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We've seen some demos of EM guns, but I have yet to see
any designed specifically for snipers.
Two of the main vulnerabilities of a sniper are being heard
and being seen. They use muzzle flash reducers and
silencers to combat this issue. But what if you didn't have
gunpowder to begin with?
There
are a couple of rifles that use EM, but they require
special ammunition. Even the simplest weapons require
magnetic capable rounds.
My concept would go this one better: it's more of a
catapult than a firearm.
The EM rail-gun portion would move a metal portion that
stays with the weapon. EM would be used to both activate
it and slow it down.
The rounds could be made of anything - rubber, stone,
metal, etc. The kit for the weapon would include molds to
be used to form the projectiles.
This way, there would be nearly infinite ammunition, and
all you'd need to do would be charge the system's battery
to fire it. This could be done with the grid, a solar
collector, a wind collector, etc.
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The biggest issue would probbaly be the supersonic crack.
And that issue can't really be fixed without maybe say a
gyrojet bullet. |
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Subsonic ammo is already the standard ammo used
with suppressors. It's usually a heavier round to make
up for the lower speed. |
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Surely the hole in the head of the person being
sniped will give things away? |
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//EM [...] used to [...] slow it down// means double the
length, double the weight, double the unweildy... In
general, if you're packing around *anything* that's 20 meters
long, it's fairly detectable. |
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As soon there is a market for a silent and invisible sniper
rifle that fires a hypersonic projectile which makes an
eardrum-splitting sonic crack and raises a cloud of dust and
detritus along its flight path (leading in a pencil-straight
line back to the gun's position), I'm sure the militaries of
the world will beat a path to your door. |
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//I'm sure the militaries of the world will beat a path to your door. |
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They probably would...Anyway the EMP pulse might be a bit of a giveaway. Suggest crossbow. |
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//The EM rail-gun portion would move a metal portion that stays with the weapon. |
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If you make that boomerang shaped, it'll cut down on the elastic needed. |
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Yeah, sniping is weaponized math. If you get one little bubble in your
hand-cast ammo, the weight is off. If the bubble is off-center, the spin
is wobbly, and the drag is off, and the round is making extra noise. |
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Seriously, how many people are you planning to shoot on one trip?
Just pack extra ammo, instead of the casting equipment. |
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I agree that a suppressor and some subsonic rounds would help
reduce notice. If you can design a quiet-flight bullet, you might have
something, or a steerable subsonic bullet, even. |
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Wow, [simpleknight], ten ideas in fourteen years and you part the veil for this? If nothing else, your discretion is admirable. |
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In general it's probably more effective to use remote
sniping platform if you want to be undetectable. |
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The further away you are from the event of
the target... the better. Especially if you missed. |
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Hence the general advice, to avoid ejecting from a
bomber plane over the area you just bombed. Since those
getting bombed are not always known for their
hospitality. Same principle applies to snipers. |
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//
In general it's probably more effective to use remote
sniping platform if you want to be undetectable.
// |
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How do you figure that? Dragging a stable mounting
apparatus, servo-equipped hard pivot, remote operation
gear, antenna and receiver, weather-doping sensors, and
specially modified rifle into the bush, setting it up,
calibrating the gear and zeroing the sights, and covering
your tracks will take a while, and doing it unobserved will
take much longer. Then you have to remove to a separate
location and wait to take your shot, hoping no errant
sentries stumble upon your unattended installation in the
meantime...probably easier just to crawl in there with a
gun and take the shot. |
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Not to mention that there are as yet no existing remote
shooting platforms capable of even _near_ the accuracy of
the best professional sharpshooters. |
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//Not to mention that there are as yet no existing remote shooting platforms capable of even _near_ the accuracy of the best professional sharpshooters//
How so? I would have thought that it wouldn't make much difference, holding a gun by hand or by motorised mount (mount should in theory be better - none of that pesky breathing or heart-beat or hand-tremor).
(Disclaimer: my knowledge of snipering comes mostly from videogames, with the odd movie and documentary thrown in...) |
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/ In general, if you're packing around *anything* that's 20 meters long, it's fairly detectable. / |
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Bury it in the roof of the family RV? Would sort of limit you to freeway and first floor targets. |
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Getting the RV through airport security as carry on would take a bit of doing. |
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I don't see why. They often get entire aircraft
through. |
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I wonder about that, [Alterother]. Back in my farmboy
days, I probably burned off two to three thousand rounds
of 6mm HPBT at next-best-thing to half-mile distances,
trying to keep down the population of my county's various
woodchuck colonies. So while I'm no sniper, I am familiar
with that feeling of having a rifle with a theoretical
accuracy limit which would cover a dinner plate at that
range, but *this* *particular* bullet has got to hit a target
the size of your fist. Snuggling up to the rifle, making sure
everything is comfortable, no wrinkles in your collar, no
sharp rocks under your knees or elbows. Looking at the
tube of air from your scope all the way to the target,
imagining the feel of the breeze in each bit of it. It's like
math and religion and cooking, all rolled into one. |
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What I'm wondering about, though, is trying to get that
personal with a rail gun. That seems more like kissing a
chain saw hooked to a lightning rod in a thunderstorm... I
wonder if the platform is even amenable to the kind of
art involved in sharpshooting. |
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[lurch] knows what I mean. You can't dope wind through a
camera lens, nor do you have any sort of depth perception.
Any active duty soldier today, grateful as they are for land
and aerial drone support, will still tell you that there is no
uncompromising substitute for a direct line of sight. |
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I don't know. The Abrams firing solution computer
can hit a car at 4 km. I think something similar
would work at sniper ranges. |
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Plus snipers don't just use their skin to feel the wind (that's
like cool badass hollywood sniper), they use
wind/temperature sensors and calculators. (But I'm sure
they are train to estimate it without these equipments if
needed) |
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Also, do you even need a human in the loop? Why not make
it fully automated. Though I have a feeling it might break a
few treaties, and maybe cause a few warcrimes or so... |
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Remote operated: So after you reveal the location
of the shooting platform by shooting a few rounds,
do you: |
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a) Go back and get it, hopefully before the enemy
gets there?
b) Abandon it, giving it to the enemy so they can
figure out a way to use it.
c) Include an explosive charge in it large enough to
render it completely useless. |
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//The Abrams firing solution computer can hit a car at 4 km. |
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Not really sporting, it's not like the car can shoot back..and are we talking some huge SUV, or one them Isetta bubble-cars? |
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//Why not make it fully automated. |
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Been done, but only by accident, that South African AA gun that started shooting soldiers.. |
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//Sniper rifle with no flash or sound// |
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Well, with a .50 cal sniper rifle you can be some significant
distance away. A mile or so. In that scenario you can easily
hide the flash with a suppressor and careful choice of
location. Then the bullet arrives a good second or so before
the sound, the echos make it very hard to track the origin.
You'd have to go a long way to beat the .50 BMG sniper rifle. |
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Well, at least beyond the mile range. |
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//nor do you
have any sort of depth perception.// |
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Care to bet? I can set up a pretty good rig for depth
perception for a couple of hundred on the camera side, and
a smartphone and some goggles on the operator side. |
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As far as what you do with the remote platform itself, you
mount it on an RC car, and change locations after each shot. |
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//
Plus snipers don't just use their skin to feel the wind
(that's like cool badass hollywood sniper), they use
wind/temperature sensors and calculators. // |
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Yeah, so I guess the snipers who lived before those things
existed were really overrated. |
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//Yeah, so I guess the snipers who lived before those things
existed were really overrated// |
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Worse shots, certainly. Simo Häyhä was undoubtedly a
phenomenal sniper, but he just wasn't equipped to hit
anyone from a 1.5 miles away, even if he had the wind info,
his rifle and ammo wouldn't be up to it. So he had to be
good at the other bits of sniping. |
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And that only made Simo Häyhä scarier. |
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Btw... did we ever catch Juba? Is he even one guy? |
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There's a reason that it took 35 years for anyone to
beat Gunny Hathcock's record, and 4 people have in
the 12 years since then. And that almost all of the
record kills longer than 1250 meters have been
logged since the turn of the century. Better
equipment equals longer ranges, more accuracy. Not
necessarily more kills. |
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hit probability = Luck + Skills + Experience + Opportunity +
Preparation + Equipment |
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+ intel
+ the enemy has none of the above. |
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You could argue that the further away you are, the
more chance you have to build experience. |
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biggest problem would be barrel length and power
requirements, reason you haven't seen EM based rifles is
because the power requirement is way more than is man
portable. Also you need a much longer barrel for similar
projectile speeds. |
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Don't forget that Hathcock made his longest kills not with a
high-tech supersniper rifle, but with a slightly modified* M2
.50 cal machine gun mounted on a standard-issue tripod.
He didn't even block the sear to make
it single-shot, he just learned to brush the trigger to snap
off a single round. I've had the chance to experience the
ma deuce twice (firing several hundred rounds each time)
and I was unable to perform the same feat, much less do it
with any sort of accuracy. Those big guns jump around
everywhere whether you handle them with finesse or brute
force. |
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That the White Feather's record shots have been bested so
seldom, and mostly by shooters using all the fancy
peripheral crap to do it, means you don't need that stuff.
Yes, it helps, but it is hardly a replacement for the weapon
component located laterally adjacent to the shoulder
stock. |
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* the only difference between Hathcock's M2 and one
straight out of the cosmoline was a fixed 4X scope and a
thorough going-over by a gunsmith. |
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According to Wikipedia, he had some custom stuff on the system. |
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Common sense says his was also fresh out of the crate and stroked by an armourer. I'd posit custom handloads as well to fit snugly in a military-tolerances chamber. |
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Hathcock did hand-load his .50 ammo, but that was and is
pretty much standard procedure for top-level snipers.
Recorded history has the only non-standard mod to the M2s
used by the Gunny and other snipers in his unit were the
telescopic sights, which were originally 4X (like the one
Hathcock used to make his record-setting 2,500-yd kill) but
later were upgraded to 6X and possibly 9X, mounted on a
side-saddle rail welded to the left side of the receiver. The
guns were indeed tuned by the company armorer, but all
other mods were done with standard parts (for example, a
style of feed tray used only by the Air Force, which
reduced the jostling of the ammo belt as it advanced round
by round). |
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see WP entry for the M2, "Use as a sniper rifle" section: He put a pistol grip on it and a custom mount. |
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Yes, but the pistol grip was also a standard M2 part that
was no longer in use, and the mount was kitbashed using
readily available parts from the M70 sniper rifle. Where WP
says "a mount of his own design," I think it just means that
he built it, not that it was an original design. |
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Hathcock's 1967 'Hill 55' kill is a perfect example of my
argument against the equipment making the man. Only four
recorded combat kills have been made at longer ranges, all
of them in the last twelve years and all using state-of-the-
art equipment. Hathcock's shot was made using a model of
gun that was already 60 years old at the time. He had no
environmental gear except a single windsock placed 500
yards from his position. His spotter had an analog
rangefinder of the type used by artillery spotters, but the
spotter's calculated range was several dozen yards short of
the actual 2,500 yards. |
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And, just to make it interesting, the target was riding a
bicycle. |
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I'm not denigrating Hathcock and have no reason to think he couldn't best a modern sniper; I'm just saying that he wasn't shooting grandpappy's old squirrel gun from the hip at 5 miles. With a spotter, 4x is reasonable optics at that range for an identified target and an M2 weighs 130lbs. |
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//pistol grip... an old M2 part// you mean that weird vertical trigger thing ? (as found on the 30-06 version) |
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At 2500 yards, viewed through a 4X scope, a human being is
a tiny, indistinct mote only a couple of mil-dots high. It was
a fucking incredible shot. |
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yeah... "incredible". Did you get the Reader's Digest version of his autobiography or something ? You've conflated 2 different weapons and 2 different stories. |
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Have I? I find that entirely likely. NTYMI, I think the guy on
the
bicycle was a different occasion. |
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// as found on the 30-06 version) // |
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No, it was very similar to the pistol grip on the M1919, and
used on M2s by ground infantry in WWII and Korea. Many
soldiers favored it because it allowed the gunner to sit or
lie prone offset from the gun, improving their field of view.
It was out of service by the Vietnam War because the M2
was no longer used in that role. |
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Yeah, that's the one I meant. Probably the same part number as the one on the .30 |
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I have serious doubts that the scope he used was a 4x. |
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If he did use Unertl brand scopes, as are mentioned in all
the references I can see, it would have been an 8x or 10x. I
don't think Unertl made any 4x scopes, even in their mini-
tube line. |
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/Plus snipers don't just use their skin to feel the wind (that's like cool badass hollywood sniper), / |
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I read this as the cool bareass hollywood sniper. |
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You probably could feel the wind better that way. And I am pretty sure that the special forces in Afghanistan went into battle in nothing but jockstraps and techno gear. I think there is a video. |
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//He didn't even block the sear to make it single-shot, he just learned
to brush the trigger to snap off a single round. // |
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It is possible, with practice, to hand-feed single rounds into Browning
MGs - actually easier on the .50 because the feed gate is bigger, but
mind your fingers on the belt feed pawl ... |
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Well the Russians have been getting keen on their 12.7X55mm cartridge over the last few years. Reports indicate it can defeat personal armour at 500+ metres, whilst being subsonic and therefore rather silent. They've even made a conveniently portable bullpup rifle to deliver it. |
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...That said it's for all intents and purposes identical to the .50 whisper cartridge of US fame (and infamy). This is well covered ground. At 500m, firing a subsonic projectile, you're basically invisible. A 1000 gr tungsten tipped projectile hitting you at 250+ m/s will ruin your day, and probably the day of whoever is behind you as well. |
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So that's the subsonic, nearly-undetectable market all wrapped up. |
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Now, if we consider the very long range market, you have high performance supressors available for all of the large calibre long range weapons. .50 cal, .338 LM, etc. At 1000+ metres, no one is going to hear the muted muzzle blast, all they'll hear is the supersonic crack, which is perceived perpendicular to projectile flight path, ie it's nearly impossible to determine the pount of origin if you only hear the supersonic crack. |
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So somone firing a high powered weapon from 1000+ metres with a supressor is essentially impossible to locate. |
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Surely this existing technology fulfils all of your requirements listed above (except the ability to use bits of the landscape as ammunition, which I think is pushing the bounds of reality a bit too far). |
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// the ability to use bits of the landscape as ammunition, which I think
is pushing the bounds of reality a bit too far // |
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<pulls back curtains to reveal BorgCo's new Backpack Trebuchet> |
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And with smarter bullets with fins for inflight trajectory
corrections, it's possible to make it work on cheaper rifles
as well! |
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Or just a bunch of rods with electronically fired guided
ammos emplaced at a hard to reach vantage point by
small quadrocopters. |
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Or to make it do something ridiculous, like say...
accurate indirect fire by shooting AKs in the air. Kind of
like a mini mortar but without the area of effect. |
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Best things of all, is that if mass producible, you can fit it
on any autonomous platform. Which means the only thing
lacking is good software and computing hardware. |
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Won't get rid of traditional snipers of course, but they be
made increasingly redundant. Or at least relegated to
surveillance/recon or as forward 'drone command' behind
enemy lines. |
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//BorgCo's new Backpack Trebuchet// |
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Yeah, but backpacks, whilst somewhat plentiful on the battlefield, are still a limited resource. After your trebuchet has fired off all of the available backpacks, then you'll be scrounging around for things that look like backpacks, next it'll be sacks, duffel bags, etc then all of a sudden you'll be in amongst the officer's quarters looking to use their bespoke luggage as ammunition. This is clearly unnaceptable. |
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And look at the price of a military backpack.. I was just looking into replacing my worn out daypack, and a decent Kifaru replacement is goign to come in north of $600. Is firing backpacks at your enemies really that cost effective? |
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What's contraception got to do with it? |
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I was going to try to confuse "contraception" with "contradiction" but
couldn't make it work. |
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Somebody above mentioned the EMP off this thing. Shirley, with all
the electronic devices around, an electromagnetic pulse is going to
have more effect than a loud noise. I mean, a loud gunshot may be a
truck backfiring, but a crackle and snap in screens and speakers is
going to scream "undetectable sniper rifle". Modern screens may be
less effected, but detectors are cheap, and I'll bet someone could
jack some together to get directional (add in a few more for distance
and a fire control system, and a mortar round would be incoming
before you could say "Jack Robinson".) |
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The best argument that I've seen against this idea is that of
the EM pulse when the weapon is used. Eventually, someone
would work out how to zero in on the burst with some kind of
radar detection, and boom! dead sniper. |
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That does bring up a different interesting idea: sound wave
detection app to determine the position of a sniper. |
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I want to know if commando types call their sniper comrades Snipey. |
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The best thing about this idea is the amazing tech hybridized with the fact that the sniper is firing pine cones and pocket change. It reminds me of the people in $100,000 italian sports cars I see puttputting along behind minivans along the city streets. |
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Hmmm, how about a 7.62mm steel rod, with a shoulder
brace? |
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By the use of a blank in the rifle, it should be possible to
fire the gun itself some considerable distance so killing the
target, totally confusing the ballistic data (viz rifling) and
you no longer have a gun to be caught with. |
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If the case was the one for the gun that came flying out of the forest and killed someone, they might figure out you were involved. |
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Aha, that's the clever bit, is has a big label on it saying
"Property of Bungston. If found please return to ...". |
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Anyway, surely it's more to the point to have an
undetectable sniper, than an undetectable rifle? I mean,
if you're anything like me I'll put
the rifle down for 5 minutes and have to spend the whole
day looking for it again. |
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