It's clear even in the summary that the bullet is human-guided. Ok, it can redirect itself in flight, that's cool, but that's not remotely what we were told.
I'm sure this technology isn't cheap. They should make it so once it penetrates a target it comes out the other side and flies right back to the sniper so he can reuse it on the next target -- otherwise it's a waste of some pretty expensive technology!
When you're the knight in shining armor with a well sharpened sword and your opponent is some peasant with a pitchfork and clothing that can't fend off the cold never mind a blade.
People forget why asymmetric warfare exists: Because a toe to toe war only works if both sides agree to the rules and both sides are similiarly armed and skilled.
I am extremely sorry, but if we "Humans" can't learn to live without this type of nonsense and live peacefully together as one people on one Planet; then maybe it's time to pull the plug on this Civilization. We have brainwashed ourselves in such an extreme fashion that we allow our primitive side to completely engulf our ability to reason.
Geeze, how hard is that to get right?!
That said, a self-guided bullet would be a small, fast, deadly autonomous robot ... which would be cool except that it would only be as useful as its range. You would need a very unique use-case to justify it's use over say, a dumb area weapon.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
I am no expert but it seems this will have much broader ramifications.
- Yes should help U.S. snipers, reduce collateral injury, reduce volume of rounds scattered across the countryside
- Will help snipers of other nationalities too if they get these systems
- Reverse engineering effort only needs one unexploded bullet.
- Would also work for bullets shot into the air randomly, only those with vectors near target will matter
- Would also work for other kinds of mass shot from high-flying drones, planes, orbital (kinetic bombardment, see brilliant pebbles / crowbars: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K... )
- Asymmetric. An enemy would only need to have one man in your city illuminating a target and shoot from across the border
- Illumination can be done by a robot.
The most intelligent weapon is no weapon at all.
I have to wonder if while trying to include everything in your calculations you misplaced an decimal or something, because 18 seconds is about NINE times as long as a quick estimate comes up with:
> System target distance is 1.2 miles. [6200 feet] ...
> Maximum effective range is around 6300 feet.
> muzzle velocity 3000 f/s,
6200 feet / 3000 feet per second = two seconds, at muzzle velocity
To get 18 seconds, the average velocity must therefore be almost 90% less than muzzle velocity. Average around 300 fps? That's just 200 mph AVERAGE. To start at 3000 fps and average 300 fps, the terminal velocity would be around 15 fps, or 10 MPH. I'm pretty sure a .50 round impacts the target at a velocity higher than a brisk walk.
Looking at the pictures, I don't think it uses fins at all. I am guessing the bullet has pizzo crystals or some other material that changes dimension when electricity is applied. Put 3 such crystals so the bullet can itself bend and you essentially need a multicopter stabilizer modified to keep the bullet locked onto its target, much like how multicopters use gyros/accelerators to stay level, only the bullet is using feed from camera instead of gravity to stay level to the target.