Sentry gun
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The sentry gun has historically been imagined as a gun and a detector working together such that the sentry gun can detect and eliminate adversaries. While the sentry gun has appeared in fiction since 1969, it has only recently appeared as a practical and tangible device.
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[edit] Sentry guns in fiction
[edit] Literature
The first reference to a sentry gun in fiction was in The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton in 1969. Crichton's version fired tranquillizer darts at intruders in the underground facility. Later, in 1995, Crichton wrote about a more advanced vision of sentry guns in his book Congo.
[edit] Films
Sentry guns also appeared in the original theatrical release of Aliens in 1986, where they successfully repelled the alien adversaries until they ran out of ammo. All reference to this sequence was later deleted from the video, television, and re-release prints of the film, not being restored until the DVD director's cut.
As mentioned above, the film adaptation of "Congo (film)" provided with a laser-sighted remote sentry unit, in order to repel the enemies.
[edit] Video games
Video games have provided a fertile ground for visions of sentry guns. Although sentry guns first appeared in the Command & Conquer series, the Team Fortress mod for Half-Life solidified the sentry gun's position in gamers' vocabularies. Various games, from Duke Nukem to Doom have contained versions.
In the game Battlefield 2142, the artillerary unit can unlock various remote sentry units.
[edit] Television
The television series Æon Flux features sentry guns in multiple episodes. In the show, two close nations are separated by a no man's land guarded by high concrete walls and sentry guns. The series depicts the sentry guns as being so precise that even a single falling leaf will trigger them, thus getting turned into dust.
[edit] Real sentry guns
[edit] CIWS systems
The earliest functioning sentry gun was the Phalanx CIWS, a radar-guided gatling gun platform that defended ships from missiles. Similar to the Phalanx is the Goalkeeper CIWS, a more powerful version with the same purpose. These guns performed sentry duty against missiles, but are not in line with the fictional versions of the sentry gun that are used primarily against humans in books, movies, and video games. There is a land-based version of the Phalanx CIWS, but it is also used for missile defense.
[edit] The Quintessential Sentry Gun
Two brothers, Aaron Rasmussen, a Boston University student, and Ezra Rasmussen constructed the first optical-tracking sentry gun during the summer of 2005. Its armament was a replica FN P90 submachine gun that fired 6 mm .2 gram plastic BB's. The original name of the Rasmussen sentry gun was "The Quintessential Sentry Gun." After the web release of a video of the turret tracking and shooting Ezra resulted in significant online press, Aaron Rasmussen partnered with Brian Mullins of SEIS Group, Inc. and formed a new company, USMechatronics, to produce the sentry gun for military, security, and recreational applications. This sentry gun is much closer in function and appearance to the sentry guns in fiction. A high-precision lethal version is under development by USMechatronics.
[edit] Samsung armed sentry/security robot
In 2006 Samsung has announced a $200,000, all weather, 5.56mm robot machine gun to guard the korean DMZ.
It is capable of tracking multiple moving targets using IR and visible light cameras, and is under the control of a human operator.
[David Craine has a good write up] [along with links to video of the gun in action.]
