No matter how advanced we get; no matter where or when we live – some things will always be true. A triangle will . . And there’s always money in figuring out new ways to let people kill each other.
One company taking advantage of that quirk of human nature is defense contractor Teledyne FLIR. In last month’s annual SHOT Show in Las Vegas (the name stands for “Shooting, Hunting, and Outdoor Trade”, and the show is an expo for the shooting sports, hunting, and firearm industries) they unveiled the HISS HD: a new sniper sight that they say will allow the shooting of targets at unprecedented distances without giving away the sniper’s position.
For those of us who don’t have experience sniping – or interacting with a whole bunch of war movies or video games that approximate sniping – here’s why that’s a big deal. Snipers are often thought of as being the unseen killers of armed forces: they specifically position themselves either too far away for enemies to detect them, or in places where they’re concealed by the environment. From there, they use high-precision – and, these days, ultra-high-tech – weaponry to kill targets from a distance of sometimes miles away.
But here’s the problem: when you’re so far away, how do you know how on-target you are? That’s where tracers come in: bullets that contain a small pyrotechnic charge, so that when they’re fired they burn brightly enough to be seen with the naked eye.
Unfortunately, if you can see them, then so can the enemy – and, like anybody with a vested interest in remaining alive, they might just start shooting back. So what’s a to do?
Well, for a little while actually, one answer has been “cooled thermal sights”. These are specialized camera tech that follows fired rounds with a thermal sight whose sensor temperature has been lowered to cryogenic temperatures – that is, 120 Kelvin, or -153°C (-243.4°F).
Those might strike you as overly low, considering bullets average (122 to 194°F) after leaving a gun, but it’s done for a good reason: it reduces thermal noise, allowing for increased image resolution. “What happens is the bullet leaves the barrel at extreme speed – close to 2,500 feet per second in the case of a 7.62mm machine gun,” Zachary Fuller, senior sales manager for weapon sights and handhelds for Teledyne FLIR and formerly an Army Special Forces sniper and Army Special Operations Command optics and target engagement manager, told .
“You don’t see it for the first few meters,” he explained. “But because you’re firing on an arc, once the bullets get out a distance in front of you and decelerate a bit, you can see all of them.”
The HISS HD isn’t the first sight to use this technology – but what sets it apart from its predecessors is both how clear the image is, and the distances at which this clarity can be maintained. The result, according to Forbes, is akin to “being able to see an enemy soldier’s arm move across a weapon at over a mile away, day or night.”
Being waterproof, lightweight, and autofocusing, the sight is “the unmatched choice for precision shooters,” according to a from Teledyne FLIR. But it’s not only a super-soldier death gadget, Fuller pointed out: it can also be used separately from a weapon to surveil objects and export video to higher-ups for evaluation.
“You can monitor the enemy at a significant distance and still see a lot of detail,” he suggested. “Your commander might want the video-out view to pipe down to a tablet inside the truck he’s typically riding in. He’s going to have various tools for situational awareness and I think the HISS HD is an added tool in his toolkit.”
“Even deconfliction,” he added; “knowing who the friendlies are, knowing who’s armed or unarmed all gets easier.”