On 8 Jun 2016 at 18:22, Richard Aiken wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 8, 2016 at 4:29 PM, Douglas Berry <xxxxxx@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>     For more traditional infantry applications, there are two
>     problems. Troops tend to do everything they can to blend in and
>     avoid being exposed for more than a few seconds, and being an
>     active emitter on a battlefield is dangerous. The immediate
>     countermeasure I thought of was a laser sensor link to a sentry
>     gun.
>
> Which would cure folks of zapping every suspicious-looking lump with
> the laser rangefinder, I suppose.

But that makes the emitters more obvious when they do light up.

> DId you find the video where they talk about using it to shoot around
> corners and over barricades?

There are other ways of doing this that don't involve lighting yourself up.

My gut feeling as an ex-light infantryman is that it's another thing to break, another
thing to carry batteries for, and another thing cluttering up my weapon (we spent a lot
of time in very heavy bush, and heavy weapons with lots of lumps and bumps on them
are The Devil). As for pre-tagging a spot - that's all very well and good, but that means
that when the target sticks their head up in a slightly different place, you either get no
shot (took you too long because you had to decide you needed a manual shot, and to
select that), or you get a miss because the gun puts the shot somewhere else (where
the tag was).

That it could cut down on ammo requirements by being more efficient is appealing,
except that I doubt that this is what would happen in practice. Modern armies seem
constitutionally incapable of reducing soldier's loads.

Now, as a demonstrator of some tech that would work nicely on a drone (either
airborne or a ground vehicle) it's quite interesting, as it shows that you can miniaturise
tank/warship fire control and stabilisation systems to a point where they could be
used in a smallish drone.