Posted on 08/05/2011 4:31:13 PM PDT by SandRat
A revolutionary device called Boomerang which ‘listens’ for enemy gunfire and instantly alerts soldiers to the sniper’s location is helping British troops fighting the Taliban.
The system can work out exactly where shots are coming from, allowing soldiers to move quickly to safety or return fire.
The Ministry of Defence says the device has saved lives. It has spent £20million to place Boomerang III at isolated British patrol bases and checkpoints on the frontline in Helmand Province in Afghanistan.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Our ROE probably wouldn’t allow our troops to use them. It just wouldn’t be fair, don’t ya know.
But do the current ROE allow us to save the lives of our own soldiers? How does that further Muslim Outreach?
FWIW, I know a guy in Huntsville, Al that works for a company that developed that technology. We’ve had it deployed in Iraq for several years.
So now the smart sniper will shoot the mast.
The Military Channel has a lot of programs on some of these futuristic weapons systems. Really cool
So let’s publicize it ! What could possibly go wrong ?
Wouldn’t the round arrive before the sound/shock wave ?
Still, I guess it lets you shoot back at the right place if you survive the first one !
A good old southern boy that hunted all his life is probably just as accurate as the machine.
New technology for an old idea... During WWI, my grandfather kept a metal cleaning rod (normal kit was a “pull through” string) for the sole purpose of counter sniper work. While in the trench, the soldiers would “sucker” a German sniper into taking a shot at an empty helmet. When the shot hit the back side of the trench, he would stick the cleaning rod into the hole made by the bullet. The rod would point to the sniper (usually in or behind a tree) who would then be quickly hosed down with a belt or two of .30-06 from one or more Browning machine guns. He said he saw more than a few Germans “hit the ground like a sack of taters” when they fell for that trick...
If you do not hear the sound you are out of the game.
This is not new and it’s not revolutionary because its not reliable. There have been breathless stories in the media about these acoustic gunshot locators since the ‘80s. It looks exciting when you read what some idiot reporter writes about it largely from the manufacturer’s marketing material.
The problem is echoes caused by ambient objects such as buildings, lamp posts, signs, and other reflectors. These create a very complex acoustic problem. Result is that the equipment doesn’t give an unambiguous indication of the shooter’s location. This causes responding forces to lack confidence. Would you want to go into an area from which shooting was heard in the last few minutes, with some computer screen telling you “it could be here, or it could be over here. Or it could also be over here, or behind here.”
Fuhgeddaboudit.
I have seen a video clip recently of a couple of taliban or whatever, firing a mortar. The clip says that we now have a tool that can track back to the mortar tube after “listening” to as few as three mortar rounds being fired from a single location. These towel heads are filming their actions, and sure enough, as they drop round #4 down the tube an incoming round kills both of them while the camera rolls. Kinda cool!!!
That's done using millimeter wave radar. The technology for back-calculating the launch site of a mortar round has been around since the '80s too. The Israelis use it all the time. It doesn't work against bullets, unfortunately, because they're too small to reflect even millimeter-wavelength RF energy. There have been some experiments on using infrared or visible light to track bullets back to their source, but to the best of my knowledge it's too delicate, sensitive to dust and dirt, and it doesn't have enough resolution to spot a bullet far away that's not aimed almost right at the sensor.
Here's how you'll know if they really have this technology perfected: when you start seeing high-resolution video of meteors burning up in the atmosphere, and this video shows up on YouTube. An optical sensor that could resolve individual bullets and track them could also resolve and track an incoming meteor at fairly high resolution.
I would love to have the M-24......just for the hell of it.
Remember the video of the raghead in a shallow cave firing a mortar, yelling Allahu Aqbar every time he dropped a mortar shell in the tube.....and by the 4th or 5th shot our guys had the exact reverse azimuth, and the next thing you see is OUR ordnance round exploding in the cave and Muhammad going to meet his 72 Virginians? I think that is similar technology.
We’ve had counter-battery artillery for some time. It is radar detection of artillery rounds, plotting their trajectories, then firing counter battery.
The gunfire is accoustical identification and triangulation.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.