Just how much useable info...
will it be able to gather before its operational limits are exceeded by the butt of an AK-47 impacting it?
Or does it have a Mission: Impossible-esque audio warning " This ball will self destruct in..."
Israeli war-tech boffins appear to have stolen a march on those of Blighty in the matter of the long-sought 360° wireless camera grenade, which can be hurled or shot through a door, window etc and so give combat troops a picture of what lies beyond. To mild media fanfare, the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) announced last …
> Why, it's almost as though the MoD procurement budget was more about
> industrial subsidy than about equipping troops and saving lives
As you well know Lewis, if it comes to a serious shooting war ramping up supplies in a great hurry is key, especially of "dispoasble" items, so it may not be a good idea to have to get them from a third party, especially should that third party not approve of your war... Get enough suppliers from enough different countries and it will be impossible to fight at all without some bit of kit or another being embargoed for spares or supplies...
If the US hadn't let us have their new type Sidewinder missiles we'd probably have lost the Falklands war, and if the French had let the Argentinians have a generous supply of air launched Exocets they'd probably have won it...
"Can we have our ball back please, mister? Yes, it is in your house. Yes it is - and you've got horrible wallpaper and you don't hoover under the soafa either. You'll put a knife in it will you? Just wait until me and the lads move down the street then. We don't want to get hit by shrapnel and bits of you flying everywhere."
Oh, it doesn't have any explosives it it? oh.
Lewis Page advocates the Military buying from other countries!
Although I'm surprised it's not America this time.
Surely the point of buying in-country is that we keep the expertise in-country rather than relying on other countrys? Especially if we're relying on a state like Israel- which is under near-constant attack and which is near-constantly attacking. Hardly a great marker of a stably, reliable supplier is it? Though I accept they'll keep having a decent sized military budget for a few years to come!
This ESPECIALLY works with relatively cheap tech like 360-degree cameras; limited R&D costs (I mean it's surely just some fancy optics, a camera & a wireless link?) and a low per-unit cost make this a fantastic item to build in-country.
"Why, it's almost as though the MoD procurement budget was more about industrial subsidy than about equipping troops and saving lives."
Yes,
The international tax pot is the biggest pot of money in the world, and yet nobody has ever tried to rob it.
Well, nobody has ever been caught robbing it which is almost the same thing.
Now if I developed an Armageddon device then they would throw me in the clink, but if BAE or Lockhead or some other rich bastard organisation developed an Armageddon device they would receive a knighthood and a big fat wad of cash. Oh and these rich bastard organisations also give highly paid consultancy jobs to world leaders that start wars.
Just an observation that's all, no need to send out the helicopters.....
If IOF were using these devices to find which buildings were booby-trapped or filled with AK-clutching terrorists, they were wasting their money. Any fool can see that the strategy was "fire indiscriminately into heavily occupied built-up areas", presumably on the basis that the only good Palestinian is one blown to shreds at the age of five.
We built a similar clever gadget for our own troops. It let them do something while safely hidden behind a wall instead of standing up waving their arms around in the air for 30secs as they do now.
Soldiers loved the prototype - then we tried to make it:
It has to be compatible with the Bowman radio - but it doesn't need a radio - ok we'll get back to you (they never did)
All electronic equipment has to interface with the "infantry soldier 2000 platform", they hope to have the specs for this available sometime around 20xx
Then it will have to be redesigned to mil-spec - but the point is that it uses cheap off the shelf commodity parts, that's why it's light/cheap/easy to use. And your manufacturing process will have to be redesigned to our specs, and we will tell you which approved parts you can use (ever tried to buy Nato made memory chips!)
Then they will only buy from approved suppliers = Thales/BAe/whatever the global arms co is called this month.
In the end we sold them to the Isrealis instead.
This seems like a good (but not entirely new) idea. For the price of a wireless camera setup I don't think it matters whether the UK buys them or makes them - this is not rocket science.
That said, the Israelis have a penchant for this kind of thing, and I would expect them to get it right.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0Q7MLR89p8
As for disabling the grenade with hammer / paint - surely the camera would have served it's purpose? While Terry vandalises the surveillance, a less civilised version can be on its way into the room.
... or out, if the tech-savvy terrorist can think under pressure.
"Get enough suppliers from enough different countries and it will be impossible to fight at all without some bit of kit or another being embargoed for spares or supplies..."
Sounds like the most practical way to bring about world peace that I've heard.
And we'll still get all the science and engineering advances that come along with weapons development and military spending.
Consider for a moment that this thing is designed to be fired THROUGH doors from what will most likely be a 40mm grenade launcher.
You'll need a sledgehammer and some good overhead swings to break it because your run of the mill hammer isn't going to cut it against something hard enough to survive that.