Israel readying anti-sniper system

The Times of India ^ | July 20 2002 | PTI

[knighthawk]

Israeli marksmen and counter-terror squads deployed along the Palestinian areas of the West Bank are field-testing a new anti-sniper system designed for the early detection of enemy snipers, media reports said.

Middle East list

If people want on or off this list, please let me know.

[ChadGore]

If this works, it would be very impressive.

[dennisw]

Good. Send the Jew killers back to the hell that birthed them.

[LibWhacker]

Saw something like this on the Discovery channel last year. The system is so fast, it can trace the path of each bullet leaving the muzzle of a machine gun as they're coming out. Shows you real-time exactly where the shooter is. Very impressive.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Radar?

What frequency would it take to resolve a bullet?

[LibWhacker]

Sound based. It would triangulate on the initial bang. It also traced out the flight path of the bullet in flight, real-time. Don't ask me how it was able to do that! Snipers, assassins, etc., are going to have much shorter combat life expectancies in the future, that's for sure.

[facedown]

Very cool bump!

[AngrySpud]

The system I'd like to see tied to this detection system is a scaled-down Phalanx gatling gun. This is one of those Navy weapons that'll throw a jillion rounds a minute at a target.

Terrorist = pink mist

[Nix 2]

I am of the belief that anytime there is an ease up on the terrorists by the Israelis, a demonstration in favor of terror ensues. Option #1 should be, when the gathering occurs, there should be nothing left on that spot but a deep hole in the ground...and maybe bits of shredded green headbands.

[jiggyboy]

A system this in went into operation in Redwood City, CA, here in Silicon Valley, in 1996. The problem was not so much gangs and drive-by shootings as all the [accurate but "racist" description deleted]'s shooting their guns on New Year's Eve. I don't live close enough to Redwood City to know how it has worked out.

Locator System Targets Shooters

[Aaron_A]

So what if it is a silenced sniper rifle?

[LibWhacker]

The show I saw didn't mention silencers, but you'd think that would be one way to go to beat it. But remember, even silenced weapons make noise and this system is so sensitive it can (apparently) pick up the sounds the individual bullets make in flight to trace their paths.

[Aaron_A]

...individual bullets make in flight to trace their paths

Now that is something.

[Jhoffa_]

Wow..

[Jhoffa_]

I wonder what the range on something like this would be and how other airborne objects (rain, bugs.. whatever) would affect it.

[Jhoffa_]

PS: Also, someone with engineering skill might be able to exploit this thing to make it fire on crowds or assisinate the very person or people it was intended to protect using flying objects, noisemakers or what have you.

(Ever see Robocop? Remember the boardroom scene at the beginning?)

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Sound based. It would triangulate on the initial bang. It also traced out the flight path of the bullet in flight, real-time.

Rifle bullets are supersonic, and consequently give off a small sonic boom. Audible, so my long-ago military training class instructor noted, as a snap as it passes by. It follows that data from a sufficent microphone array beside/behind (and, obviously, preferably also in front of) the target could be compared to infer the track of the bullet. The further apart the microphones roughly along the bullet's path, the greater the potential resolution capability--but you would need to know the geometry of the microphone array, if it wasn't a constant. So you could deploy microphones by mortar shell if you needed them widely spaced, but that would leave you with operational problems figuring out where the mikes actually fell. That might be solvable by deliberately firing a known shot or two over the array, perhaps . . . but if you had a squad of troops and each one had a mike with some kind of position measurement transponder . . . After that, it would be a matter of operating a Kalman filter, perhaps, to infer the flight paths of incoming rifle shots. Computer processing power would be, at this late date, the least of the problems, given that GPS boxes are under $1000 and we're talking about somewhat similar analysis.