OT: 2700-yard sniper record

Wow! Under fire too! (So was Furlong) Very impressive.

Pete

Kind of shocking, this is beyond imagination.

Which brings up a question, can they make a snipering robot. It would be told where to aim, but would do all calculations of distance, height, wind velocity etc and the hands of the robot would not shake.

Two shots or one shot?

My History Channel degree in, well, Everything, sez that two guys are required for this, one operating as a kind of navigator with a g-d telescope, and that a few shots are usually required before converging on the target -- which also presumes a non-moving target.

Were those Taliban bent over (s)praying?? Did he shoot them in the ass???

Altho, I guess if the rifle is clamped in a stationary apparatus with vernier dials'n'shit, one guy could do this. But still, a few shot req'd.

But, Ed, don't you feel a little queasy, citing the NY Post??? Dats like mebbe one notch above the Enquirer, except the Enquirer is more diligent about source verification. Unless the NYP is just citing Reuters, AP.....

But mostly, the NYP just makes shit up.... They should call it The World According to Rupert, with the little NYTimes-ey slogan box off to the right, All of Rupert's Confabulations That Will Fit.....

I much prefer the Village Voice, because, well, mostly for the 10 pages of she-male ads in the back.....

What?? And deny the enlisted man the personal pleasure of killing?? Are you nuts?

I dunno, I think that killing with a robot would be just as pleasant.

After all, they rarely hack enemy to death with bladed weapons these days.

The nice thing about robot killing, is that the sniper is always target number one, but with a robot there is no human to die. So the fear element is out of the equation.

But what does the robot do with the scalps?

If there's a robot on the other end, it would just be roboticide. That's just a misdemeanor, unless the robot is friends with the judge.

Regarding the idea of a robot sniper, my guess (and it's only a guess) is that shooting at that level is as much a high art as a science. Programming a robot to duplicate that feat might be beyond the current capability of AI. Seriously.

The article didn't say.

I think it was one in the stomach, and the other in the side as he was trying to get away. But read the article. It was late when I read it.

'Don't know. You should read the article. I just picked it up from Google News. The last time I read the Post was when John Lott was in here with his sock puppet, Mary Rosh:

I hear that if you line a canary cage with it, it kills the canary.

Jeez, I'm glad you reminded me of the Voice. I haven't read it for years. I used to love it.

Why? The operator gives the robot the point to shoot. The robot's job is to aim with highest precision, taking wind, distance, elevation into consideration. It would not be the job of the sniper robot to pick targets.

So they were moving targets?? Man, that history channel ditty would suggest that's a near-impossibility -- or just luck. Extreme luck for two.

No, the canary just becomes stupid, and starts confabulating, meowing like a cat....

The VV was a really expensive weekly -- $2-2.50, before it became..... FREE!! WTF???? Sheeit, the ad revenues from those she-males must be thru the roof!

It's still the same, at first blush. Very long detailed socio/politico "insider" type articles, hip-ly written. Heh, mebbe less hip-ly, cuz back in the day, I actually had trouble understanding the VV syntax.... goodgawd.... And that's coming from ME!!

There is the optical distortion, influencing the apparent center of mass, caused by the position of the sun and shadows. There is the anticipation of movement, in this case, of the second target. There is a sense of the ballistic effect of humidity. There is a sense of how the rifle may be shooting today, based upon recent performance. There is a matter of how this batch of ammo has been performing. There is the sense of how the rifle reacts when you are braced in a particular way. Most of that goes on below the level of consciousness, by my guess.

This is no-shit artistry, Iggy. It isn't like mounting a handgun in a bench mount and shooting it at flat paper targets 50 yards away.

I never was a benchrest shooter and the subtleties of shooting at extreme ranges is outside of my experience. But I've read about it, in the context of my interest in varmint rifles, and it sounds damn near like magic. An "expert system" likely would never be able to anticipate everything that's working on the shooter at subliminal levels, because each situation is different.

Your robot would almost have to be a pair of robots and they would be operated by remote by trained snipers. There is no computer in the world other than a human mind capable of doing the job required.

Reading all of the information needed to make long shots is more of an art than a science. You can train and practice to get the muscle control, breath control and mind control to make the shots easily.

The hard part is the instinct of what has the heat of the day done to the ammo? has the sunlight on the barrel moved the point of aim? What will the breeze coming around that small hill at the 500 yard point going to do to the bullet? Will the bullet be deflected at all by the heat rising from the open sand? Just how far is that target? Will the air around the target shift the bullet?

And those are only a minute part of the equation of what runs through a long distance shooters head.

Read the freaking article. IIRC, the first one was stationary, manning a machine gun, and the second one turned to get away after the first one was shot.

Hitting two in a row at that range is not luck. It is, however, damned near incredible.

As a young writer trying to learn the range of current styles, I read The Village Voice, the East Village Other, Harper's, Playboy, and anything by Tom Wolfe, Annie Dillard, John McPhee, and Joan Didion.

I got a lot of mileage out of Playboy, because I actually read the articles, too.

Just out of curiosity, how many hours did you spend on that set of exchanges, Ed?

Kind of makes me think of asymmetric warfare.

God only knows, Spehro. I was really curious about the story and I was doing the research for my own sake, not for the exchange on RCM. I considered doing an expose article but it wasn't worth it, IMO, after I'd checked it out. If I had to guess, it might have been 30 hours or so.

That happens frequently. I spend a lot of time chasing down possible ideas. But I never write anything over my byline for publication these days, and I haven't since _Machining_ laid us off, because ghost writing pays, typically, three times as much for the same article.

I shoot 1000 yard and 1500 yard and even in a non hostile situation it isn't very easy.

When I first started out some of the old hands were telling me that long range shooting isn't as much learned as it was felt. I told them "the Force" was in Star Wars and this was reality. BUT after shooting a few years I now understand what they were saying. You get to where everything on the range is seen as a potential shot breaker in the ways it can affect the bullets travel.

OK, let me ask you a question.

Let's say that you are shooting at a distance. You have to figure out all those variables like wind, etc.

The target is stationary.

Then let's say you had two option, either to hold the rifle in your hand, or in a rifle vise, so that you take time to point it exactly the way you want and then pull a trigger without any effects of hands shaking, etc.

Would the vise method be more accurate?

The fire control system in a modern tank is close to halfway there to being a robot sniper; a person still has to put the cross hairs on target, but the computer does the rest. Still, the quoted ranges are only 2500 yards or less while the targets are bigger and the effect of wind is less.

The pentagon is in fact working on laser guided sniper bullets :

There goes the ball game. Jeez. War is getting scary.

For many years there was a segment of the benchrest shooting community that built "rail" guns, basically very heavy guns built into their own machine rests. You'd thing that they would give repeatable accuracy better than the hand-held jobbies, but the groups don't lie, no matter what they did, the regular rifle shooters had smaller groups at the same distances.

Stan