Steerable bullet aims for mass army deployment Researchers at Sandia National Laboratory are developing a steerable bullet designed for general military use, giving the standard squaddie the capabilities of an advanced sniper. Bullets that can adjust their flight have been under research for some time, and DARPA is three years into research into a steerable .50-caliber …
I see your point. But the big problem with aiming a sodding great rifle is the sodding-great-ness of it, and hence the extreme skill required to shoot without any kind of tremble in your hands. Laser designators are the size of a camera, mount on a small tripod, and the better ones have all sorts of assists for getting the targetting right. AFAIK they don't currently have ones that can track a target as he walks, but it's almost certainly only a matter of time. So it's going to be easier to do with a separate designator.
Don't forget about the problem of showing yourself to fire, and if you're firing directly at the target then they can see your muzzle flash. With this beastie, you can stay behind cover, bash a round into the air roughly in the right direction, and your mate with the laser designator can steer it onto the target. Hell, your mate can even be behind cover too and use a detachable control panel to drive the designator.
And it's worth pointing out that this will tie in perfectly with the XM25 smart rifle, also a smooth-bore weapon. A smart fused payload on a smart targetting shell is likely to be rather useful - think grenade launcher with sniper-rifle accuracy.
Gareth 7 - You can't be serious. If this thing is for the mass market, a soldier will carry 80 or so of them in a magazine. They will all have to respond to his own painter laser - or the one of the guy who paints for that soldier. Which could be - in theory - one guy painting for ten soldiers, or ten guys painting for one. Or whatever. No way you'll match the bullets individually to a target indicator.
12ga shotguns have a bore somewhere in the range of .60, rather than .50 (the exact number escapes me at the moment). You can't fire a round smaller than the bore reliably. Best case? You'll destroy the barrel or damage it beyond use. Worst case? You'll break it and injure yourself. Someone doing this deserves what happens to them.
You're right about a laser pointer being light. But they're still hard to point. I've tried it. About the only thing I know of that's easy to point is a well-balanced hunting rifle so maybe you'd want to model your pointer on that. And carry that around with you... :-(
The bit about showing yourself is true, but the guy with the pointer still has to show himself. And Private Snuffy won't have a detachable control panel at his disposal, I think. Most of the time anyway. And there's still the little matter about target identification.
So it might come in handy now and then, but more likely in cases where you'd employ a sniper anyway - firing a first shot in a well-planned attack, like. Not in a battle situation.
There is a difference between showing yourself and *showing* yourself. Sure the guy with the pointer will need line of site to the target, but that doesn't necessarily reveal him. There will be no muzzle flash from the pointer, the bullet will come from elsewhere. As soon as they start coming in I doubt any of the targets will give any thought to the unarmed man one of their team thought he saw 5 minutes ago wandering about at 45 degrees to them.
Many of the "smart" bombs in Iraq were guided in by laser. Sometimes painted from other aircraft, but often painted by forces on the ground.
The DARPA smart shell project (Judge Dredd gun) reported previously uses both a new shell *and* a new (big) gun with lots of built in electronics to prep the shell.
This is a *retrofit* to existing weapons in the field. *NO* 2 way comms with the shell. No GPS. No IMU, No temperature and wind speed compensating IR optics.
And once again for the slow ones in the back. Existing laser designators use *invisible* light which *flickers* in a controlled pattern. For missiles this pattern *may* be adjustable so different groups of missiles look for different patterns. Given an 8 bit pattern could allow 255 designators this is not difficult (although IRL some of those patterns would be *very* poor ones to lock onto).
For something this size it's likely to be fixed in design inside the bullet.
And the bullet will be fitted with a filter, making it *blind* to visible light (like the Sun, laser pointers etc).
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