#Computer

MP-155 is one of the most popular semi-auto hunting shotguns in Russia thanks to its robust construction and affordable price. It’s available in a variety of hunting configurations and Kalashnikov Concern also offers a sort of a tactical AR-shaped shotgun ( TG1) based on the MP-155 action. At the ARMY 2020 exhibition, the company introduced another, rather futuristic iteration of this gun called MP-155 ULTIMA that looks more like a sci-fi movie prop. Actually, as mentioned on the Kalashnikov Concern’s social media pages, the appearance of this shotgun was inspired by video game guns.

It’s almost 3 in the morning, and I’m lying awake in bed thinking about small arms. I’m trying to put everything out of my mind so I can go to sleep and wake up in the morning, go to the range, and bring you some raw ballistic data. So of course what pops into my head is an almost complete article about just why the Army’s latest whizzbang rifle program is doomed to collapse in a heap. All I have to do is write it.

When the subject is the future of infantry, the conversation inevitably turns to one thing: Powered, armored exoskeletons. Since the publication of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers in 1959, the concept of an armored suit with enhanced mobility from an internal power source has fascinated military futurists, quickly solidifying as a military fiction staple, and even appearing repeatedly in official “future soldier” concepts from armies and companies around the world.

Working under contract from the Army’s Research, Development, and Engineering Command (RDECOM), AimLock, a subsidiary of Rocky Mountain Scientific Laboratory, developed an actively stabilized weapons chassis for AR-15 rifles. AimLock has been in the news before for their stabilized rifle platform, which was shown off in a presentation at the 2016 National Defense Industry Association conference and subsequently reported on in Futurism and Popular Mechanics, and, of course, here at TFB.

At the 2017 Association of the United States Army annual meeting (AUSA 2017), US Army Research, Development, and Engineering Command (RDECOM) presented a concept for the US Army’s future soldier of the 2030 timeframe, which promised everything from powered exoskeletons, to futuristic optics, to individual network capability. I captured the Command’s two future soldier concept demo videos that were running at the conference, embedded below:

Can a computer pick out and identify guns directly from video footage, without the aid of a human? That’s the technology being demonstrated by a program at the Spanish University of Granada, which earlier this year released a video purporting to show an computer artificial intelligence doing just that. You can see this technology in action in the video released by the University, embedded below:

The National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the US Department of Justice, has released guidelines on the development of new “smart” handguns for law enforcement. The guidelines are intended to help firearms manufacturers produce firearms with integrated electronic safety features that still meet the standards that have been refined through the modern, highly effective all-mechanical handgun. You can find the guidelines at the link here.

Russian forum poster Epizikl has great skill with computer assisted drafting software: He has rendered in great detail a veritable multitude of different ammunition types and loads, including rare and obscure types that are rarely if ever seen constituted in the real world. His work can be seen in photo dumps on both forums.guns.ru and popgun.ru; some of his renders are reproduced below:

Electronic gunsights, such as those developed by TrackingPoint, will become an increasingly important aspect of military and civilian small arms development in the coming years. Such optics have already given dramatic improvement to accuracy and hit probability in larger military systems, for example tanks and other armored fighting vehicles. While TrackingPoint’s system is clearly geared towards the precision shooter, it hints at other capabilities that could be applied through electronic gunsights in other areas where small arms are used. In this article, I aim to speculate as to what some of those capabilities might be.