Monday, October 4, 2010

well, phooey

A self-aiming sniper rifle? What kind of fun is that?

8 comments:

TBeck said...

One step closer to waging global war from an air-conditioned warehouse at Fort Bragg.

Anonymous said...

It might be self-aiming, but it's still not self-concealing...that still requires the human touch.

Bubblehead Les. said...

Taking out Two Taliban Terrorists in the same amount of time as takes to kill one? Works for me. Now when they get a Star Trek Phaser on wide beam... : )

Mike Doyle said...

Reminds me of the PR surrounding the ARBS bombing system they rolled out (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/ASB-19 back when I was in Ordnance. The money quote I remember was, "It doesn't make a great bomber better - it makes a good bomber better, and a mediocre bomber good." For example, our CO had been flying A4s since he was a lieutenant at Chu Lai, and posted the second-best scores at Bomb Derby (.04% behind the Weapons and Tactics Instructor officer!). And our CO was notorious for flying birds with down avionics - he'd take a grease pencil and draw hashmarks on the HUD combiner glass, if the avionics went TU... his widget wasn't built for the reincarnations of Carlos Hathcock or Chuck Mawhinney - it was built for the fair-to-middlin' Squad Designated Marksmen, to make them better than fair.

OTOH, when I was a tanker, we spent a lot more time shooting in what we called "Degraded-mode" - we shut off the computer and rangefinder and had to shoot the old-fashioned way. Murphy's Law - if you learn to muddle through without it and do well, you're going to do better still when you have it available. So long as they use the widget as a supplement and not a crutch, I'm okay with it...

Regards,
Mike Doyle

Skip said...

Self adjusting sniper?
Isn't that called a Predator/Hellfire?
Flown and fired from Vegas?

Old NFO said...

It will be 10 years, cost $50k each and weigh 50lbs by the time it actually gets to the sniper... and they will have all upgraded to .338 Lapua so it won't even work...

Geodkyt said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Geodkyt said...

So, the scope will self-adjust to range and then improperly apply corrections for weather, probably improperly apply corrections for slant, and the shooter still has to get to his position (according to my sniper qualified buddies, shooting's the easy part of sniper school), still has to hold the rifle steady, still has to apply lead, and still has to squeeze the shot off?


"Self-aiming" my shiny head.

I'll garantee that RoboScope 2000 ("All the functionality of a good rangefinder, at six times the price, with system generated errors added in at no extra cost!!!") will be too pricey for Designated Marksmen, and unnecessary for and less accurate than a standard 2-man sniper team could pulloff for under $300 worth of kit in addition to the scopes they already have. (Ignoring the fact that real sniper teams almost certainly already have a "pocket" met station anda laser rangefinder -- even if they went out of pocket for it.)