Video camera for gunners view?

[Sam Hough]

Hi,

Has anybody managed to get a video camera working that gives an approximation of what the gunner would have seen?

Presumably would need some sort of special lens? Non-fish eye version of door spy hole?

Cheers

Sam

[GlenStenhouse]

Drone racing FPV setup is your best bet.

[Gerhard Michel]

Here is a short video clip which will show among others also the gunner's sight (and some other effects tested):

[Sam Hough]

Thanks Gerhard,

That is exactly what I had in mind. Did you have to do anything special? Lens, cut into mantlet or just put the sensor very tight to the inside of the mantlet?

Laser for tracer fire? Hope my dad doesn't see that else it will be next on the wish list.

All the best

Sam

[Gerhard Michel]

Hi Sam,

unfortunately this is not my tank, but a model of a comrade. He can drive his tank with this equipment by FPV glasses and / or make videos, but I don't know how he installed the FPV cam.

Lasers for tracer fire are somewhat ambivalent, I mean. Red light would be the best to imitate a tracer fire, but the beam is nearly invisible in the air. Blue or (better) green beams are easy to see in the air, but they have the wrong color for a tracer. Anyway a laser is easy to trigger for the intermittent fire of a machine gun.

[Stephen White]

I have a laser in my barrel smoke system on my Cent:

viewtopic.php?f=23&t=3931&start=1005

There is a potential issue with eye safety. Too weak a laser and you don't see it. Too strong and you're prosecuted for damaging the sight of the inevitable small child who peers intently at the beam. It's not helped by the rather complicated classification system (and the availability of cheap lasers from a certain Far Eastern country which have escaped any known classification). Moreover, the system changed a while back and a lot of lasers are still classified under the old system. You used to be more or less OK with a class 3 laser but now you need to know if it's Class 3R (eye safe) or Class 3B (potentially damaging to direct exposure). You can mitigate the risk a bit by putting a filter over it to diffuse the beam.

I found Class 3R lasers were really too weak to be useful on their own (eg to simulate MG fire) but if used in conjunction with smoke (eg in a main armament barrel smoke system), the smoke not only diffuses the beam but the reflectance makes it much more believable.

For MG flash, using an LED, using fibre optic cable to deliver the light to the end of the barrel works well. I've not tested the same setup with a laser but it ought to work. Perhaps someone in the know might be able to say if the fibre optic cable degrades the luminance of the laser beam at all.

[yves mouton]

Hello Sam,

I have a camera in my panther A
You can find the pictures and video on yves panther a update page 10 ( the last page of my build )
Video is a little bit interferiance, i still donth know whats the source is thats make that snowscreen

Best regards Yves