Sandia National Laboratories have officially made our video games dreams and nightmares come true at once by creating the homing bullet. Finally, all our Contra cosplay will be perfectly authentic!
So, how does this homing bullet work? Most bullets have rifling, grooves that ensure they spin. That spin keeps the bullet straight and not tumbling. The homing bullet instead has fins that allow it to correct its course and slam right into your liver, killing you horribly.
Doing those course corrections? An eight-bit computer using an optical sensor to track a laser the target’s been “painted” with. It can change course thirty times a second, meaning if you’ve got that laser on you, it’s going to find you. As you can see from the photo at right: that’s one of these bullets fitted with an LED to track its course changes during a test firing.
It’ll be a while before this hits the market, but we’re not far away from a world where any idiot can shoot at you and hit you. Maybe between now and then we should look at keeping certain types of ammo off the market, U.S. Government, what do you say?
[ via the homing pigeons at Wired ]
image courtesy Sandia National Laboratories