[MtnClimber]

I wonder if this will really work. The noise and recoil will be absent.

[buffaloguy]

A majority of the training for snipers is how to remain invisible without affecting your ability to fight. That won’t change much. It can’t be taught in a seminar.

They will still have to spend a lot of time on the range.

[itsahoot]

I wonder if this will really work.

I don't know but this seems to work pretty well. Never Miss Rifle.

[TexasGator]

“The noise and recoil will be absent.”

Noise is there. Even without recoil, training to react to scenarios is a good thing.

You can weed out those that can’t respond.

[Yogafist]

NASCAR driver Denny Hamlin credited one of his wins to sim racing.

http://archive.boston.com/news/globe/living/articles/2006/07/31/playing_can_drive_a_nascar_win/

[SauronOfMordor]

A big part of being a sniper is finding hidden/camouflaged enemy. This can be put into video training.

[txhurl]

Like they took out the Nigerian Archbishop in Shooter?

[Tallguy]

It’ll be second-best training. But it’ll be a lot cheaper.

OTOH, the Scout-Sniper has to be good at observation and field-craft too. You only get a shot further on down the line.

[gundog]

You ever kill anything with a rifle? Noise and recoil are absent.

[Axenolith]

That, and ants crawling around your gonads, the fer de lance hanging next to your head and x days on a couple pints of water and 1/2 an MRE etc...

[af_vet_rr]

I wonder if this will really work. The noise and recoil will be absent.

Spoke to my son this morning about it - we used to play a lot of FPS games together, and he's a Marine who served in Afghanistan. They did something like this before shipping out - it may have even been this system, or more likely a beta or the older version mentioned (he deployed to Afghanistan a few years ago).

He said the noise and recoil is not really something you need to simulate in digital training, because you know it's not real, and you get the actual noise and actual recoil on the live-fire ranges anyways. He also said that the "crack" as he described it, of an actual round going near your head is a lot different from a live-fire exercise where they are firing rounds well over your head.

He said the good thing about these simulations, is that you can practice team work, and you can do a large amount of repetitive actions in a short amount of time. He said the repetition was most helpful to him. It was almost like muscle memory/autopilot when they got into combat, because of their training.

[suthener]

When I did this years ago they had a co2 system connected to the weapons which provided cycle and slight recoil. I was Navy and just did it a few times when the Marines let me.

[Svartalfiar]

I wonder if this will really work. The noise and recoil will be absent.

Actually, I'm guessing this system has plenty of noise and recoil. The Army uses the EST2000 (Engagement Skills Trainer, or Electronic Shooting Thingy) to simulate gun ranges and some basic battle drills/scenarios. It's not VR, just an image projected on a way, but it does use special M4s that are connected to an air compressor that uses air to simulate recoil. And there's a whole speaker system with left/right/center to help simulate the noise. I would think this new system they're using uses a similar set up.