[leetcrew]

newton's third law says yes, at least to some extent. unless the barrel is perfectly aligned with the platform's center of gravity, it will be deflected (at least a little) before the projectile exits. and it's not trivial to hold a quadcopter or fixed wing craft steady enough to aim precisely in the first place.

[jhgb]

Do you need to aim steady or do you only need to fire precisely at the right moment? For example, TOWs using a top-attack EFP warhead don't "aim steady" either, they just detonate at the right moment.

[10000truths]

I suppose it depends on how much time the bullet spends in the barrel. For a .50 BMG, this might be on the order of a few hundred microseconds.

[jhgb]

I assume that the time spent in barrel is more or less constant compared to the other variables (such as angular velocity or angular acceleration of the barrel around the time of firing) and can be considered a fixed time delay in the system?

[bombcar]

I think you could have a “free floating” barrel - these are already used to reduce barrel movement before the bullet leaves the barrel.

[laverya]

Free float barrels are designed more to make it so that a bipod or handgrip doesn't change the point of impact when you put wait on them, but I don't think that would matter here.

That being said, if I was designing a system like this, I'd be aiming for engagement ranges of ~100m to make target acquisition and aiming easier. You can ID something as "person" at 100m with a 4k video stream from a cell phone camera, but you'd need some really complicated optics to do the same at 1km. And at 100m, you can afford to lose quite a bit of accuracy to recoil.