Check it out. So you know what the bit of furry that may come from this, is about.
(Now that it made a major page)

http://www.therawfeed.com/2006/02/he...h-shotgun.html

and for mirrors look here: (Other dumb stuff in comments as well)
http://digg.com/robots/Helicopter_Ro..._With_Shotgun_

Direct Link for video mirrors:
http://users.skynet.be/mobilavenue/A...er_Gunship.mpg
http://mirrors.theredfist.com/gunship.mpg
http://mirrors.theredfist.com.nyud.net:8080/gunship.mpg
http://www.indigo.nu/show/gunship.mpg

don't blame me if a link doesn't work. Its being put through the digg effect [X(]

Ahh.. Americans and their guns...

The most you'd ever have to worry about with us Canadians is maybe attaching a hockey stick to the helicopter..

The "cool" factor on this is pretty high, but the "responsible use" thing just goes out the window. It's a cool idea in concept, but just downright silly to do in real life. There's just too big of a margin of error with RC helicopters to be strapping weapons to them. I'd hate to see a radio glitch where the servo controlling the trigger decides to go haywire. Yeah.. real safe.

Also, if you look at the pictures, it's obvious that it wasn't designed from the ground up as a helicopter for military use. It's just a regular helicopter with an auto-shotgun strapped to it with what looks like bungee cables!

Not to mention that trying to target anything with that gun is probably impossible without actually being inside the birds cockpit. Some sort of video downlink or something would be nescesary for true "military" application where aiming were actually possible.

Because of the nature of the news post though, I can't see it having too big of a negative effect on RC hobbyists. It makes more mention to lab work and military application rather than hobby users. Most people probably wouldn't even make the connection.

Don't know why the "reports" keep saying "knuckle heads in Alabama" or "only in Alabama". I guess these people don't realize that Huntsville has a large contigent of Space, Military Defense, and Technical industry here. People see "Alabama" and they think rednecks. That's like saying the Kennedy Space Center in Florida is full of only rednecks or Silicone Valley is full of only surfers.

Besides, all the military hardware that our forces use today had to be "developed" somewhere. Why not Alabama?

d.tipton

That heli was obviously not just designed as a "toy"

Its ignorant to break out the "silly redneck" crap at this point...thats a viable option. Hell, LAPD has been using tank-style robots with both bean-bag and lethal round 12-guages for a few years now, to get into buildings or hostage situations, bomb retreival. So thats wreckless too? (a hadio hit could potentially fire the gun, right?)

The lapd robot uses a special type of reciever, to fire the shot, isnt just a 1 or 0 signal, its a stream. Like a pattern of signals (real short time, but still alot of signal) ... the chances of that signal getting confused by a radio hit/loss are astronimical. Its probably the same thing on the heli.

Besides, if it was a bunch of rednecks, and i can say this because i am one, it wouldnt be an expensive automatic shotgun, it would be a 30-30 held on with duct tape.

This doesn't look like scientific research for military application to me. It looks like a bunch of NRA members with money to burn.

At anyrate, this doesn't even really fall into the realm of RC helicopters, these are UAV's, they essentially fly them selves with minimal human input, much like the Yamaha RMAX.

Besides, small helicopters make a poor choice for carrying ordinance, to be effective with something like a shotgun they'd need to be too close to the ground, which means they'd be too vulnerable to small arms fire. And if you bring in high powered rifles, you can forget about it. Even assuming bullet proof protection could be found to cover the entire helicopter without exceeding it's overall weight limit, the inpact of bullets from high powered rifles would probably be enough to make the helicopter difficult to fly, let alone target, anthing.

RC Helis can be great for military use, but not for weapon use. A UAV like that would be much better suited for scouting and surveillance with video equipment attached.

Also, nobody has made a redneck comment except for in the actual news posting, so theres no sense in starting the argument here.

[link=http://www.neural-robotics.com/]Neural Robotics[/link]

Before you judge this to be irresponsible, perhaps you should read about the company that is doing the testing. These people are not just some "NRA members with money to burn". They are very responsible about what they do and who they do it for. I know some of the people that work for NRI and they are very serious about their work. This is not a weekend warrior that has built this in his basement for something to do.

This report is typical of the anti-gun groups trying to bend the truth for their own adgenda and not reporting the whole truth as it really is.

someone opend a huge can of worms,
du-da du-da
someone opend a huge can of worms,
ohhh da-du-da-day

LOL, GOOD ONE [&:]

I'm betting they don't use it to practice nose-in hover!!!

Definately not..

heres an idea-lets get the government to spend a couple billion dollars on these things,they could buy them with the money that they are sending to prop up the puppet governments in Iraq and Afganistan-then we let RC ers from right here fly them via satellite link-we can hunt for bin laden and all the rest of those ah's-then we bring our soldiers home

Satelite recieving lag + reaction time + satelite send lag = fun flight.

I can imagine a 10 second delay between what you see and what happens will be fun. I'd do it though, if it didn't cost me anywhen i wrecked the machine...

I dont know if he was actually being totally serious, gorgok.

Neither did i, but i'd definately be open to trying it. As i said, as long as crashes don't cost me anything.

I could imagine that the heli would have good programming though, if done via satelite, so not full manual flight at all... Auto hover, stops forward flight perfectly and such.

Shooting things with a shotgun from a heli, with 10 second lag would be very hard though... First getting in range without them shooting back (big loud bird) and then aiming... waiting 10 seconds hoping they don't move and shooting.

A shotgun is probably the worst weapon i could imagine on a helicopter. Helis are fragile, shotguns are short range; those combined is real bad. Give it rockets or some such, like LAWs, and have a field soldier pilot it. Much safer being a few miles from the heli, which could be a few miles from the target. Double the distance the soldier is from the front yet still has the same firepower.

Wait a minute. You mean that you Canadians don't have guns. Hum......[sm=idea.gif]

Found a couple more threads on this:

http://www.runryder.com/helicopter/t239556p1/
http://rchelispot.com/viewtopic.php?...2ae7b47f858fa2


and on another topic [:-]
go here for maybe a bit 'o funny. If it works for you, let us know for a lark.
http://it.slashdot.org/it/06/03/03/004215.shtml


---------------------------------------

startkeylogger "stopkeylogger" funny for those on dumb symantec stuff

Nope! They gave their's away to make their criminals feel safer in the performance of their jobs!!![sm=bananahead.gif]

Oh no, Canadians have guns..

I mean..

Canadian criminals have guns. Lawful Canadian citizens who may want to protect their property or life aren't allowed to have guns. It's a great system..really! Let the criminals run around with weapons and let the innocent citizens defend themselves with..em..er..hockey sticks!

So what your saying is... let us all sink to the level of criminals?

You do realise the criminal will always have an advantage over jo public. Thats why they are criminals. When ciminals started using fists, jo public started using fists. So criminals started using knives, jo public starts using knives. So of course criminals start using guns, jo public starts using guns, so criminals find bigger better faster guns, what should jo public do now?

Its Idiocy pure and simple.

As for the heli. Whoever thought it would be a good idea to strap a shotgun to a helicopter may need some medical help. Rockets? Sure. Smal caliber automatic fire? Excellent. A shotgun? Erm..... duh?

Butuz

Butuz,

So what do you think honest people should do....let the criminals go about their business without any worries of being stopped? If you are waiting for the police to protect you, I sure hope you a lot more police officers where you live than we do. No matter how hard they try, they cannot be everywhere all of the time to stop criminals before they have time to rape, kill or steal. In fact most police work is involved in solving past crimes and attempting to bring the criminals to justice. If you are the one that has been hurt by these guys, then the fact that they MIGHT get caught and spend a little time in jail doesn't do you any good.

On the other hand, if you don't mind your family members being injured or your personal possessions being taken from you while you watch, then I guess you really don't need a way to defend yourself. If you don't believe that the POTENTIAL of a gun being available for defense is a deterent to crime, then why don't you try walking into a potential gun owner's house in the middle of the night and "borrowing" something! I'll bet that you are smarter than to try that and guess what, most criminals are too. They look for easy targets and a man with a gun is not "easy". That is why cities in the US with the highest percent of legal gunowners have the lowest crime rates of personal assault and home invasion.

I want to know what happens to the Heli when the gun is fired. I would think the kickback would give the pilot some issues!

Bayou is pretty much correct in this regard. The criminal WILL always have the advantage, that's why they're criminals, however, by not bringing your self up to their level, you're just painting a big bullseye on your self saying "please rob, rape, and kill me".

In a perfect world, police forces would be effective enough to root out and stop criminals and gun owners. But this is far from a perfect world, and the police usually only react AFTER a crime has been committed, not before. So even if they "catch the guy" the damage has already been done.

So the only solution is to defend your self. Don't rely on others to do it for you or you'll get burned, plain and simple. Is allowing everyone to carry weapons a good idea? Hell no. There SHOULD be regulations to allow non-lethal weapons (stun guns, pepperspray, etc.) instead of lethal ones by citizens. I believe some US states already allow citizens to legally carry things such as tazers around with them in public. Canada should follow suit. Much like America has tons of nuclear weapons as a deterrent for other countries to attack (Anyone heard of MAD? Mutually assured destruction. It's what keeps nuclear countries from attacking eachother, even if they're political enemies) citizens should be permitted to carry weapons.
Just to give you an idea of how bad things are currenty in (Toronto). In 2005, there has been something like 80 homocides, more than half of which were caused by guns. To put this in perspective. Toronto doesn't even have HALF the population of New York, and yet New York had considerably less in the way of murders.

In Canada, you can't even legally carry a knife concealed in public. And it seems, now adays, all criminals fight like wussies. Whatever happened to the days of men fighting with their fists to settle differences? Everyone carries knives and guns now, what a bunch of wimps. [&o]

There are two versions of this video out there. You have obviously seen the short version (40 seconds or so). There is another version about 2.5 minutes in length that shows the gun firing while flying. It has suprisingly low impact on the heli, but this is a special military weapon with advanced recoil handling.

Credence,

I am glad you understand what I am saying. Most police departments in the US are in favor of legal ownership of firearms because they know they can only do so much to combat crime and that POTENTIAL gun ownership DOES deter crime.

I own several firearms and also have a permit to carry a concealed weapon issued by our sheriffs department. Most of my firearms were acquired for sporting purposes and a couple simply because they are fun to shoot. I seldom carry a firearm on my person or in my vehicle for protection because quite frankly I don't feel threatened. But I do have the choice to do so if I wish. Before I was granted this permit, my background was checked to make sure I am not a criminal and that I am not a threat to the public. In order to purchase new firearms I must undergo a new background check for each purchase. While these laws help to keep guns out of the hands of criminals, they are very ineffective since a criminal will buy weapons illegally from many sources. All of my guns are kept in a safe when not in my immediate possession to make sure they do not get stolen and are not involved in any accidents. This is the case with most legal gun owners. In the area that I live, many people have guns in their homes for sporting use and they can be used for defense if necessary although most will never need to. It is well known that it is very likely that a weapon may be available in ANY house and as a result home invasions and burglary are not very common.

I, like most gun owners, hope we never have to use a weapon against another person for any reason and do not go out looking for a reason to do so. We only want to be able protect our families and our belongings if the need arises.

The reality is that since the private ownership of most firearms was banned in the UK
only the criminals have guns. Now that’s idiocy!

An interesting statistic is that in the US only 12% of all burglaries take place in occupied
homes (home invasions by definition). Guess what, in Britain where the criminals know
that the homeowner will be unarmed, approximately 60% of burglaries are home invasions.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/m...ixopinion.html

Since the banning of guns, so-called gun crime in Britain has in fact increased alarmingly.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main...0/ncrime10.xml

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main...05/nshot05.xml

http://www.news.telegraph.co.uk/news...07/ncrim07.xml

Just so this newbie doesn’t go too far of topic, the helicopter video was interesting.