Comments on: TechCrunch on TrackingPoint

By: Scipio Americanus

Scipio Americanus — Mon, 19 Jan 2015 22:27:39 +0000

Having carried them around the dense woods of upstate New York a fair bit, neither would I.

By: Isegoria

Isegoria — Mon, 19 Jan 2015 20:22:51 +0000

Those old-school battle rifles are long and heavy. I can’t imagine too many conscripts shot them well off-hand.

Once you switch to an optic, you don’t need a long sight radius, and once you switch to a small caliber with an automatic action, you don’t need the weight to absorb the recoil.

I wouldn’t want to storm a position with a long, heavy, bolt-action rifle.

By: Scipio Americanus

Scipio Americanus — Mon, 19 Jan 2015 19:26:13 +0000

Handling the one they had on display in a local gun-shop, I was surprised by its lightness. That may just be because I’m used to carrying either a 1903 Springfield or a Mauser K98k and don’t get to play with modern light rifles much, but even just from its bulk I thought it’d be heavier.

By: Isegoria

Isegoria — Mon, 19 Jan 2015 18:55:40 +0000

The odd thing about the TrackingPoint is that it's awesome, but in a way that's no fun as a hobby. It's like the opposite of practical-pistol competition. Humans are still pretty good at infiltration, so we'll use live snipers for a while, but once the autonomous drone-versus-drone thing kicks in, watch out!

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.

By: Handle

Handle — Sun, 18 Jan 2015 13:23:16 +0000

I’ve seen a tracking point rifle shot, and I was salivating to get a change to try it myself, but I didn’t get my shot. A great regret of mine. No one that got to shoot it did anything but curse excitedly and in amazement. “Holy s**t! This is F***ing Awesome!” I wonder if you can combine it with DARPA’s OneShot for Snipers.

Thing is, you don’t really need the human to be there, just to positively identify the target and reload. But you could do that with a camera and an auto-loader, so it shouldn’t be too hard to air-drop remote-operated versions of these or load them on drones. Or just to have them sit in hibernation in some robot-version of a spider-hole or overwatch embrasure (or ‘arrow slit’).

Remotely-piloted robot war is coming.