Rabid wrote:
As for the price, in the link someone above posted, the people of the XM-25 project claimed their grenades with an integrated electronic "flight computer" would cost roughly $12 a piece once mass produced. So for a small silver-bullet of the degree of electronic/mecatronic complexity and miniaturization its performances suggest, I'd ass-pull a guess for a unitary price of ~20-40 dollars if mass-produced, or ~100-200 dollar a piece if it isn't mass-produced and made "on demand" only.
Yeah likely the 100 dollar range. Really, its kind of hard to make something that small all that expensive simply because all the custom tooling ect.. needed is also quite small and it just cannot be that many components.
Compare with the cost-effectiveness of the other solution(s) you mentioned, and see if this "silver-bullet" is an improvement as far as cost-effectiveness goes for its intended purpose. I can't tell myself. But in the other hand, if the US's DoD felt like sinking, like, a billion dollar in the project maybe it was because they felt a need for it ? Or maybe they just did it for the lulz.
I honestly don't know.
Lockheed got 14.5 million for this project, another company got 9.5 million and has yet to show results. The cost isn't just about what the value of the target is, its also about letting snipers reliability fire from much longer ranges, thus keeping them alive and making them easier to deploy. That means you are considering stuff like what are the odds we loose a helicopter trying to rescue a sniper team caught close to the enemy ect... which can turn into some very high costs very quickly. That’s before you even consider that in many cases the target of a sniper is someone who its directly threatening other US forces in turn.
Also worth considering that if this works out, it’d be an excellent weapon for unmanned ground and air vehicles. Other advanced sniper technology is also being pursued, such as a sniper scope with a built in atmospheric condition measuring laser and fire control computer to vastly increase accuracy with conventional ammunition.
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956