TrackingPoint Takes Aim at the Future of Firearms Targeting | Hacker News Reader

TrackingPoint Takes Aim at the Future of Firearms Targeting

techcrunch.com

17 pointsclarkm2 comments

The comment section of the page is predictably full of hand wringing over how this can turn anybody into a sniper. While it is an interesting setup (I'd love to know more about the image processing on board), this device would really not be very useful for sniping.

1) Laser range finder. It will give away your position to anybody with a detector (yes, they exist and those who you would expect to have them do). Also, unnecessary for actual sniping. One of the first things you do when you setup a hide is do a range card - you can do that with a hand held laser range finder, but more often than not you just use simple algebra and known object sizes (height of telephone polls, car widths, width of men's shoulders, etc).

2) Wind. This thing only accounts for bullet drop. A light breeze will push 5.56 far enough off target at 500 yards that you can easily miss man sized targets. At 300 yards wind plays a role in shot placement within a man sized target, at 200 yards you can disregard most wind. At that range you do not want a scope, as it delays target acquisition and reduces field of view.

3) Target marking. It is very rare for a sniping target to remain stationary, so unless their image processing is really clever - this is going to be a much greater hindrance than help. This isn't really a problem for hunters, because they rarely take a shot at critters on the move (except with shotguns). I'd be pretty surprised if their tracking software can handle vanishing targets (transitions in and out of concealment like a window or bush).

It is a great toy for hunters with money, but it isn't going to turn anybody into a sniper.

Really good hunters like my father, and to a much lessor degree myself, perhaps with lots of shotgun wing hunting experience, can make shots at moving targets. I witnessed my father make his very best shot in a long three quarters of a century of hunting at a running coyote (a pest as they've vastly extended their range due to our wiping out nastier apex predators) at ~350 yards with a 7mm Remington Magnum.

You "simply" lead enough so the target and the bullet with its time in flight intersect. In that hunt I did the same thing at maybe 50 yards, my point of impact was less than a foot off (it was a snap shot as the coyote briefly exited a dry waterway to get over the road there, absolutely no way would I have tried it without quite a bit of (generally unsuccessful :-) wing shooting experience). (Hey, it's conceptually simple.)

From another description of their stuff I got the impression a laser is only used to take a reading of where the end of the barrel is ... a laser range finder indeed problematic.

As for wind, if you're serious surely you'll use something heaver than 5.56/.223 ... maybe they didn't want the recoil from those rounds to disturb this newbie. They certainly didn't give him an opportunity to shoot their .338 Lapua Magnum wildcat round!

Yep, a toy for a class of hunters, and perhaps some will use this for mischief, but the high price and perhaps traceability due to the custom ammo etc. will deter that. But not the usual crew of pearl clutchers who, like the author, know nothing about how this has been done in real life since at least the American Revolution (the British thought it was terribly unsporting that our riflemen liked to pick off their officers).

Very much not the future for a whole lot of us. For US self-defense uses, the world's biggest gun market today, totally irrelevant, we first use handguns, and for rifles I'll take an Eotech holographic sight (one of many good modern innovative sights) over this any day. Or the forward mounted low magnification fixed power scope of my .308 Scout Rifle. Then again echoing a commentator, by the end of high school I'd finished my "10,000 times" on my JROTC rifle team.

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