New ‘Self-Aiming Bullet’ Has Microchip and Self-Adjusting Fins, Accurate to 20cm at Half a Mile

T.C.
Economist
June 15, 2012

MILITARY snipers are competitive types. There is an ongoing and grisly contest between them to see who can kill an enemy soldier from the farthest distance away. The present record is held by Craig Harrison, a corporal in the British Army’s Household Cavalry, who managed to kill two Taliban soldiers from 2,475 metres in November 2009. That was a slight improvement on the previous record, held by Rob Furlong, a Canadian soldier also fighting in Afghanistan, who managed to shoot his enemy in the chest from a distance of 2,430 metres in 2002.

Such long-range killings are the exception rather than the norm, as long-distance shooting is extremely difficult. Snipers must guess at wind direction, atmospheric density, relative humidity and a host of other factors that affect a bullet’s trajectory. In an interview with the Sunday Times, Corporal Harrison described the atmospheric conditions as perfect: “no wind, mild weather, clear visibility”, but modestly neglected to mention the hundreds of hours of painstaking training that are required on top of that.

Now a protoype self-aiming bullet developed at Sandia National Laboratories, an American weapons-research lab in New Mexico, might allow any soldier to match such feats. Modern bullets gain their accuracy from a technique known as rifling, whereby the barrel of the gun that fires them has a series of spiraling grooves etched into it. These cause the bullets to spin, and that spins stabilises their flight path. Rifling offers a huge improvement over old-style smoothbore guns such as muskets, which were notoriously inaccurate at even comparatively short ranges.

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This article was posted: Friday, June 15, 2012 at 9:18 am

Tags: war

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