SENTRY GUN < Homemade Ingenuity

I've always thought that the desire and need to tinker, and having the ability, resources, and freedom to do so, in thought and action, as being the main reason the USA is such a great country.

http://cs-people.bu.edu/aaron/turret/turret.htm

It's people like this ingenious little punk who will lead the way. Very impressed.

Pradeep

pretty slick.....
scary, but pretty slick
chris

Neat!

I think I'll get one or two of those for when I'm going exploring outposts in space who missed their last check in....

No one can hear you scream and all that

I bet one of those would keep the damn racoons out of my mom's attic!

WILD, I certainly respect their creativity, skills, & abilities!

That's quite impressive for the skill level and stuff used. I can see a device like this being really handy to tag trespassers with dye-filled paintballs. Although I don't know how close that would come to being classed as an illegal boobytrap.

I wonder in a military situation how well a system like that would work with a recoil of a real gun. Probably would need a very heavy base at least.

I can see the DOD getting interested in this kind of thing. A fellow my father knew years ago developed a terrain-following guidance system for geo-surveying helicopters, then mysteriously turned over all of his work at the urging of the government. Who knows, maybe that's where the Air Force systems came from.

That's an awsome piece of work! I also strongly suspect the DARPA folks perfected it long ago, but still haven't found a "home" for the technology. Current ethics demand "wetware" somewhere on the trigger!

Larry

AWESOME!! That BB gun is the cheap kinds that shoots just soft enough not to hurt you, while being plenty fast to scare you! Good anti-racoon/unwanted animal sort of contraption. Wonder what the runtime is on that thing?

That is great!!! I thought that the military had those things already, I seen them in half life, I hated em'

AlexGT

We're still working on getting remote fired guns for mouting on the Humvee, with a camera for aiming.

Real talent there.

With some real engineering behind this it could be quite slick and advanced. I am surprised the government isn't deploying this kind of thing. If you have somewhat-permanent base out in the middle of nowhere, a reusable sentry gun system seems like it would be cheaper and easier than land mines, and could reduce the number of patrols. Just set it to blast anything within 100yds outside the wire.

Although a sniper could probably take out the guidance hardware from 500yds with a powerful rifle.

Since landmines are being vilified for how they remain long after the war, maiming innocent people, this seems like a good solution. A row of these could easily defend a line, fortification, or a DMZ tyoe region.

I've seen several military projects that put machine guns on motorized T&E mounts hooked up to video cameras, and I'm sure several of the experimental ground remotely operated vehicles have similar systems, so the mechanics of such a system are surely well known already.

I just don't think they've hooked any of them into image recognition and motion tracking software as a serious project. Uncle Sam probably wants a human in the loop.

The best compromise I see, is the software watches the field of view, tracks any potential targets, then routes images to a human operator standing watch over multiple sentry gun units, with the final fire button. That takes all the tedium out of the process, but still puts a human brain on the final fire/no fire decision.

ABTOMAT said:

Although a sniper could probably take out the guidance hardware from 500yds with a powerful rifle.

Click to expand...

And there's the problem with all technology
One motivated person with a rifle can neutralize equipment which cost a hundred times more than his training and equipment.

Rifle's are shaped as they are so the user can hold aim and manipulate it. If it's built into a mechanism that isn't handled by humans, you have much more leeway as to where stuff is placed. The control electronics need not even be in the sentry gun, just the cameras and the motors. It could communicate over encrypted wi-fi to a base unit kept in a secure bunker elsewhere. Hell, maybe even via satelite all the way back to the Pentagon.

It shouldn't be too hard to build the whole thing into an armored box where nothing but the sensors and the muzzle are projecting. Cover the sensors with wheels of Lexan that can take a hit, then rotate until a clear section is exposed, kind of like the covers on race car cameras that keep turning to get the dirt off...

Think of a unit like the coaxial machineguns on tank turrets, especialy in WWII, where there was usualy just a armored "ball" with a few inches of muzzle sticking out. Since no operator needs to sit in the thing, packing it all inside an armored box should be even easier. Slope and angle the sides like an M1 Abrams tank, so bullets are more prone to glancing off...

Also, maybe just don't bother armoring it. It's a GOOD thing if it forces enemy snipers to shoot at it, instead of our troops. Maybe for every sentry gun unit, three or four of them are cheap non-functional decoys with a motor that makes them twitch occasionaly?

There are high-speed video cameras, triangulating microphones, and things like mili-wave radar that can see, track, and balisticaly plot the origin of something as small as .22 and .30 caliber bullets. A larger anti-material round like a .50 is even easier. The engineering and targeting is already well understood since it's been applied to counter artillery and anti-mortar systems already. Hook that info the networked sentry guns, and they could return fire accurately no matter how well concealed the sniper was. The balistic path of the snipers bullet can't lie.

1 second after he fires his rifle, he's pinned down by machinegun fire that's accurate to within one foot of his position, and if he's baracaded, indirect fire weapons like the auto-detonating micro-shells from the OICW project, or just plain mortar rounds are dropping on him.

I read about are some automated anti-sniper systems out there courtesy some mad scientists at the pentagon a few years ago. No specifics, but they claimed to have something already.

Ballistics tracking was at the core of it. I suspect it was just a micro version of counterbattery fire.

As I've said, American ingeniuity.

How long before CPF members have these mounted with M6s, and set to illuminate anything that walks into a room?

Makarov said:

And there's the problem with all technology
One motivated person with a rifle can neutralize equipment which cost a hundred times more than his training and equipment.

Click to expand...

only if he knows its there!!

I think its very cool home project but military would certainly have this already..