Robo-Gunsight System Makes Sniper's Life Easier 265
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."
Re:Laser guidance? (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.darkgovernment.com/news/self-guided-sniper-bullets-wanted-by-us-dod/ [darkgovernment.com]
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 [freepatentsonline.com]. Interesting.
Walk away (Score:2, Interesting)
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!
Re:Something wrong here (Score:1, Interesting)
Am I alone in feeling disturbed at the trend to separate the combatants by ever increasing distances?
Oh, I don't know. 9/11 finally brought some kind of perspective to the wars the US have started the last fifty years. A number of countries have experienced US-backed wars, but this was the first time in a long time someone brought the action to US soil. The oceans have made that hard for a long time. Other countries are not that lucky.
You guys failed that test, though. Instead of reflecting, y'all went apeshit. You are now on the border of bankrupting yourselves.
505 kill sniper with iron sights (Score:4, Interesting)
The famed Finnish sniper Simo Häyhä [wikipedia.org] (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.
Re:505 kill sniper with iron sights (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
Dispersed Warfare versus Personal Courage (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [amazon.com] 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.