The present invention relates to military training equipment, and more particularly, to a system for automatically aligning a laser transmitter on a rifle for subsequent use by a soldier in war games.
For many years the armed services of the United States have trained soldiers with a multiple integrated laser engagement system (MILES). A laser small arms transmitter (SAT) is affixed to the stock of a rifle such as an M16. Each soldier carries detectors on his helmet and on a body harness adapted to detect a laser "bullet" hit. The soldier pulls the trigger of his or her rifle to fire a blank to simulate the firing of an actual round and an audio sensor triggers the SAT.
It is necessary to align the SAT so that the soldier can accurately hit the target once he or she has it located in the conventional rifle sights. In the past an early version of the SAT was bolted to the rifle stock and the mechanical sights of the weapon were adjusted to align with the laser beam. The disadvantage of this approach is that the mechanical weapon sights must be readjusted in order to use the rifle with live rounds. To overcome this disadvantage the conventional SAT now in use incorporates mechanical linkages for changing the orientation of the laser.
The prior art small arms alignment fixture (SAAF) used by the U.S. Army for alignment of the conventional MILES SAT consists of a complex array of one hundred forty-four detectors which are used in conjunction with thirty-five printed circuit boards to determine where the laser hits with respect to a target reticle. The difficulty in using the prior art SAAF is that the soldier aims his or her weapon at the array which is twenty-five meters away without the use of a stable platform. In many cases, the soldier fires his or her weapon in a manner which results in the aim point not being at the desired location. The fact that the array is located twenty-five meters away from the soldier introduces visibility limitations due to snow, fog, wind and poor lighting conditions at sunrise or dusk. The prior art SAAF calculates the number of error "clicks" in both azimuth and elevation. The number of clicks is then displayed on the prior art SAAF using four sets of electro-mechanical display indicators. The soldier must then turn his conventional SAT's adjustors the corresponding number of clicks in the correct direction. He or she must then aim and fire the weapon again and make additional corresponding adjustments. This iterative process continues until the soldier obtains a zero indication on the prior art SAAF. This is a very time consuming and tedious process due to normal aiming errors incurred each time the soldier has to reacquire the target reticle. It is not uncommon for a soldier to take fifteen minutes to align his or her weapon to the best of his or her ability and still not have it accurately aligned.
Not only is the alignment process utilizing the prior art SAAF time consuming, it is also expensive because a large amount of blank ammunition must be used. The laser of a conventional SAT will not fire without a blank cartridge being ignited or by using a special dry fire trigger cable. The prior art SAAF does not support optical sights, different small arms weapon types, nor night vision devices. Nor does the prior art SAAF accurately verify the laser beam energy and encoding of the received laser beam.
It would therefore be desirable to provide an improved alignment system for a small arms SAT which would eliminate the need to utilize a large target array. Such a system would also preferably automatically adjust the SAT for more rapid and accurate alignment. In addition, preferably such a system would require only a single target sighting and would accommodate different small arms such as automatic weapons, sniper rifles, and so forth. Not only do these small arms have different gun stocks, but in addition, the laser output of their SATs have different powers and codings to enable the manworn portion of a MILES system to discriminate between hits made by different small arms.