First off, I wanted to share a funny tidbit about my naming conventions. I come up with descriptive names (often acronyms) for these concepts. And then, when I say the acronym out loud, I realize that I can’t call it that. In this case, the acronym was WMD. Right. For the Infantry Ballistic Shield, the acronym was IBS. Say that out loud. That’s why I decided to call it Impact. It had to take an impact. I have a post coming up in a few months called UBS. See what I mean? So the monikers are important. 🙂 Anywho, enjoy.

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Working Name: On-Target
Descriptive Name: Gyroscopic Weapon Motion Dampener
Date Conceived: Early 2006

Layman’s Summary:
• I came up with a no-brainer way to fire your weapon accurately while panting from exhaustion.
• Mr. Wizard was right about everything. A spinning bicycle wheel aligns all axes (axises? axiees?).
• Start-ups rarely get started or even get up.
• I had the unusual experience of watching someone else invent my device on their TV show.
• These are getting popular among some rifle shooters.
• Lots of things waiting to be done with them. Go make some money on them.

Story
I developed this between 2005 and 2007, a window overlapping my tour in Iraq and beginning college. The concept began as two questions.

1) How can you reduce the effect of exhaustion on accuracy?
2) How close can you get to a weapon’s mechanical accuracy?

In short order, I came up with gyroscopic motion. I wanted to design a weapon-mounted gyroscope intended to reduce the natural motion of a rifleman. It could be finely controlled by an operator who may be exhausted, shaking from the cold, or at the upper limit of the weapon’s range.

I created some characteristics for a model for the rifle and a model for the pistol, including how the user would interact with the devices intuitively during operations. I wrote a protocol explaining the device’s purpose and a proposal to my technical writing teacher at George Mason to make this my writing project(1). I also created a few CAD models in Google SketchUp (this is when I first discovered and then taught myself SketchUp) that could be made mostly from Radio Shack parts. I figured they wouldn’t work too well on a weapon in their current state, but they could demonstrate that the principle was valid.

I think the first time that I talked to someone about it, the counter-argument (there’s always at least one good counter-argument to a new idea) was, “Whether or not it works, you could stick that piece of gear on your weapon, or you could just train more to become a better shot.” If you think this was directed at me, I’m a pretty good rifle shot. It was directed at people who don’t take their shooting seriously, which is not who this gear is for. My response, as nearly always, is a comparison. Scopes make us better marksman. Forgo the scope and train more or train more with the advantage of the scope? I have an on-going love/hate relationship with Sensors and Judgers.

I tried to start a small company around the research, design, development, and marketing of some of my ideas perhaps a year or so after I came back from Iraq (maybe 2006). This was to be our second(2) product. I made a PowerPoint presentation explaining what this was, how it worked, how it would be used, and how we would divide up the responsibilities of producing and marketing it. I never got to show it to the team (or perhaps I did, I don’t really remember). Like most start-ups, we didn’t get off the ground or even get the props turning. But it was fun to think and talk about and we had a great group.

(1) The answer was a vehement no. Seriously startling vehement no.
(2)The first product (if you’re curious) was a test product for the team: a funny “No Parking” sign that was supposed to help us see if we could work together.

Concept
Rail-mounted plastic bar containing a heavy gyroscope (or two along an axis). Mass and placement of gyroscope is based on mass of weapon and degree of natural human error. Reduces/corrects natural motion of rifleman, making shooting offhand like shooting kneeling, shooting kneeling like shooting prone and shooting prone like using a bipod. The heavier the gyroscope, the more movement is dampened. The faster the gyroscope spins, the more movement is dampened. It keeps the weapon on target.

The ideal balance is to have a lighter gyroscope with a powerful motor, the speed of which can be adjusted by the user. A switch on the outside of the case reverses the direction of the motor to direct the torque away instead of into the shoulder, depending on the shooter’s handedness and preference. The device has a variable resister trigger that can be placed wherever the shooter’s non-shooting hand is located (in the drawings, I made this large and blocky and placed it forward of the trigger well for the demonstrator, but a small variable resistor would be ideal). This allows the shooter to gradually increase the angular velocity of the cylinder and, therefore, the stability of the weapon system as the shooter’s sight comes to land on the target. This action would be comparable to the approach of the natural pause in breathing during which an accurate shot can be taken. Except of course that On-Target removes the constraint of time.

Here are some of the graphics. Oh, and I did not create the weapons. I downloaded them from the warehouse.

Developed
I thought this concept was a little obvious, so I was surprised that it didn’t already exist somewhere. In 2009, a very similar apparatus was shown on the Military Channel program Weapon Masters. Unfortunately, I am unable to locate a video of it (or many videos of the show at all). He was oddly specific and repetitious; even using the same terminology that I use. It was interesting to see that it worked (as I’ve said before, I’m never 100% sure any of these things actually will). Even though the model built was much larger than I proposed, it worked identically and even partially quelled some of my concerns involving the effect of torque on the operator. I suspect we developed this concept at about the same time.

In the last few years has it begun to be applied to weapons smaller than a tank. Just Google “rifle gyro stabilizer” and you’ll find a few of them shaped like giant pills attached to rifles. These are basically just re-purposed camera stabilizers. I am not aware that this concept has been employed for pistols but I’m sure that’s next on the menu.

Application:
Most of the applications here are obvious (and have been employed), but I’ll list them anyway for reference.
• Pistol-mounted
• Rifle-mounted
• Machine gun-mounted
• Bow-mounted
• Photography
• Videography
• Construction

Shoot and be merry,
-CG