US monster-truck roboguns to blast enemies autonomously Military boffins in the US are now equipping a small fleet of armoured lorries with automatic defensive weapons which can detect incoming antitank rockets and shoot them down in mid-air before they strike, meanwhile retaliating upon the enemy gunmen with devastating firepower - all without human input. The 'Buffalo' Mine …
OK, so $8,000,000 to fit it with roboblaster kit to protect against a $1,000 weapon. But how much do these wheeled tanks cost in the first place? And who is the enemy in the first place? A bunch of nutters with explosives? We are going to be fiscally bled dry by a buch of guys running around in bathrobes and sandals. And before this it was a buch of guys in black pajamas and sandals.
"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." -- Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961.
In an ambush, the al Quaeda-types set up a couple of rifles on tripods, fixed aim, triggered by control wire from someone a safe distance away in a trench. 1) Fire a round at vehicle. 2) Crosshair empties the magazine into a bare patch of rock, seriously damaging one rifle. 3) Fire second rifle. 4) No response as top gun out of ammo. 5) Rest of al-Quaeda-types can now attack with impunity. Five mins later the vehicle has been RPG's to death and the attackers have vanished back into the countryside before the air-strike can be called in. Sounds great.
Not sure, but I suspect a faceful of paint is less of a hindrance to a radar system. Plus a network of radar units was mentioned, so I guess you'd have to cover all of them for the attack to work (if it worked). Plus, multiple vehicles can share information, so if they travel in columns (admittedly perhaps this is unlikely as I'm sure the things won't be cheap) you'd have to hit them all simultaneously. Then of course you have to follow-up pretty rapidly with your actual RPGs, having already revealed your position when you threw the paint-bomb. In fact, if your paint-delivery weapon was ballistic (which it'd pretty much have to be if you wished to walk away), the system may have already foiled it just as it would the RPG attack.
Even assuming you did effectively "blind" the system without getting yourself zeroed in the process, the occupants facing your sophisticated assault could always fall back to the old faithful "shoot everything in 360 degrees" plan.
I'm sure it does have an Achilles heel of some sort, but I don't think this is it.
Oh, and I think we have a winner for the Most Tortuous/Contrived Acronym Award!
all this needs is an injection of DARPA robocar challenge challenge magic and the RotM is properly out of the starting gate. Remember, even without guns the Oshkosh entry managed to wipe out a house on the Urban Challenge, just imagine what havoc it could wreak with autonomous firepower
Makes you proud to be an American, because let's face it, if you are going to waste taxpayers' hard-earned money, is there a cooler way to do it? On top of that, with one of these babies, it might become almost safe to drive through Detroit or Newark. (But not DC; that place is scary.)
And think of the children? Yeah, I'll think of the children; something like this might keep the dirtbags from biking through my yard and chucking rocks at the dogs.
Or we could bring back spanking, but no, that's cruel.
When the time comes I want to ride it across Damnation Alley!
The shape of it looks kind of like the shape adopted by the South Africans when they developed a similar vehicle. Driving over a mine the main blast energy passes around rather than through the hull. OK, the wheels and drivetrain can get wrecked but crew survivability goes way up which can't be a bad thing.
Maybe they should give our boys some when there are A-10's running in the same kill-box...
I *do* like the automatic gun-slinger kit, though.
"has just been awarded an $8m contract to fit the kit - plus "Iron Curtain" active protection - to 25 Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles for "testing and evaluation"
Step 1 . 8 mil for 25 MRAPs = 320,000 for the kit per vehicle. Also the price will go down if they build in mass quantitiy.
Step 2 more math. The vehicle looks like it has maybe 6 troops in it. What's the cost to train 6 soldiers and replace the broken MRAP... (guessing it's not cheap)
Step 3 future. Why keep firing rockets at vehicles you can't kill? Shooting war over.
No offense, but this seem bad ass if it really works. Ammo's cheap, RPG's are not. I'd guess these vehilces laugh off anything that isn't shape charged as it is, so you're not going to fake them out with water baloons. Pretty soon, as long as the Govt has people driving these things and ammo, their will can't be opposed. I consider this tech to be very powerful and scary.
Re: If you can't stand the heat..
So you're volunteering your country to accept unlimited Palestinian refugees?
Re: what are you expecting as a response, harsh language?
if the attack is with a rock, unable to injure the personnel inside, and unlikely to even scratch the paintwork, then, yes, that would be a reasonable, proportionate response. Blowing the shit out of a kid for throwing a rock rates pretty highly on the "actions liable to turn victim's friends into fanatical terrorists" scale.
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