Its voice has a range of three kilometres. The speaker, which must accompany the turret on all of its expeditions, is known as an acoustic hailing robot. The gun’s muzzle pans as the red square, like something lifted from futuristic military video game Call of Duty, moves across the screen.
A targeting square blinks onto the computer screen, zeroing in on a vehicle that’s moving in the camera’s viewfinder. Pull the trigger and it will fire.Ī gaggle of engineers standing around the table flinch as, unannounced, a warning barks out from a massive, tripod-mounted speaker. Another measures the distance from the gun to its target. A laminated sheet is taped to the table in front of the controller, reporting the function of its various buttons. Next to the keyboard sits a complicated joystick, the kind a PC flight simulator enthusiast might use. It spreads across the landscape: four kilometres-worth of territory, enough distance to penetrate deep into the city from this favourable vantage point. Another presents a top down satellite view of the scene, like a laid-out Google Map, trained menacingly on our position.Ī red cone, overlaid on the image, indicates the turret’s range. One shows a 180-degree, fish-eye sweep of the horizon in front of us. Instead, the cable slithers up onto a trestle table before plunging into the back of a computer, whose screen displays a colourful patchwork of camera feeds. An ethernet cable leads from the gun’s base and trails through the tidy grass into a small gazebo tent that, in the Korean afternoon heat, you'd be forgiven for hoping might contain plates of cucumber sandwiches and a pot of tea. 50 calibre, the sort that can stop a truck in its tracks – is draped over one shoulder. It’s about the size of a large dog plump, white and wipe-clean. On a green hill overlooking the tree-lined perimeter of Daejeon, a city in central South Korea, a machine gun turret idly scans the horizon.
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