If ya had… they showed some weapon systems technology that is simply unbelieveable. You have to literally see it to believe it…
For example, a grenade launcher that fires 4,000 rounds a second?!? 250,000 rounds a minute?!?
Or their flagship product, a weapons platform that fires 1,000,000 rounds a minute…?!?
(that’s not a typo… one MILLION rounds a minute…)
Picture this… a video of a bank of barrels placed 10x10 in a box…the film rolls… you hear a “brrrrrp!” and some smoke…and the platform is empty, having fired all it’s ordinance in something rediculously approaching a second or three…
Words fail… they have the perfect name… “Metal Storm”… what the product does is pick a target and basically fill all available space with bullets around which that target is at…
They’ve got video clips on their site where you can see the stuff in action. There’s been previous threads on the company before and IIRC, the comments made were that the technology isn’t quite ready for primetime as of yet. They can do it in theory, but haven’t fully demonstrated it as of yet (again, IIRC).
I knew a guy whos dad was working on this system back in… it would have been around mid-90s and they were doing the dog & pony show to potential buyers. I don’t know how close it is to being ready but it’s been in the development and demo thing for a long time now.
Don’t confuse firing rate with fire power. 1,000,000 rounds per second isn’t that great if the gun can only fire 100 rounds and can’t be easily reloaded. While the technology is interesting, many of the company’s claims were pegging my “hype meter”.
Nonono…my point was this was on Discovery Channel… they had a few working platforms… a grenade launcher, a “box” gun, and a handheld pistol…
The pistol was impressive… 4 barrels, multiple rounds per barrel… it fired 3 rounds per .3 seconds… three rounds left the barrel before the slide came back…
Mind you the slide didn’t advance rounds or anything, just absorbed recoil…
If you haven’t seen/heard of metal storm, the basic premise is this: you load 50 rounds in a tube, one after the other, and they’re triggered by a computer in sequence. No moving parts other than the projectile… incredibly fast firing rate…
Like I said earlier, on this show they showed a “box” weapon platform (basically a 10x10 box of barrels filled with projectiles)… the film rolled, you heard a “brp!”, saw a puff of smoke, and they were empty. 250,000 rounds fired in a few seconds…
I’ve seen the videos. It seems to me that these devices are more like super-claymores than super-machine guns. Machine guns are controlable; these seem to be fire-once.
I guess you could consider it ‘directed shrapnel.’
Seems like complete hype to me. Interesting, but useless. And I really wonder what kind of energy these put out. Ft/lbs and velocity of the bullet. I bet it’s real, real low.
You see, their barrel is also their magazine. So you gat fifty bullets stacked in the barrel. between each bullet is the propellent charge. Their technology sets off the propellent charge sequentially, and very quickly if need be.
But then you have to send the barrel back to the factory to be reloaded. The bullets also have widely differing velocities (as the length of the barrel varies for each shot).
Further, nobody can really come up with a good reason for shooting a million bullets per second for a fraction of a second.
Before I retired, we were looking at as a means of distributing landmines. The mines would be factory packed in a tubes, on atop the other. When you press the button the mines fly out making a quickie minefield. The ‘Volcano’ system was fielded using this sort of idea.
Other uses might be for a large number of rather large flares.
But it is not really as useful as you might think.
and invented in the 1840s, apart from the computer bit. A Danish artillery officer named Schumacher oversaw the development of a weapon - the “espingol” - of this sort. It was deployed operationally in the 1848 and 1864 wars. More than anyone wants to know…
I think the criticism about the pistol was the first few bullets had such a short barrel length that they were so inaccurate as to be potentially dangerous.
They had mentioned it as kind of a perimeter defense against incoming missiles. Track the missile, fire a bazillion rounds at it, knock it out. Hopefully.