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robo-dog, with a miniaturized, water-cooled 9mm Para chaingun to eliminate jams and stoppages, mounted on a turret? Tether it to a vehicle if batteries are the problem, and have a remote human hold down a button to allow or deny fire if you're iffy on the targeting code. What part of that isn't currently available off-the-shelf?
That might work for 40 men in a line. I wouldn’t bet on it if they were maneuvering, in cover, or shooting back. We are getting to the point where targeting software will allow engaging infantry, sure. It’s the hardware that I would expect to limit us.
Acquisition isn’t enough. You need something that can slew the weapon over, fire, confirm the kill, and proceed. Even at the >70°/s traverse rates achieved by shipboard CIWS, that’s not a small task. Every pound you spend on servos and sensors to make it happen is one you have to haul around on your robot. Every cubic foot makes you a slightly bigger target for small arms or close support.
I think the hardware to engage multiple targets in quick succession starts to look less like a robo dog and more like an APC or tank. Which are famous for not coping with infantry in knife range. Or air strikes, for that matter.
As an aside, is there a particular justification for a 9mm chaingun? I don’t think I’ve heard of one before, and I wonder if there’s a mechanical reason. A casual search shows one company, Freedom Ordnance, which seems to really enjoy making belt-fed guns. Plus a WWI prototype. I guess it’s possible! If I were designing a battlefield robot, though, I don’t think I’d go smaller than intermediate caliber.
The business end of the CIWS turret contains a radar, a 20mm gatling cannon, and the cannon's magazine. That's at least a ton of hardware all-up for the actuators to throw around. Compare to, for example, amateur DIY paintball turrets. Also note that this amateur, DIY example is from 13 years ago. I would expect full-360 traverse in less than a second to be a reasonable milestone, and you could probably do even better, especially if you can get the magazine off the turret proper.
Seems like it would be a good balance of weight and effectiveness. The smaller the weapon is, the easier and faster the turret can slew it around. The chaingun part is because electrically-actuated firearms are immune to duds and far more resistant to jams and stoppages. Intermediate rifles would mean higher pressures, a heavier barrel, heavier bolt, heavier ammo, and it's not obvious that the increased weight would be worth it; modern armor doesn't cover your face, arms or legs, which are all targets I'd expect a SOTA AI to be able to hit reliably at speed and range. Even if it's just aiming for center-of-mass, I'm not aware of any tactics that count you as winning if you receive, say, ten rounds of duty handgun ammo in the space of a second or two into a 20-inch circle centered on your torso, armor or no; the chance of catching a round somewhere the armor doesn't cover gets pretty high at that point. My guess would be that you could get the weapon itself down under, say, two pounds, plus maybe another pound for the water jacket, and then use the rest of the weight for a large ammo magazine and feed mechanism. Crank up the fire-rate to something like 1000 rpm, and program it to deliver quick bursts of several rounds per target and then cycle to the next.
Almost certainly not. A chaingun is just a regular automatic action, with bolt reciprocation being driven by a cam attached to a looped chain which in turn is driven by an electric motor. This setup is more reliable than gas or recoil, since the force applied is steady and relatively slow, and unrelated to the rest of the firing mechanism. I'm not sure if it's legal to build a civilian chain-gun, since it would be very, very easy to convert it to full-auto and it's hard to imagine a way to prevent that mechanically. Obviously there hasn't been any military or police need for such a weapon; I think they've made 7.62mm NATO chainguns, but below that, what's the point? There is a commercial gatling gun chambered in 9mm and feeding from (of course) glock mags; you can convert that to a poor-man's 9mm minigun by attacking an electric motor to the crank, though the magazine probably won't handle high rates of fire, and it would be vast overkill for a robo-dog in any case.
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