You can take your shots in those chintzy Mariachi glasses your friends brought you back from their Mexico vacation. Or, you can bust out the heavy artillery and have some drinks in the above Muzzleshots. Machined out of a solid block of aluminum, the glasses are shaped like an M16′s A2 flash suppressor, and are then Mil-spec anodized for a army matte finish. They’re virtually indestructible, and will definitely look pretty badass next time you bust them out at a poker game or something. Each 1.5oz. glass is $35, but if you want four of them in a custom-desgned Pelican case, it’s going to cost you $200.
If you want to add a little bit of military flair to your digs, then look no further than the Andromeda Lamp. It’s made from black anodized aluminum and features three Picatinny rails mounted 120 degrees away from each other. These are the same kinds of rails that are used in modern rifles to mount accessories like scopes, night vision sights, lasers, etc. The Andromeda uses these so that you can mount the three arms and shades and position them any way you want, using nothing more than an Allen key. To complement its rugged look, the lamp comes with a “nostalgic filament bulb”, though you can replace it with any standard bulb that uses the same E-27 socket. Perhaps a rugged mil-spec lamp can co-exist with an eco-conscious LED bulb?
In any case, the Kickstarter project looks like it’ll get funded, and if you want your own lamp it’s $279, or $299 if you want to get different colour anodized bolts.
Getting over walls can be done in a variety of ways. Aside from being bitten by a radioactive spider and turning into Spiderman, these include grappling hooks, trebuchets (might be hard on the landing), and suction cups, to name a few. All have their drawbacks, but the above solution is interesting. “Utah State University “Ascending Aggies” team recently won first prize out of 33 teams in the Air Force’s contest to get four soldiers over a very tall wall.” They developed what they call a PVAC, or Personal Vacuum Assisted Climber and it works just as you’d imagine: a loud-as-hell vacuum strapped to your back connects to two suction cups and lets you climb pretty much anything, even if the surface wouldn’t have been so good for regular suctions cups. It’s loud, and heavy, and it’s still in the development stages, but the work they’ve done so far is impressive enough that the Air Force coughed up $100,000 to let them keep working on it. You sort of do have to watch the above video to get a sense of just why this is cool.
The Israeli army knows a thing or two about urban warfare. They’ve been at it, for better or for worse, for the last 60 years or so. And one of the many difficulties in that environment is that when a soldier is down, evacuation can be tricky. Usually it involves another soldier using his arms to carry the downed troop, but that also means that he can’t use his weapon. That’s bad. The Injured Personnel Carrier (IPC), developed by Agilite, is a specially designed harness/backpack that can allow a single person to carry another on his back while keeping the use of his arms. It’s easily deployed in a few seconds and folds into a tiny, easy to carry package.
The best part is that it’s not limited to the military. Perfect for hiking trips or any sort of situation that might require you to carry someone who is injured or incapacitated. And at $80, it’s almost wrong not to bring along with you.
Milled out of a 13.5 pound 6061 T6 aluminum block, the OPMOD Battle Mug is about as hardcore a mug as money can buy. It features 3 military spec rails that let you mount just about any accessory that you would normally mount on a rifle: scopes, night vision sights, lasers, you name it. The handle itself is the handle from an AR-15 rifle which was mounted onto one of the rails. It holds 24 ounces of liquids and has a Mil Spec Type III Anodized finish. And as cool as it looks bare, it’s really only once you start decking it out with the accessories that it gets a personality.
Of course, none of this is cheap. The mug itself is $250. The accessories… well, the OPMOD PVS-14 Gen III Night Vision Monocular sight for example is a hair under $3k. Pocket change really, for what is undoubtedly the manliest mug in the market.
This product has been used in battle for the last couple of years and now it appears you can get your own. It’s called the BattleView Infrared Vascular Trans-illuminator and is made specifically for situations where using visible light might get you killed. Like setting up triage on the side of a mountain at night in Afghanistan for example, where lighting your helmet light simply gives the enemy a beacon for your location. The BattleView features 4 near-infrared LEDs running off a single 3-volt CR123A lithium battery. Put it on a patient’s hand (or other body part) and the venous blood will fluoresce making it instantly visible to anyone wearing night vision goggles. You’re then free to get your IV going as if it was broad daylight.
The fact that it’s near-infrared also means that it will
Unmanned aircraft such as surveillance drones are really nothing compared to the stuff the Air Force is working on. Miniaturization marches onwards and gives rise to the sort of little devices you see in the picture.
At the Micro-Aviary at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, researchers rig the walls with super-sensitive motion capture sensors that track a tiny plane or helicopter’s position ”within about a tenth of an inch,” according to researcher Greg Parker. Information from those sensors helps engineers develop “flapping-wing flight” drones — “very, very small flapping-wing vehicles,” in Parker’s phrase.
And how. One of the vehicles on display in the video above, released by the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Pat, is a robot dragonfly. It doesn’t appear to be much more than a circuit board, a super-tiny motor and two insect-like wings
No camera on that “insect” yet. However we can deduct a couple of things from the information that is given to us. The bleeding edge of military research is always and understandably classified. So if we’re being shown something like this little dragonfly in the picture, you can make a safe bet that there’s something far more advanced already in production. What shape this technology would have is pure speculation, but this writer is picturing this: swarms of semi-autonomous insect-sized flying bots with video reconnaissance capabilities, all simultaneously feeding back to a base station. They’d be impossible to fully shoot down and would be indistinguishable from actual insects. Are we there yet? There’s no way to know right now.
The US’s military drones can do a bunch of things, but they aren’t the only drones in town. Currently in development by the Japanese Defense Ministry, the ball-shaped drone you see in the picture (and in the video below) can do some things regular drones can’t. Its spherical shape allows it to roll around the ground and land pretty much anywhere. It can takeoff vertically, but once in flight can deploy wings for forward travel at 60km/h (that’s 37 mph for you Yanks). If it hits an obstacle, it simply keeps on trucking like nothing happened (watch the demonstrator in the video slap it around some).
The prototype you see in the video was made with commercially available parts costing around $1,400. But that also means that it’s nowhere near final specification as production models will likely have parts engineered specifically for it. Consider this a proof of concept, so that 8 minute flight autonomy is more than likely to increase with later iterations. Currently it weighs 350g (12 ounces?) and is meant primarily as a reconnaissance craft.
While the fighting has not completely subsided, it appears as though Gaddafi’s regime has all but crumbled and the revolution in Libya was successful. Initially described as a ragtag group of disorganized youths, Libya’s rebels managed to topple the Colonel’s 42 year rule with the help of NATO… but also from a Waterloo, Ontario company called Aeryon Labs. They’ve been providing the Transitional National Council with the Aeryon Scout, a small surveillance drone which the company describes thusly:
The Aeryon Scout is a small, easy-to-fly man-packable flying robotic reconnaissance system design for operation in real-world, harsh conditions. It weighs just 3 pounds, packs into a suitcase or a backpack and can be quickly and easily deployed and operated by soldiers in the field. Instead of using joysticks, the Scout uses a map-based, touch-screen interface that allows new users to pilot the system in just minutes. The Scout essentially flies itself allowing the operator to focus on acquiring imagery.
By David Ponce
