shallowdeep
Posts: 343
Joined: 9/1/2006 From: California Status: offline
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Ars Technica had a couple of articles, including a hands on experience, with more depth about the technology than the NPR piece. The NPR story probably does not capture the full range of the system's capability with its 500 yard quote. According to Ars, someone who had never fired a rifle was able to hit a "big dinner plate" sized target at just over 1000 yards on their first try. They could hit the same target "just about every time" at that range, albeit with an experienced spotter to suggest corrections for crosswinds, which need to be entered manually. For comparison, in 1999 the US Army published a paper that puts the probability of a trained sniper team hitting an E-silhouette target at 500 yards at 79 percent. At 1000 yards, the probability dropped to 11 percent. quote:
ORIGINAL: MalcolmNathaniel I would not trust my family's safety to that. There are just too many single-points of failure in that design. The system certainly introduces plenty of additional points of failure, but the consequences of those failures would be an useless expensive computer… not really a safety issue. It's not like the computer is capable of firing the rifle; the gun only fires when the trigger is being depressed by an external force. The system works by increasing the trigger's resistance to prevent firing until the the shot is (at least according to the ballistics computer) perfectly aligned, at which point the trigger returns to normal weighting, resulting in firing if a sufficient force is being applied against it. The only thing the computer can do is prevent a shot. I don't see how the rifle is more dangerous than a similar conventional one. If anything, it seems like it might be somewhat safer. quote:
ORIGINAL: kdsub OK so if the laser is locked with the touch of a button why waste time with a laser lock...just pull the damn trigger. Lasers beams and bullets don't follow the same trajectory. Aiming the gun at the point that allows one to hit the target means you will miss with the other at longer ranges. The laser doesn't actually lock – it's just brief illumination for range finding, tracking is done with image feature recognition. quote:
I don't understand how this would work. If you are curious, the Ars Technica article does a pretty good job explaining it.
< Message edited by shallowdeep -- 5/20/2013 8:58:32 AM >
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