In a lot of ways it would take a lot of the fun out of long range shooting but I’d still buy a few rounds if I could get them “cheap”. I’m sure even as mil-surplus they would be expensive enough I wouldn’t be shooting a lot of these:
Darpa, the Defense Department’s far-out research arm, announced a pair of contracts yesterday, to start designing a super, .50-caliber sniper rifle that fires guided bullets. Lockheed Martin recieved $12.3 million for the “EXACTO” (EXtreme ACcuracy Tasked Ordnance) project, while Teledyne Scientific & Imaging, LLC got another $9.5 million.
If the system works, it’ll “provide a dramatic new capability to the U.S. military,” Darpa says. “The use of an actively controlled bullet will make it possible to counter environmental effects such as crosswinds and air density, and prosecute both stationary and moving targets while enhancing shooter covertness. This capability would have the further benefit of providing increased accuracy and range while reducing training requirements.”
And from the same article:
The agency has earmarked $7.5 million for a laser-guided bullet program. Darpa gave Lockheed $2 million for advanced sniper scopes that could boost kill rates by tenfold, or more. If the system works out as planned, it would actually allow snipers to remain virtually invisible, lost in the “heat haze” in between them and their targets. Our own David Hamling called the project the “next war’s secret weapon.”
Back in my day, we relied on the skill of the shooter to hit the target in an undetectable manner… 😛
The sword fighter relied on his strength, training and skill, as did the spear fighter and the bare-hand fighter. Each time, no doubt, when someone came up with a better way, there were protests from those who had spent great effort mastering that which had just been made obsolete.
A problem I see is that while we battle in the courts and in politics trying to hold on to our 2A rights, there are whole technologies being developed which aren’t even on the table for discussion with regard to our right to bear arms. While we fight to hold on to our AR-15s, or our shotguns, our government is developing smart bullets, microwave weapons, sonic detection systems, et al. I said quite some time ago that what we know of today as “guns” are becoming something of an anachronism, and yet there are localities where certain knives are banned.
Not only are new technologies probably going to be restricted to “the chosen ones” new technology development is slowed down. This is because weapons development is heavily regulated.
Decades ago, Charles Moore, developer of the FORTH programming language, predicted that some day the DoD would want to put a processor in a bullet. And he predicted that FORTH would be the ideal language for it. It’ll be interesting to see if he was right about that part.
Hmmm… I wonder if I can get Microsoft to help put Windows CE on it…
I would love to work on that project.
Technological toys are cool, and when they work they work well.
But a group of average citizens with nothing more than some simple explosive, soldering iron made capacitor bank, and generator (or large battery bank) can make an EMP bomb that turns toys into deadweight.
At least until every circuit is protected. But then there will be different vulnerabilities in the mix.
EMP bombs are much more difficult to make than hinted at by the popular press. When I was working at the government lab the consensus was that, other than air burst nukes, no one had really made one. We wrote up a proposal to do some of the early investigation on how one could be made.
The problem was that it wasn’t just a big EM spike that was needed. You needed to get the electrical field to a very high level and then oscillate it at a high frequency while at a high, relatively, DC value. If you didn’t do this then most electronics would survive.
A bullet 2000 yards away chambered in a gun or in a metal ammo box is going to be protected from almost any EMP you can generate with conventional explosives anyway.