Satellite-controlled machine gun

[sTeamTraen]

From the story:
Various accounts of his death have emerged since the incident. While early news reports said he was caught in a gunfight between his bodyguards, others said that he was fired at by a remote-controlled machine gun, mounted on a pick-up truck, operated by someone who later fled the country.
That seems to suggest (although it would be nice to have a lot more detail about the various imagine scenarios, perhaps involving stop-motion animation with Playmobil figures) that the machine gun was remote controlled but the truck wasn't. This seems even more bizarre. What is the need for someone to hang around in the cab of the truck while the machine gun fires itself?

It doesn’t read that way to me. I have added a couple of commas that show how I read it.

Well, now it looks (to me) like the machine gun was both remote-controlled and operated by that someone. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[shpalman]

I remember as a child learning the difference between "remote controlled" and "radio controlled" toy cars, in that the former had a wire running between the controls and the car.

[dyqik]

I remember as a child learning the difference between "remote controlled" and "radio controlled" toy cars, in that the former had a wire running between the controls and the car.

Now I can see a disappointed small shpalman falling over with a wire tangled round his feet.

[Brightonian]

I remember as a child learning the difference between "remote controlled" and "radio controlled" toy cars, in that the former had a wire running between the controls and the car.

Now I can see a disappointed small shpalman falling over with a wire tangled round his feet.

In his embarrassment he claimed he was dancing and he's had to keep it up ever since.

[Martin_B]

From the story:
Various accounts of his death have emerged since the incident. While early news reports said he was caught in a gunfight between his bodyguards, others said that he was fired at by a remote-controlled machine gun, mounted on a pick-up truck, operated by someone who later fled the country.
That seems to suggest (although it would be nice to have a lot more detail about the various imagine scenarios, perhaps involving stop-motion animation with Playmobil figures) that the machine gun was remote controlled but the truck wasn't. This seems even more bizarre. What is the need for someone to hang around in the cab of the truck while the machine gun fires itself?

It doesn’t read that way to me. I have added a couple of commas that show how I read it.

Well, now it looks (to me) like the machine gun was both remote-controlled and operated by that someone. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It makes sense to me. A scenario of a lone assailant who has a pick-up truck and a machine gun, which can be mounted on that pick-up. But if he has to get out of the cab and onto the pick-up tray to fire the gun, he: a) might be spotted by the Minister's bodyguards before he starts firing, and b) afterwards will have to climb back into the cab to make his get-away, and if he hasn't killed everyone that's going to expose him.

Better for him to stay in the driver's seat of the pick-up and have a remote device controlling the machine gun on the tray, so he can fire the gun from the cab and then make a quick get-away. He could even have the satellite phone to his superiors in <cough>Israel</cough> for them to give him the final 'go' command and make them feel all macho because they had a direct hand in it.

[Grumble]

Or he drives the pickup, parks it. Goes a few hundred metres away to a vantage point. Waits there for a bit, then points a laser at the target and presses a button, possibly after receiving a “go” from HQ. Presses another button to make the pickup explode then calmly walks away and gets out of the country.

[sTeamTraen]

But now we've lost the satellite control.

I think y'all (and the Iranians) have been watching too many action movies.

[shpalman]

People of Iran, request your next Mossad mission below. If yours is approved, you will win a NEW CAR¹!

¹It's Fakhrizadeh's car

[Imrael]

Is it Satellite control if you use Google maps to navigate?

I think that several modern armoured vehicles have external machine guns that can be operated from within the turret.

[jimbob]

Is it Satellite control if you use Google maps to navigate?

I think that several modern armoured vehicles have external machine guns that can be operated from within the turret.

Several US WWII aircraft did as well, the B29 certainly did.

[EACLucifer]

But machine guns are not very accurate; the kind of bandwidth you have to a satellite is not very good for artificial intelligence; and the gun was apparently a pickup truck with a driver. Is it not a more parsimonious explanation that the gun was operated by a human and the Iranians are rather embarrassed that it was allowed to get so close to the victim? How would you even get evidence that a satellite and "artificial intelligence" were involved?

Depends entirely on the machine gun.

Hathcock used a Browning M2 .50 cal as a sniper weapon at one point, while the tripod mounted WW1 vintage heavies could drill a not very large hole in whatever they were fired at.

Fully automatic fire is inaccurate from the shoulder because - with the exception of a few very modern examples - the bolt carrier is smacking into the back of the receiver every round and jarring the shooter's aim, and from the hip they are inaccurate because everything is inaccurate from the hip.

[EACLucifer]

It's not unusual for IEDs and similar devices to have additional charges designed to destroy the timing and trigger elements to reduce the forensic value of what's left. Was standard practice for the IRA on their vehicle mounted mortar devices like the one used on the attack on Downing Street in February 1991

The hitting one person in the car and not hitting anyone else in it is quite impressive given the relative unpredictability of the path of rounds once they've hit any parts of the target vehicle. A careful choice of round both in terms of calibre and velocity as well as material can alter this, but there's always the limitation of the inherent accuracy of the weapon even in a fixed mount

Mechanical accuracy of a modern rifle can be better than a minute of angle, while a WW2 rifle's more like three minutes of angle. A minute of angle equates pretty well to an inch of deviation at a hundred yards. A machine gun is just an autoloading rifle that lets you disable the trigger disconnector.

[Woodchopper]

It's not unusual for IEDs and similar devices to have additional charges designed to destroy the timing and trigger elements to reduce the forensic value of what's left. Was standard practice for the IRA on their vehicle mounted mortar devices like the one used on the attack on Downing Street in February 1991

The hitting one person in the car and not hitting anyone else in it is quite impressive given the relative unpredictability of the path of rounds once they've hit any parts of the target vehicle. A careful choice of round both in terms of calibre and velocity as well as material can alter this, but there's always the limitation of the inherent accuracy of the weapon even in a fixed mount

Mechanical accuracy of a modern rifle can be better than a minute of angle, while a WW2 rifle's more like three minutes of angle. A minute of angle equates pretty well to an inch of deviation at a hundred yards. A machine gun is just an autoloading rifle that lets you disable the trigger disconnector.

Machineguns are though inherently far less accurate than a rifle in single shot mode because the recoil forces move the gun.

[dyqik]

It's not unusual for IEDs and similar devices to have additional charges designed to destroy the timing and trigger elements to reduce the forensic value of what's left. Was standard practice for the IRA on their vehicle mounted mortar devices like the one used on the attack on Downing Street in February 1991

The hitting one person in the car and not hitting anyone else in it is quite impressive given the relative unpredictability of the path of rounds once they've hit any parts of the target vehicle. A careful choice of round both in terms of calibre and velocity as well as material can alter this, but there's always the limitation of the inherent accuracy of the weapon even in a fixed mount

Mechanical accuracy of a modern rifle can be better than a minute of angle, while a WW2 rifle's more like three minutes of angle. A minute of angle equates pretty well to an inch of deviation at a hundred yards. A machine gun is just an autoloading rifle that lets you disable the trigger disconnector.

Machineguns are though inherently far less accurate than a rifle in single shot mode because the recoil forces move the gun.

EACL's other post deals with that. Not if you mount them to something heavy. Like a pickup truck.

[Woodchopper]

Mechanical accuracy of a modern rifle can be better than a minute of angle, while a WW2 rifle's more like three minutes of angle. A minute of angle equates pretty well to an inch of deviation at a hundred yards. A machine gun is just an autoloading rifle that lets you disable the trigger disconnector.

Machineguns are though inherently far less accurate than a rifle in single shot mode because the recoil forces move the gun.

EACL's other post deals with that. Not if you mount them to something heavy. Like a pickup truck.

Whoops, missed that post.

I disagree though. If fired in full auto mode a machinegun is still going to produce a lot of vibrations even if its mounted on a truck. Here's a video of a browning mounted on a truck being fired. You can see how much the barrel is moving due to the recoil forces.

Hathcock was a record setting marksman, but in Vietnam snipers fired single shots from .50 brownings.

[dyqik]

If it's pickup truck mounted, you can clamp the gun in a heavy gimballed structure (to allow aiming), with significant mass directly clamped to the gun, and the bearings of the gimbal aligned to the center of the barrel, so that recoil is through the center of rotation. That will mean much less recoil induced vibration than for shoulder or tripod firing.

I can see recoil in that video, but not so much off-axis vibrations. And you can make a much more stable mount than that if you want to. And it's likely that the gun used here had significantly lower recoil.

[Boustrophedon]

Mechanical accuracy of a modern rifle can be better than a minute of angle, while a WW2 rifle's more like three minutes of angle. A minute of angle equates pretty well to an inch of deviation at a hundred yards. A machine gun is just an autoloading rifle that lets you disable the trigger disconnector.

Only if it fires from an open bolt with a fixed firing pin. If it is hammer fired then you need an auto sear that releases the hammer after as the bolt locks up, otherwise the hammer rides the bolt and you will get a light strike. So a little more complicated than just disabling the disconnector.

The ultimate in truck mounted machine guns. Note the pin point accuracy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIlwHT4 ... tenWeapons

[dyqik]

Mechanical accuracy of a modern rifle can be better than a minute of angle, while a WW2 rifle's more like three minutes of angle. A minute of angle equates pretty well to an inch of deviation at a hundred yards. A machine gun is just an autoloading rifle that lets you disable the trigger disconnector.

Only if it fires from an open bolt with a fixed firing pin. If it is hammer fired then you need an auto sear that releases the hammer after as the bolt locks up, otherwise the hammer rides the bolt and you will get a light strike. So a little more complicated than just disabling the disconnector.

The ultimate in truck mounted machine guns. Note the pin point accuracy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIlwHT4 ... tenWeapons

I don't know why people keep posting videos of guns not at all designed for high accuracy as a demonstration that you can't build a machine gun for high accuracy?

[Woodchopper]

Mechanical accuracy of a modern rifle can be better than a minute of angle, while a WW2 rifle's more like three minutes of angle. A minute of angle equates pretty well to an inch of deviation at a hundred yards. A machine gun is just an autoloading rifle that lets you disable the trigger disconnector.

Only if it fires from an open bolt with a fixed firing pin. If it is hammer fired then you need an auto sear that releases the hammer after as the bolt locks up, otherwise the hammer rides the bolt and you will get a light strike. So a little more complicated than just disabling the disconnector.

The ultimate in truck mounted machine guns. Note the pin point accuracy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIlwHT4 ... tenWeapons

I don't know why people keep posting videos of guns not at all designed for high accuracy as a demonstration that you can't build a machine gun for high accuracy?

Perhaps someone could post an example of an actual machinegun which is capable of full auto fire that’s of similar accuracy to several single shots.

[EACLucifer]

It's not unusual for IEDs and similar devices to have additional charges designed to destroy the timing and trigger elements to reduce the forensic value of what's left. Was standard practice for the IRA on their vehicle mounted mortar devices like the one used on the attack on Downing Street in February 1991

The hitting one person in the car and not hitting anyone else in it is quite impressive given the relative unpredictability of the path of rounds once they've hit any parts of the target vehicle. A careful choice of round both in terms of calibre and velocity as well as material can alter this, but there's always the limitation of the inherent accuracy of the weapon even in a fixed mount

Mechanical accuracy of a modern rifle can be better than a minute of angle, while a WW2 rifle's more like three minutes of angle. A minute of angle equates pretty well to an inch of deviation at a hundred yards. A machine gun is just an autoloading rifle that lets you disable the trigger disconnector.

Machineguns are though inherently far less accurate than a rifle in single shot mode because the recoil forces move the gun.

This is only an issue with recoil-operated weapons, where the barrel moves with recoil to cycle the weapon, either moving a little bit to unlock the bolt (short recoil - ie Browning 1917/19, Vickers) or recoils the whole length of the cartridge then goes back forwards, the bolt held back until the barrel is in battery, then released to feed the next round (long recoil - ie Chauchat).

Most modern machine guns, though, are gas operated. This approach uses a fixed barrel, and gas is bled from the barrel to operate the action, typically by means of a piston system (virtually everything, starting with stuff like the Lewis and ubiquitous on AKs, FALs etc) or by directing the gas blast against the bolt carrier (AR-15 derivatives), with a very few using gas traps (Bang system), forward moving pistons (St Etienne machine gun) or blast directed against a swinging lever (Browning 1895)

A few machine guns use delayed blowback, where the bolt is never truly locked and is forced back as the projectile is forced forwards, with mechanical disadvantage used to slow the bolt down. These are mostly WW1 era designs, though at least one postwar French design uses this approach.

Most modern machine guns use a fixed barrel, and recoil won't throw the first shot off, and can only jar the aim as much as it can move the gun, so
a fixed mount means it will be accurate. And on top of that, all modern machine guns are air-cooled, meaning they need a heavy barrel to absorb heat, and heavy barrels contribute to accuracy.

[EACLucifer]

Machineguns are though inherently far less accurate than a rifle in single shot mode because the recoil forces move the gun.

EACL's other post deals with that. Not if you mount them to something heavy. Like a pickup truck.

Whoops, missed that post.

I disagree though. If fired in full auto mode a machinegun is still going to produce a lot of vibrations even if its mounted on a truck. Here's a video of a browning mounted on a truck being fired. You can see how much the barrel is moving due to the recoil forces.

Hathcock was a record setting marksman, but in Vietnam snipers fired single shots from .50 brownings.

The barrel is moving, but it returns to a fixed position before the next round is fired. And this is a .50 browning, a design that is over a hundred years old. Almost all post-war designed machine guns use gas operation, with a fixed barrel.

[Boustrophedon]

Perhaps someone could post an example of an actual machinegun which is capable of full auto fire that’s of similar accuracy to several single shots.

The burst fire guns that came out of the SPIW program and SALVO et al, like the HK G11, that fired very rapid bursts of two or three rounds are the only contenders that I know of that could claim that sort of accuracy. Even then the burst fire capability would be pointless if the bullets all went through the same hole.

[Boustrophedon]

Mechanical accuracy of a modern rifle can be better than a minute of angle, while a WW2 rifle's more like three minutes of angle. A minute of angle equates pretty well to an inch of deviation at a hundred yards. A machine gun is just an autoloading rifle that lets you disable the trigger disconnector.

Only if it fires from an open bolt with a fixed firing pin. If it is hammer fired then you need an auto sear that releases the hammer after as the bolt locks up, otherwise the hammer rides the bolt and you will get a light strike. So a little more complicated than just disabling the disconnector.

The ultimate in truck mounted machine guns. Note the pin point accuracy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIlwHT4 ... tenWeapons

I don't know why people keep posting videos of guns not at all designed for high accuracy as a demonstration that you can't build a machine gun for high accuracy?

Because there are no such guns. And it's fun.

[EACLucifer]

Only if it fires from an open bolt with a fixed firing pin. If it is hammer fired then you need an auto sear that releases the hammer after as the bolt locks up, otherwise the hammer rides the bolt and you will get a light strike. So a little more complicated than just disabling the disconnector.

The ultimate in truck mounted machine guns. Note the pin point accuracy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIlwHT4 ... tenWeapons

I don't know why people keep posting videos of guns not at all designed for high accuracy as a demonstration that you can't build a machine gun for high accuracy?

Perhaps someone could post an example of an actual machinegun which is capable of full auto fire that’s of similar accuracy to several single shots.

It's an hour + deep dive into the history of the weapon, but this is the first I could find with footage of not just the gun but the target. Firing starts at about 12:30, view of the target at 14:05, clearly showing the two groupings after the gunner adjusted her aim

And that's with a design where the barrel does move, and the lockwork includes substantial off axis forces, and they are feeding it with what appears to be old Soviet surplus copper-washed steel case ammunition, which isn't going to be the most consistent.

For how stable the barrel can get on a modern weapon, here's a video showing lots of live fire of a gas operated constant-recoil design

At a guess, the mechanical accuracy could be pretty good. I looked it up, and it uses the same basic design of multi-lug bolt as the AR family, which can be very accurate.

[EACLucifer]

Mechanical accuracy of a modern rifle can be better than a minute of angle, while a WW2 rifle's more like three minutes of angle. A minute of angle equates pretty well to an inch of deviation at a hundred yards. A machine gun is just an autoloading rifle that lets you disable the trigger disconnector.

Only if it fires from an open bolt with a fixed firing pin. If it is hammer fired then you need an auto sear that releases the hammer after as the bolt locks up, otherwise the hammer rides the bolt and you will get a light strike. So a little more complicated than just disabling the disconnector.

Pedant

Of course, if it has an out of battery safety, that can potentially do the same job as an auto-sear

The ultimate in truck mounted machine guns. Note the pin point accuracy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIlwHT4 ... tenWeapons

I mean to be fair, Mr McCollum is trying to walk the fire in as the gun his using doesn't actually have any sights