英国军方领导着全世界射击范围安全

Tens of millions of small-arms rounds, from pistols, rifles and automatic weapons, are fired on Britain’s military training ranges each year. Some of these rounds can travel for kilometres, even after ricocheting. A number of the ranges are small and confined, or have unusual topography. It’s essential, therefore, to protect service personnel and the nearby public from stray rounds and ricochets – but it’s a very complex task.

这MOD owns 240,000 hectares of land in the UK, comprising 16 major and 104 minor training areas, ranges and camps. Over two-thirds of it, known as the defence training estate, is used solely for preparing the armed forces for service. Around 9,000 tri-service personnel (British Army, Royal Navy and RAF) pass through the estate each day.

Safety on the ranges is co-ordinated by the tri-service Defence Ordnance Safety Group (DOSG), led by Major (Ret’d) Charles Ross, previously of the Royal Artillery. He relies on Leica Geosystems equipment, including a UAV (drone), a multi-station and a GNSS rover, to get the job done.

“I can’t commend Leica Geosystems enough for their first-class support. They’ve given us a tremendous amount of advice and are very quick to come out and solve problems for us. We’ve been very lucky that they’re so interested in what we’re doing, and they just never say ‘no’.”
-Charlie Ross, Defence Ordnance Safety Group

Modelling ‘probabilistic solutions’
对于他们被要求评估的每个范围，查理·罗斯（Charlie Ross）和他的团队需要确定“武器危险区域”。首先，他们使用Leica设备收集行业标准的3D点云数据来绘制该区域。这将创建每个范围的非常精确且详细的3D数字模型，包括范围地板的相对高度和范围。

Next, the team feeds the DFX output from those surveys into triangulation software in their world-leading ballistic modelling software, which they developed in-house. This simulates the effect of firing weapons, using highly complex mathematics to model billions of possible trajectories. It identifies where ricochets could occur, and at which angle and distance. This delivers statistical probabilities which, when merged with the topography of each range, determines the weapon danger area.

“No one else in the world does what we do.”
-Charlie Ross, Defence Ordnance Safety Group

DOSG的“概率”模型最初于1996年开发，不断增强以提供最大价值。这就是为什么其他北约联盟成员（包括美国）使用的模型背后的引擎。DOSG还与国际范围安全咨询小组合作提供全球咨询服务；例如，他们最近对新西兰进行了调查并建模了两个有问题的范围。

From human subjectivity to extraordinary accuracy

According to Charlie: “Before we had the technology, a General would approve a range as ‘safe’ if it had been in use for 100 years and no one had ever been shot there! When it became clear that that was too subjective, smaller ranges and those with more complex topography were simply decommissioned. Then we moved into using an engineering contractor to do our surveys, but it wasn’t very satisfactory.”

Seven years ago, however, DSOG introduced equipment from Leica Geosystems and they haven’t looked back since. Their equipment currently includes:

• 这Aibot X6intelligent aerial surveying UAV (drone)
• 这Nova MS60多站 - 世界上第一个自学多站
• 这GS18T– the world's fastest GNSS RTK rover.

查理说，Leica Geosystems套件使团队能够以极高的信心来计算风险。这意味着他们甚至可以保持最小，最复杂的范围，并且仍然可以确保所有人的安全。

“无人机非常快速地提供精确数据。曾经需要几天的时间才能拍摄和收集六到八公顷的点云数据，我们现在可以在六个小时内自行完成，从发布到成品。我们知道，我们的结果准确且至关重要，我们自己现在收集和存储所有数据。借助所有Leica Geospatial调查设备一起工作，我们已经显着提高了准确性 - 从五米到只有10毫米的确定性。”

这也许就是为什么该模型从未在计算中失败的原因；失败意味着服务人员，观察员或公众成员的死亡或伤害。查理·罗斯（Charlie Ross）说：“我们的3D表示是代表我们的射击范围的基础，在代表我们的基础上是一个重大的步骤变化，他们从未使我们失败。”