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One of the aims of this program was to essentially give any 18 year old kid the tool set to perform like a highly trained sniper. There will still be a need for marksmanship training but this enables the minimum standard of marksmanship for its user to be akin to an expert. Ballistics computation is complicated but this simplifies it to a more straight-forward "point and shoot" approach that almost anyone can understand.


Seems like a silly thing to focus on. Learning to shoot accurately is by far the easiest part of becoming a sniper.


That may be true, but the harder parts about being a sniper get a lot easier if you're as accurate from a mile as today's snipers are from 200M.


i don't know... i think the missions will just get harder. or remain just as hard, to up the success %.


Yes, either of those would make the project a success, no?


Think bigger: a drone at 2000 ft having to deal with the cross-wind from different altitudes.


Drones don't use 50cal machine guns. What they use is missiles and bombs, and they've been guided for decades.


Missiles have the problem of collateral damage. Anytime you explode things, shrapnel and shockwaves will endanger people you may not see nearby.

What you'd like to do is put a drone in the air where you can lase 5 people, and have it precision assassinate them. Then have it loiter and wait till their colleagues show up, who, by observing their actions, you can assassinate them to.

The size of a bullet means you'd have a lot of operational time would be very long - you could carry hundreds of rounds on a drone, that would still be just as capable of disabling vehicles or hitting passengers.


Just guessing, but maybe future drone models (esp. low altitude ones) will use machine guns?


These bullets are not going to be used from a machine gun. It would make zero sense. They're for long range sniping.


Well, sniper drones then?


Cough... five comments and no one wonder about the possibility of shooting at drones with this rifle?


Impractical. The effective ceiling of an MQ1 Predator is 25,000 feet, which approximates to 4.5 miles.

The effective range of a Barrett M82 (50 Caliber rifle) is approximately 6,000 feet, and that's not shooting straight up.

Point blank (which, despite the common vernacular meaning 'really close', actually means 'the range of the bullet before you have to adjust for elevation') is 1500 feet, past that, gravity begins taking over.

TL;DR, the range of a Predator drone is definitely greater than the naked eye's visibility range, and even with optics, target acquisition is nearly impossible, and even if it weren't, unless it's flying very low relative to its ceiling, you can't hit it anyway.


In metric:

25000 feet = 7620m, which approximates to 7.6 km ;)

6000 feet ~= 1800m

1500 feet ~= 450m


Ironically enough, I converted some of those measurements FROM yards into feet.




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