How fast did weapons and ammo technology really advance and when did it happen?

[Goldengun]

Just wondering if that is what he was getting at...one of the Militia types who are fantasizing about fighting our own Military some day.

Did my comment offend you?? Seems to have touched a nerve with you or you wouldn't have asked

I'm definitely not one of the militant types, no misplaced gung ho mentality from me. After I asked that I was thinking about the smart rifle/bullets thing(I have no specific knowledge of that, but thinking just from a superior weapon point of view) and had applied it to the gov't in general "as" I had read it, but realized later that it doesn't matter from a citizen defense standpoint, our gov't has more than enough firepower as it is. I think any sane American would want our gov't to have the greatest tech out there and the capacity to use it for our defense. I also think a "healthy" fear of the gov't is a good thing, which is what I thought "Sturner" was trying to say more or less, (as in the weapon being used against us, scary)(I might be wrong), and I thought maybe you had a different opinion, it hards to tell exactly in writing sometimes what someone is trying to convey.

 

[Ingwe]

I'm definitely not one of the militant types, no misplaced gung ho mentality from me. After I asked that I was thinking about the smart rifle/bullets thing(I have no specific knowledge of that, but thinking just from a superior weapon point of view) and had applied it to the gov't in general "as" I had read it, but realized later that it doesn't matter from a citizen defense standpoint, our gov't has more than enough firepower as it is. I think any sane American would want our gov't to have the greatest tech out there and the capacity to use it for our defense. I also think a "healthy" fear of the gov't is a good thing, which is what I thought "Sturner" was trying to say more or less, (as in the weapon being used against us, scary)(I might be wrong), and I thought maybe you had a different opinion, it hards to tell exactly in writing sometimes what someone is trying to convey.

I hear you my friend and great post!

I do have some mistrust for Govt (much more under Obama) but the notion of Americans taking up arms against the kids in our Military or our Police Officers is beyond disturbing and makes me angry to think about. I pretty much hate politicians but love my Country...if that makes sense

Sorry to hijack a great thread so back on topic

 

[sturner]

Dang I didn't mean to stir the pot my friends it was a poor attempt at humor with all this going on just trying to be funny

 

[DJ Fergus]

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" Authur C. Clarke

This quote is one of my favorites. Folks should take that idea seriously in multipe applications of this world because if we look through history we know of times where people were indeed deceived. Take the common technology of a smart phone to people of a mere 100 years ago and some of those would believe it's magic. I will tell you this: the best weapons we've used in the middle East are nothing compared to whats available and what's in the works that we don't know about. That war is not of proportion to what technology we would utilize to a more equal opponent. That war is more like the Kansas City chiefs toying around with a middle school team. There's no way the Chiefs would show all their best plays against a middle School team. The sr71 black bird was started in the late 50s and near retired before the American public even knew we had it. I'm saying this to tell people if times go for the absolute worst abrubtly, don't be surprised or deceived about what you presently think is not possible. The powers of the world have not and will not show their cards until absolutely necessary.

 

[BallisticsGuy]

My day job puts me in contact with lots of incipient technologies; that is technologies that are not complete and still have significant engineering yet to be completed, and because the nature of what we do is basically bridge the gap between the physical and the digital many of the technologies our customers create are in fact terrifying when looked at for their potential rather than at what they actually get used for in the end. I can't give really any details but I can illuminate things a tiny bit:

Weapons aren't scary. There'll be plenty of them on the ground if we ever really need them to repel an internal or external threat to our nation. The non-weapons technology though... that should concern folks mightily. Ubiquitous internet connectivity, novel networking technologies, AI, big data, machine learning and certain areas of mathematics like game theory and statistics are where the most powerful tools are coming from and nobody on the street really sees the details.

What if, someone came up with a bit of software that operated a little bit like wildlife on the internet? Think of what happens when the endpoints (the computers attached to the internet) aren't where the power of the internet is because the existence of the internetwork itself provides a distributed physical infrastructure where this wildlife lives and suddenly the idea that being behind a vigorously secure firewall will protect you from someone outside of it attacking you becomes instantly false because the client (your computer) doesn't have to initiate a connection to a server (their computer) and instead it happens the other way around and you couldn't ever tell that it happened. That technology exists but has yet to be marketed. I was involved with building it if only on the periphery. It'll change the heck out of several industries over the coming years but no individual person on the street will probably ever know explicitly about its existence. The average person will simply see a new app that's cool and gives them new capabilities and it'll be up to the entities that implement systems based on technologies like this to do the right thing. History is littered with government lackeys that were trusted to do the right thing and did the exact opposite, that's why people should have any concern at all. A gun is only dangerous in the hands of of a person. Sitting there on a shelf, they're as harmless as software sitting on a shelf.

NOTE: Some of the euphemisms and analogies aren't exactly spot on and might give the highly technical reader a little heartburn so, please techies, keep in mind that this is meant for the layman, not nerds like us.

 

[Ingwe]

My day job puts me in contact with lots of incipient technologies; that is technologies that are not complete and still have significant engineering yet to be completed, and because the nature of what we do is basically bridge the gap between the physical and the digital many of the technologies our customers create are in fact terrifying when looked at for their potential rather than at what they actually get used for in the end. I can't give really any details but I can illuminate things a tiny bit:

Weapons aren't scary. There'll be plenty of them on the ground if we ever really need them to repel an internal or external threat to our nation. The non-weapons technology though... that should concern folks mightily. Ubiquitous internet connectivity, novel networking technologies, AI, big data, machine learning and certain areas of mathematics like game theory and statistics are where the most powerful tools are coming from and nobody on the street really sees the details.

What if, someone came up with a bit of software that operated a little bit like wildlife on the internet? Think of what happens when the endpoints (the computers attached to the internet) aren't where the power of the internet is because the existence of the internetwork itself provides a distributed physical infrastructure where this wildlife lives and suddenly the idea that being behind a vigorously secure firewall will protect you from someone outside of it attacking you becomes instantly false because the client (your computer) doesn't have to initiate a connection to a server (their computer) and instead it happens the other way around and you couldn't ever tell that it happened. That technology exists but has yet to be marketed. I was involved with building it if only on the periphery. It'll change the heck out of several industries over the coming years but no individual person on the street will probably ever know explicitly about its existence. The average person will simply see a new app that's cool and gives them new capabilities and it'll be up to the entities that implement systems based on technologies like this to do the right thing. History is littered with government lackeys that were trusted to do the right thing and did the exact opposite, that's why people should have any concern at all. A gun is only dangerous in the hands of of a person. Sitting there on a shelf, they're as harmless as software sitting on a shelf.

NOTE: Some of the euphemisms and analogies aren't exactly spot on and might give the highly technical reader a little heartburn so, please techies, keep in mind that this is meant for the layman, not nerds like us.

Please, keep your posts coming BG

 

[BallisticsGuy]

In answer to my original question, what was the real cause of the jump... it appears to be almost certainly due to IMR-17 hitting the market. Quantities of surplus powders, specifically that one which were available were huge and it was bleeding edge technology used in all of the military rifles of the first world war. That much innovation hitting that rapidly fueled a new era of problems and solutions to those problems (like how to deal with fouling from cupro-nickel jackets) which ended up with things like 4064 coming out which has lasted right up until today. I have 2lbs of 4064 in the powder cabinet.

People also might find interesting that copper fouling remover additives have been around since WW1. Things like tin and bismuth which form very brittle alloys when mixed with copper.

 

[DJ Fergus]

I don't think that the common person totally grasps the full potential of AI. A fellow that I work with mentioned that no machine can be smarter that the person who programmed it. But take this same machine and empower it with the fullest knowledge of what a multitude of people know with instantaneous ability to pull any data that it needs from the internet or various other databases. This is a very powerful thing. So yes it absolutely can be smarter than any one person.

 

[BallisticsGuy]

I don't think that the common person totally grasps the full potential of AI. A fellow that I work with mentioned that no machine can be smarter that the person who programmed it. But take this same machine and empower it with the fullest knowledge of what a multitude of people know with instantaneous ability to pull any data that it needs from the internet or various other databases. This is a very powerful thing. So yes it absolutely can be smarter than any one person.

Douglas Adams gave one of the most heartwarming and clear explanations of the potential power and the near certain downsides of advanced computing technology:

The famous Herring Sandwich experiments conducted millennia ago at MISPWOSO (the Maximegalon Institute for Slowly and Painfully Working Out the Surprisingly Obvious), demonstrated that anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something else which thinks at least as logically as it does. The easiest way to fool a completely logical robot is to feed it the same stimulus sequence over and over again so it gets locked in a loop.

A robot was programmed to believe that it liked herring sandwiches. This was actually the most difficult part of the whole experiment. Once the robot had been programmed to believe that it liked herring sandwiches, a herring sandwich was placed in front of it. Whereupon the robot thought to itself, "Ah! A herring sandwich! I like herring sandwiches."

It would then bend over and scoop up the herring sandwich in its herring sandwich scoop, and then straighten up again. Unfortunately for the robot, it was fashioned in such a way that the action of straightening up caused the herring sandwich to slip straight back off its herring sandwich scoop and fall on to the floor in front of the robot. Whereupon the robot thought to itself, "Ah! A herring sandwich...", etc., and repeated the same action over and over and over again. The only thing that prevented the herring sandwich from getting bored with the whole **** business and crawling off in search of other ways of passing the time was that the herring sandwich, being just a bit of dead fish between a couple of slices of bread, was marginally less alert to what was going on than was the robot.

The scientists at the Institute thus discovered the driving force behind all change, development and innovation in life, which was this: herring sandwiches. They published a paper to this effect, which was widely criticized as being extremely stupid. They checked their figures and realized that what they had actually discovered was "boredom", or rather, the practical function of boredom. In a fever of excitement they then went on to discover other emotions, Like "irritability", "depression", "reluctance", "inkiness" and so on. The next big breakthrough came when they stopped using herring sandwiches, whereupon a whole welter of new emotions became suddenly available to them for study, such as "relief", "joy", "friskiness", "appetite", "satisfaction", and most important of all, the desire for "happiness".

This was the biggest breakthrough of all.

Vast wodges of complex computer code governing robot behaviour in all possible contingencies could be replaced very simply. All that robots needed was the capacity to be either bored or happy, and a few conditions that needed to be satisfied in order to bring those states about. They would then work the rest out for themselves

 

[Don A Parsons]

Yes,,, that was a good read

Bob Fisher and his trusty 25/06 to drive down on those 325 yard Wearhouse shots...

Flat like warm butter on a hot day... Ha...

I like the part about not over thinking some areas of the rifle,,, optic,,, and ammo along with getting the human spirt behind the shooting challanges...

And,,, not under estimating areas that need addressing,,, rifle,,, optic,,, ammo and more human spirt... LOL

The Huston Wearhouse Project was only as good as the """In-Puts""" from with in...

Who knows,,, the some day could happen in my life time since there are now Warehouses as long as 500 yards today,,,, the ultimate closed cell shooting to see what things look like on paper at distance...

It would be nice to test the 30 BR and smaller on up to the 408+++ Chy-Tech rifles and larger... Ha...

Bullet performances from .17 to the big 50's...
Mighty as well rock the back stop if we are chosing to shot off the 700 lb cemit bench... LOL

Don

 

[DNADave]

People often overstate the potential of AI/machine learning. The amount of data required to adequately train an algorithm to act accordingly within a situation is rather large. Often, the algorithm will be trained to do the right thing only within a very narrow set of cases and will fail spectacularly when operating outside of those bounds. This is why Google/Uber/Tesla/and others are constantly training their self driving cars. The car can only operate within situations it has seen before and the software needs to encounter all possible situations in order to know what to do.

I train these algorithms within the health care arena to predict whether you respond to a drug, or not, or to predict whether you will have an adverse event (bad side effect), or not, when taking a drug. It is incredibly difficult. We can often find an algorithm that works well in the data sets we have access to, only to find that it fails when we try it on a new data set that the algorithm hasn't seen.

I'm not saying that we'll never get to a point where AI/machine learning isn't more pervasive than it is, and useful, only that its uses are often overstated today. In areas where the outcome is less controlled by external forces/environment, AI /machine learning will certainly be more useful. In biology/health care, we have a much longer road to travel than for machining processes and other processes such as ballistic calculations.

 

[BallisticsGuy]

People often overstate the potential of AI/machine learning. The amount of data required to adequately train an algorithm to act accordingly within a situation is rather large. Often, the algorithm will be trained to do the right thing only within a very narrow set of cases and will fail spectacularly when operating outside of those bounds. This is why Google/Uber/Tesla/and others are constantly training their self driving cars. The car can only operate within situations it has seen before and the software needs to encounter all possible situations in order to know what to do.

I train these algorithms within the health care arena to predict whether you respond to a drug, or not, or to predict whether you will have an adverse event (bad side effect), or not, when taking a drug. It is incredibly difficult. We can often find an algorithm that works well in the data sets we have access to, only to find that it fails when we try it on a new data set that the algorithm hasn't seen.

I'm not saying that we'll never get to a point where AI/machine learning isn't more pervasive than it is, and useful, only that its uses are often overstated today. In areas where the outcome is less controlled by external forces/environment, AI /machine learning will certainly be more useful. In biology/health care, we have a much longer road to travel than for machining processes and other processes such as ballistic calculations.

This is exactly what fueled NTT Domoco's founding. That gave rise to companies like mine, Google, Apple, Facebook and others that walk the razors edge between acceptable privacy compromises and totally unacceptable privacy compromises. Docomo's founding principle is in their name, Do Communications over the Mobile network and it means "everywhere" in Japanese. Their Ubiquitous group's entire reason for life is (and their founder has stated this) cause a fundamental shift in how people do things causing the methods to move to online systems which are accessed by personal, internet connected digital mobile computers (aka smart phones). It takes a lot of data yes, but the technologies that Docomo and my company make enable the Google/Apple/Facebook types of the world to leverage truly vast data sets which is closing the gap between the kind of man-in-the-loop training one had to give AI software like that that runs a self-driving car 2 years ago versus what it has to be hand-fed today. DNADave is dead nuts right, current AI is impressive but not that scary in its own right (well, some individual systems are but for why they do what they do, not what they actually do). It's the efforts of Docomo's Ubiquity group and others that work at the industrial & infrastructure levels that is reducing the man-in-the-loop training requirement by supplementing it with truly BIG data sets which only grow bigger as more things move into the Docomo ideology. I am willing to bet that probably fewer people on this site than I have fingers have even ever heard of NTT Docomo. That's the problem. People don't understand the technology they carry around with them. I've always thought it a bad idea to have tools that you are not capable of controlling in your possession. It's asking for trouble. The whole world has moved to where everyone is carrying around things that are immensely powerful and which they have on average zero understanding of. Reminds me of the little underwear gun that Archer carried in the series... it liked to go off for literally no reason.