Preacherman
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From the 'Danger Room' blog at Wired News:
Thursday, April 26, 2007
Next-Gen Scopes for Can't-Miss Snipers
American snipers are already deadly accurate, pinpointing targets from a thousand meters away and more. But a heavy crosswind can throw off even the surest shot. Which is why the military has started a largely-secret, crash program to build laser gunsights that compensate for the environment -- giving snipers lethal precision at 2000 meters range, in winds up to 40 miles per hour. If it works out as planned, Defense Department researchers think the scopes will boost a sniper's kill-rate by ten-fold, or more, and let snipers "engage and pull the trigger" in "less than one second."
Unlike most efforts from Darpa, the Pentagon's ordinarily-futuristic research agency, this "One Shot" program is meant almost to yield immediate battlefield results. The goal is to have prototype sights by the fall of 2008, and production-ready scopes that can be mounted on standard sniper rifles a year later. That would seem to put it far ahead of Darpa's companion effort, for detecting and "neutralizing" enemy gunmen -- before they fire.
Today, the agency notes, "a 10mph wind could produce a miss even at 400 meters while in other cases the deviation could be much worse, exceeding 3 meters at 1200 meters range." To compensate, sniper/spotter teams have to make all sorts of difficult calculations while being swamped with stress. Darpa wants the scope to the those calculations on its own. Agency researchers have two methods in mind, to make that happen.
The first method (to grossly, grossly oversimplify), is to shoot out a series of thousands of laser pulses, creating a "profile" of the "eddies" in the local atmosphere as the light bounces back. The second involves using use a high-speed camera to take an image of the target. The eddies distort the phase of the light in that picture. The scope, through a series of algorithms, can take those into account for the sniper team.
Algorithms for the second approach have already been developed and field tested at University of Maryland's Intelligent Optics Laboratory, Pentagon documents show, helping target objects 2300 meters away.
