Infantry Discussion Thread 10: Shovel Edition [NO FWORDS]

[Spreewerke]

You mean the "I'm here shoot me!" device?

Literally my first thought. Might as well shoot blackpowder, at least that gives you a smokescreen to escape under after you give away your position.

Some IR sight do have a light though...

Type 38 carbine or Berdan M1870 Shotgun conversion for Honor\Prison Guard use?

Y'all need to learn how to use a weapon light.

[The Technocratic Syndicalists]

Revising a panoramic NVG design I made a while back that fuses both IR and I2 sensors and is intended to be standard issue to all infantrymen, special forces, fixed wing pilots, and rotary wing pilots in my military. Also available for LE/SWAT and export customers at a bargain bin value of ~80,000 USD a pop! Since they're pretty bulky I figure the LiPo battery back and say an IR strobe accessory would be attached to the back of the soldier's helmet to balance out the weight prevent his neck from from getting too strained.

[Spreewerke]

>standard issue
>$80,000.00

lolwut

[The Technocratic Syndicalists]

>standard issue
>$80,000.00

lolwut

I figured I'd take the rough cost of the AN/PSQ-36 and double it because there are two pairs of II and IR imagers instead of just one (ie six tubes instead of three). Excessive, but a worthy investment IMO.

Assuming a production run of say 150,000 units for all three branches that's 12 billion which is only about 6% of my annual procurement budget.

[Gallia-]

Galla issues AN/PVS-7s to automatic riflemen, commissioned officers, and NCOs. Machine gunners, recoilless rifle gunners, automatic grenadiers, and ATGW operators have thermal weapon sights. Everyone else makes do with flares and tracers until the indeterminable future. Cost per unit is ~$2,500 as an average for all units acquired.

AN/PVS-7Es for super high speed 21st century killing machines have improved tubes and a clip on infrared attachment that fuses the two into a coherent image. The PVS-7 also trickles down to individual riflemen at that point, with the exception of people who have Thermal Weapon Sights or NIR optics on their rifles. Cost per unit, excluding the clip-on, is ~$2,200. With the clip on, it's about $9,200. A more advanced form, AN/PVS-7F, incorporates networking using a fiber optic cable to integrate with the thermal imaging rifle sight (narrower FOV but higher resolution than the COTI) costs ~$11,500. Total cost for an AN/PVS-7F + COTI + rifle TWS is ~$19,800.

In Kitten equipped units, the PVS-7F + COTI combination is restricted to automatic riflemen, commissioned officers, and NCOs. Riflemen receive the PVS-7E, which lacks the networking function of PVS-7F, or a rifle thermal weapon sight.

Assuming a production run of say 150,000 units for all three branches that's 12 billion which is only about 6% of my annual procurement budget.

Tremendous.

It only costs a tank division. Or an entire JSF program.

Yet it gives you a 0.001% increase in night fighting capability for some light infantry. You're going to have a lot of light infantry once those RDT&E cuts hit all the other, vastly more important, programs for armored vehicle modernization and procurement, too.

If only the US DoD were this smart and spent $12 bn on dumb night vision goggles (it's about six percent of their procurement budget at Cold War levels of GDP spending, too¹) instead of F-35s!

¹Assuming we hold procurement budget at the same proportion as FY16, you'd need to spend ~7% of the US GDP on the DoD to match, which is equivalent to the Reagan-era boosts. I wouldn't put it past those wily rascals in the Pentagon to seriously contemplate it, though! Give it thermal optics and networking for a real US Army makeover al a Family of Weapon Sights, and you'll have a true Land Warrior who gets still gets slaughtered by ICMs because he can only afford to drive around in MRAPs.

[The Technocratic Syndicalists]

A lot more than 0.001%, you have 100 degree FOV (compared to 40 for standard mono/binocular NVGs) plus IR sensor fusion for seeing through obscurantists and making people and other heat signatures
much more visible. Besides infantrymen the advantages to helicopter pilots and fixed wing pilots who fly NOE should be pretty obvious. Against an OPFOR with traditional NVGs it would be like if were fighting during the day except they had to all look through a straw.

[Taihei Tengoku]

It won't be day fighting unless you got color vision back

[Gallia-]

Against an OPFOR with traditional NVGs it would be like if were fighting during the day except they had to all look through a straw.

Have you ever used any form of NVGs?

Monochrome kind of sucks, at best.

for seeing through obscurantists

I don't think this will help you with studying philosophy.

making people and other heat signatures
much more visible

Dunno if you noticed but:

1) Image intensification has terrible resolution and colour depth.
2) The image is grainy and washed out, making it difficult to distinguish the soldier on the right of the thermal's FOV.
3) The thermal optics will have a narrower FOV and lower range than your II tubes, making them pretty useless without a separate thermal imaging optic.

This is just like three PVS-7s strapped to your face for thirty times the cost. It's probably closer to 5% superior over someone with COTI + AN/PVS-7 though, my mistake. Clearly worth the 3000% increase in cost. The best night fighting technique you can give soldiers isn't a stupid goggle, it's giving them integrated night sights that can be used for aimed fire and movement. Infrared lasers are kind of shitty, it's much better to have a zeroed and narrow field-of-view, high resolution gunsight projected onto your optic so you can "shoot from the hip" like Vietnam and actually hit targets.

This is what the US Army is doing IRL.

It's also what I did with Galla, but ghetto.

It won't be day fighting unless you got color vision back

And, of course, thermal optics are superior in daytime anyway.

Give everyone PAS-13Bs to wear on their faces!



USMC leads the charge into the bright Technicolor future.

[The Technocratic Syndicalists]

*obscurants. Damn autocorrect on my phone.

And I'm taking about the field of vision, not the color. Being able to see things to your immediate left and right is nice.

[Taihei Tengoku]

*obscurants. Damn autocorrect on my phone.

And I'm taking about the field of vision, not the color. Being able to see things to your immediate left and right is nice.

You do that by looking left and right.

[Gallia-]

*obscurants. Damn autocorrect on my phone.

And I'm taking about the field of vision, not the color. Being able to see things to your immediate left and right is nice.

Field of view is less important than contrast and resolution. It's why thermal imagers are popular for night fighting in the first place. Image intensification is generally the worse of the two with regards to both resolution and contrast, but has a higher field of view and greater range, so when combined they make a mediocre replacement for daytime due to high costs.

It's also why no one has bought "AN/PSQ-36". Because it's kind of a joke product. The US Army can't even afford enough AN/PSQ-20s that it has to give them to NCOs and officers like it's 1975 or something, because they cost like $20,000 a piece. They're hoping they'll be made somehow half that price so they can afford to give them to everyone, plus the FWS III, before 2022.

Honestly you could stick with AN/PVS-7 forever (or AN/PVS-14 if you're decadent bourgeoisie) and be just fine, using stuff like COTI to add thermal imaging capability. That's 100% more night fighting equipment than most of the world has.

The gap isn't really closing with regards to that sort of technology, either, because it's so heavily reliant on semiconductor fabrication technology.

[The Technocratic Syndicalists]

Field of view is less important than contrast and resolution. It's why thermal imagers are popular for night fighting in the first place. Image intensification is generally the worse of the two with regards to both resolution and contrast, but has a higher field of view and greater range, so when combined they make a mediocre replacement for daytime due to high costs.

It's also why no one has bought "AN/PSQ-36". Because it's kind of a joke product. The US Army can't even afford enough AN/PSQ-20s that it has to give them to NCOs and officers like it's 1975 or something, because they cost like $20,000 a piece. They're hoping they'll be made somehow half that price so they can afford to give them to everyone, plus the FWS III, before 2022.

Honestly you could stick with AN/PVS-7 forever (or AN/PVS-14 if you're decadent bourgeoisie) and be just fine, using stuff like COTI to add thermal imaging capability. That's 100% more night fighting equipment than most of the world has.

The gap isn't really closing with regards to that sort of technology, either, because it's so heavily reliant on semiconductor fabrication technology.

That's....the point of the goggles. IR has detection advantages over II which is why I use it alongside II which itself is useful for target identification. I use two outward facing detectors instead of just one pointing forward because each one only has a 28 degree FOV which is pretty narrow so I use two detectors with a slighlly overlapping FOV to get ~50 degree IR plus 100 degree II vision from the four II tubes. COTI on the the other hand attached to a regular NVG adds only 20 degree IR FOV along to the base 40 degree II FOV which is is pretty terribad for clearing corners or doing basically anything that requires peripheral vision. And monocular NVGs take away your depth perception which is also obviously bad (which is why pilots don't use them). Oh, and driving with PNVGs allows you to see the entire windowshield without turning your head. Imagine trying to drive with one eye closed and the other eye looking through a roll of empty toilet paper. That's what driving with a monocular NVG is like.

[Austrasien]

Glass is generally opaque to infrared though. The only exception is sapphire and ALON armour glass. Which is only transparent to MWIR. Which requires a cooled imager. Which does not fit on your head.

[The Technocratic Syndicalists]

MWIR was the plan, and are you sure they have to be cooled? I've seen references to uncooled MWIR detectors built on GaAS and PbSe substrate photodetectors. For the pilot version I was thinking SWIR since IIRC polycarbonate is 90% transparent to SWIR but opaque to MWIR and LWIR.

[Purpelia]

Either way I'd be using 40mm Bofors and therefore my HE should be quite good as far as 40mm HE goes. I was just worried about how far 40mm HE went. And it seems to do Ok-ish.

Basically the idea here is to abandon everything between light guns (40mm) and heavy pieces (120mm+ regimental artillery). So no 75mm equivalents in my army anywhere except on tanks and assault guns. I actually have a proto-regiment planned out as well if anyone wants to see.

This said, I really want to squeeze a sort of LIG in there. But I don't know where and how yet.

I mean 75mm field guns are kind of useful and were used by everyone but yeah just git rid of an entire area of capability I bet it'll be fine.

I did say except on tanks and assault guns. Basically I am abandoning non-motorized direct fire 75mm artillery on the logic that it's too slow to get into position and vulnerable to enemy counter battery fire. I am keeping indirect fire light howitzers like the LIG at the regiment level, light guns like 40mm's in battalions and than assigning (on paper at least) a unit of STUGs to the division. The last one being more of a wish than a wartime reality though.

But yes, the idea is to make my army a tad too light for the early war on purpose.

Also, when I say assault guns I am not talking about turetless proto-tanks but just plain old guns on trucks like these things [url][/url]. Basically the complaint my army has is that during WW1 field guns have demonstrated them self to be useless as they can't be brought up to support infantry quickly enough, are too vulnerable to enemy plunging fire and inadequate against trenches. So the solution is to use light guns that can be easily moved by hand and motorize the rest. Ideally at least. Que WW2 photo of horses towing a cart with a field gun in the back...

[Rhodesialund]

Against an OPFOR with traditional NVGs it would be like if were fighting during the day except they had to all look through a straw.

Have you ever used any form of NVGs?

Monochrome kind of sucks, at best.

What Gayla said, monochrome does suck a lot. Although it is worth mentioning this. Keep in mind, it's purely anecdotal. I have a few friends that said they witnessed a phenomenon with monoculars, where the brain filled in missing colors for their vision. Dunno how much bullshit this is, but it should be an interesting topic for debate.

Dunno if you noticed but:

1) Image intensification has terrible resolution and colour depth.
2) The image is grainy and washed out, making it difficult to distinguish the soldier on the right of the thermal's FOV.
3) The thermal optics will have a narrower FOV and lower range than your II tubes, making them pretty useless without a separate thermal imaging optic.

This is extremely true, we do not have the technology today to sharpen the resolution and color depth while minimizing size and weight for deployment on the user's head. On top of that, this "sensitive" equipment must be rated to take a lot of damage, dings, roughhousing, etc etc. Those soldiers are not super delicate with equipment, they will abuse it. They will break shit you thought would be unbreakable.

[Gallia-]

Field of view is less important than contrast and resolution. It's why thermal imagers are popular for night fighting in the first place. Image intensification is generally the worse of the two with regards to both resolution and contrast, but has a higher field of view and greater range, so when combined they make a mediocre replacement for daytime due to high costs.

It's also why no one has bought "AN/PSQ-36". Because it's kind of a joke product. The US Army can't even afford enough AN/PSQ-20s that it has to give them to NCOs and officers like it's 1975 or something, because they cost like $20,000 a piece. They're hoping they'll be made somehow half that price so they can afford to give them to everyone, plus the FWS III, before 2022.

Honestly you could stick with AN/PVS-7 forever (or AN/PVS-14 if you're decadent bourgeoisie) and be just fine, using stuff like COTI to add thermal imaging capability. That's 100% more night fighting equipment than most of the world has.

The gap isn't really closing with regards to that sort of technology, either, because it's so heavily reliant on semiconductor fabrication technology.

That's....the point of the goggles.

No it isn't.

If it were, you'd be using something ENVG.

The point of your goggles is to restore a near daylight FOV.

This is fairly pointless compared to the other considerations. People have necks.

That's what driving with a monocular NVG is like.

If all my other equipment put together costs as much as my stupid pair of goggles (FNVG lol) or twice as much, which is the case with your thing, then I would prefer a monocular if I were a budget planner.

Your idea is silly. It is very expensive for very little practical gain. No one IRL would contemplate it TBH.

Probably why no one IRL has adopted large quantities of panoramic NVGs, let alone ENVGs. There are better solutions to every problem you've presented. An ideal solution is never "the best capability no matter the cost", rather it's always "the minimum capability required for a task at the lowest cost".

If PNVGs cost as much as monoculars though, you'd have a point.

[Puzikas]

Revising a panoramic NVG design I made a while back that fuses both IR and I2 sensors and is intended to be standard issue to all infantrymen, special forces, fixed wing pilots, and rotary wing pilots in my military. Also available for LE/SWAT and export customers at a bargain bin value of ~80,000 USD a pop! Since they're pretty bulky I figure the LiPo battery back and say an IR strobe accessory would be attached to the back of the soldier's helmet to balance out the weight prevent his neck from from getting too strained.

(Image)

The AN/PSQ-20 EMVG mk. II and III are better and does this for $62,000 less.
I mean it doesn't have a particularly large FOV but no NVG monocular does really.

[Spreewerke]

>standard issue
>$80,000.00

lolwut

I figured I'd take the rough cost of the AN/PSQ-36 and double it because there are two pairs of II and IR imagers instead of just one (ie six tubes instead of three). Excessive, but a worthy investment IMO.

Assuming a production run of say 150,000 units for all three branches that's 12 billion which is only about 6% of my annual procurement budget.

It is not a worthy investment. Not only are you using $80,000.00 NODs and giving them to everyone, but you are forgetting that NODs need routine maintenance. Maintenance means money. Replacement lenses, replacement films, lens cleaning, replacement electronics, etc., etc. These appear to be GPNVG-18 equivalents, and now we're also talking weight: ~1.5lbs. hanging off the front of your helmet versus 1.3lbs. from Sentinel up-armored binoculars and 0.75lbs. from PVS-14s. Is this a "ounces are pounds, pounds are pain" argument? No. Is it a "the brim of my helmet keeps falling down in front of my eyes so I have to put nearly two pounds of batteries and other crap on the back of my helmet as a counterweight" argument? Yes.

A lot more than 0.001%, you have 100 degree FOV (compared to 40 for standard mono/binocular NVGs) plus IR sensor fusion for seeing through obscurantists and making people and other heat signatures
much more visible. Besides infantrymen the advantages to helicopter pilots and fixed wing pilots who fly NOE should be pretty obvious. Against an OPFOR with traditional NVGs it would be like if were fighting during the day except they had to all look through a straw.

You may only have a 40 degree field of view, but what about the other half a dozen guys in your squad? By their powers combined, you're looking at like a 240 degree field of view. You don't need GPNVG-18s for everyone. Even USSOCOM is pretty stingy about issuing them out to anyone. The IR sensor combination would also kind of suck since IR can't look through glass and I think the brightness of the heated objects in your lens would wash out your IR aiming beam, but I'm not 100% sure on that so I'll leave it at that. What's more, I've had to do a fair amount of work after dark and there's been a couple times an individual had to be located in the woods or in a corn field or whatever. No one had any night vision or thermal optics. The helicopter that was called in had FLIR, though, and walked everyone right to the individual they were after. If you can afford to issue $80k night vision to everyone, you can surely afford to instead just have air support with FLIR.

You also say fighting with traditional NODs is like looking through a straw. Assuming you're not fighting CQB 100% of the time, this doesn't even matter. That 40 degree field of view will let you see anything you need to see that's at any reasonable engagement range. If you need to hit something and do some CQB, get a white light on your weapon. You can do CQB with a monocular well enough, but a white light is going to be a big problem to deal with if you or your enemy is wearing NODs: http://www.nightvisionforums.com/viewto ... f=1&t=6239

I also doubt that it will be like fighting in daylight since this is what a hybrid NV/IR optic looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mrb1TCgeDPo

As for pilots of fixed-wing craft, I don't know why you would need night vision. I think they're going to be okay considering their helmets have an integrated HUD and night vision and/or thermal capabilities already. Pretty sure most rotor wingers have these, also.

Against an OPFOR with traditional NVGs it would be like if were fighting during the day except they had to all look through a straw.

Have you ever used any form of NVGs?

Monochrome kind of sucks, at best.

Images from what would be considered the highest, most current-tech NOD technology insofar as image clarity goes: https://tnvc.com/shop/tnvpvs-14-l3-gen3 ... hosphor-2/

*obscurants. Damn autocorrect on my phone.

And I'm taking about the field of vision, not the color. Being able to see things to your immediate left and right is nice.

You do that by looking left and right.

That is correct.

That's....the point of the goggles. IR has detection advantages over II which is why I use it alongside II which itself is useful for target identification. I use two outward facing detectors instead of just one pointing forward because each one only has a 28 degree FOV which is pretty narrow so I use two detectors with a slighlly overlapping FOV to get ~50 degree IR plus 100 degree II vision from the four II tubes.

So you're saying you'd have to turn your head just as much as you would with a half-the-weight PVS-14 in order to get thermal readings on something.



Peripheral vision is not the mainstay of CQB since you're looking with the gun. Wherever the gun is pointed, that's where you're looking. Peripheral vision helps in noticing where you should perhaps look next, but if you're clearing a room, there's nothing wrong with using white light and your regular eyes that have a much greater field of view.

This is the only solid argument made for your device so far.

[Gallia-]

Revising a panoramic NVG design I made a while back that fuses both IR and I2 sensors and is intended to be standard issue to all infantrymen, special forces, fixed wing pilots, and rotary wing pilots in my military. Also available for LE/SWAT and export customers at a bargain bin value of ~80,000 USD a pop! Since they're pretty bulky I figure the LiPo battery back and say an IR strobe accessory would be attached to the back of the soldier's helmet to balance out the weight prevent his neck from from getting too strained.

(Image)

The AN/PSQ-20 EMVG mk. II and III are better and does this for $62,000 less.
I mean it doesn't have a particularly large FOV but no NVG monocular does really.

He thinks that the particularly large FOV is all that matters though.

[The Technocratic Syndicalists]

What Gayla said, monochrome does suck a lot. Although it is worth mentioning this. Keep in mind, it's purely anecdotal. I have a few friends that said they witnessed a phenomenon with monoculars, where the brain filled in missing colors for their vision. Dunno how much bullshit this is, but it should be an interesting topic for debate.

When did I say anything about them being monochrome?

It is not a worthy investment. Not only are you using $80,000.00 NODs and giving them to everyone, but you are forgetting that NODs need routine maintenance. Maintenance means money. Replacement lenses, replacement films, lens cleaning, replacement electronics, etc., etc. These appear to be GPNVG-18 equivalents, and now we're also talking weight: ~1.5lbs. hanging off the front of your helmet versus 1.3lbs. from Sentinel up-armored binoculars and 0.75lbs. from PVS-14s. Is this a "ounces are pounds, pounds are pain" argument? No. Is it a "the brim of my helmet keeps falling down in front of my eyes so I have to put nearly two pounds of batteries and other crap on the back of my helmet as a counterweight" argument? Yes.

TBF that's an extreme upper-end cost estimate. Both PVS-36 and GPNVG-18 cost around 40-50k each but their very limited production runs probably play a large factor in that. More realistic would be PVS-20B doubled. I guess it's hard to see from the images since there's no scale but the II tubes are quite a bit smaller and shorter than the 20mm tubes found on most II goggles and slightly shorter than the 16mm tubes on the PNVG, the shorter range being compensated for by the longer range of the two IR sensors.

You may only have a 40 degree field of view, but what about the other half a dozen guys in your squad? By their powers combined, you're looking at like a 240 degree field of view. You don't need GPNVG-18s for everyone. Even USSOCOM is pretty stingy about issuing them out to anyone. The IR sensor combination would also kind of suck since IR can't look through glass and I think the brightness of the heated objects in your lens would wash out your IR aiming beam, but I'm not 100% sure on that so I'll leave it at that. What's more, I've had to do a fair amount of work after dark and there's been a couple times an individual had to be located in the woods or in a corn field or whatever. No one had any night vision or thermal optics. The helicopter that was called in had FLIR, though, and walked everyone right to the individual they were after. If you can afford to issue $80k night vision to everyone, you can surely afford to instead just have air support with FLIR.

You also say fighting with traditional NODs is like looking through a straw. Assuming you're not fighting CQB 100% of the time, this doesn't even matter. That 40 degree field of view will let you see anything you need to see that's at any reasonable engagement range. If you need to hit something and do some CQB, get a white light on your weapon. You can do CQB with a monocular well enough, but a white light is going to be a big problem to deal with if you or your enemy is wearing NODs: http://www.nightvisionforums.com/viewto ... f=1&t=6239

I also doubt that it will be like fighting in daylight since this is what a hybrid NV/IR optic looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mrb1TCgeDPo

As for pilots of fixed-wing craft, I don't know why you would need night vision. I think they're going to be okay considering their helmets have an integrated HUD and night vision and/or thermal capabilities already. Pretty sure most rotor wingers have these, also.

I don't want to have to issue two types of NVGs; an ENVG for standard use and a PNVG for CQB when I could just combine both into one design. The way the goggles are arranged you could also just use only one side of them (ie only have one of the combined twin II/one IR modules attached to the mount) which gives you essentially an ENVG but with a slightly wider II field of view. Then when you go into CQB you could snap the other side on. I could maybe even save 50% on cost and issue soldiers just the mount and only one of the IR/II modules. And the blinding effects of white light can be diminished with autogate, at worse it's no worse then being blinded while using unaugmented vision.

Also PNVGs were originally developed for pilots. They were later appropriated by SOCOM with their obvious potential advantages in room clearing/urban combat.

[Spreewerke]

If you have a PVS-14, not only can it be head-mounted, but it can be used as a handheld monocular. It can also be double-head-mounted for binocular use with independent eye focus. It can also be mounted onto a weapon to turn any sight into a NV-capable optic.

It's also only like $4k with white phosphor.

Save $50-80k equipment for people that actually need it, which is hardly anyone.

[The Technocratic Syndicalists]

If you have a PVS-14, not only can it be head-mounted, but it can be used as a handheld monocular. It can also be double-head-mounted for binocular use with independent eye focus. It can also be mounted onto a weapon to turn any sight into a NV-capable optic.

It's also only like $4k with white phosphor.

Save $50-80k equipment for people that actually need it, which is hardly anyone.

So can this, with the exception of being weapon mounted. I wouldn't find that super useful anyways since I prefer dedicated thermal weapon sights which IMO are superior to II for that role.

[Spreewerke]

If you have a PVS-14, not only can it be head-mounted, but it can be used as a handheld monocular. It can also be double-head-mounted for binocular use with independent eye focus. It can also be mounted onto a weapon to turn any sight into a NV-capable optic.

It's also only like $4k with white phosphor.

Save $50-80k equipment for people that actually need it, which is hardly anyone.

So can this, with the exception of being weapon mounted. I wouldn't find that super useful anyways since I prefer dedicated thermal weapon sights which IMO are superior to II for that role.

So, your $50k device is less capable than one a tenth of its price all for the highly debatable advantage of better FOV.

[Theodosiya]

What have i done...

Btw, issuing AP round to average grunts?