Microrockets have another potential advantage. Bullets have a limit on their power, since at a certain point the gunpowder just eats away your barrel. Rockets don’t. Moreover, the choice of propellant is wide. Gyrojets used something like gunpowder, which was much safer and lighter on the nozzles. However, metal-based propellants offer much more bang. The 50-100% power improvement over a colt .45 could actually have been further enhanced significantly.
There’s also things like specific impulse, meaning you could design the engines to accelerate more quickly or perhaps more slowly (with the benefit being cleaner nozzles and better accuracy or more overall power).
I have no specific knowledge of the Gyrojet apart from Wikipedia, but one common problem with rocket weapons seem to be that of wind deviation.
Your average bullet is pushed away from its line of aim by crosswind, but a rocket projectile that’s still under power will not just deviate in a linear manner - its engine will actively propel it in the wrong direction, making the problem worse as the engine burns.
(Fin-stabilized rockets have this problem even worse, with the fins acting as weather vanes.)
Yup. However, things are a bit different for a gyroscopic rocket. Its spin does a lot to resists this effect. The biggest problem is at the start of the trajectory, when the rocket is both spinning slowest and when any deviation will have the biggest eventual effect. What’s needed is a way to spin up the round to extreme speed before it leaves the barrel.
Alex
I believe that is the Metal Storm system. Supposedly the thing works great for firing a hell of a lot of bullets in a short time. They have even ganged several barrels together to get even more lead out faster.
This is where patriotic pride forces me to point out that Metal Storm is nothing but repackaging of a Danish invention from the early 1800s, the espingol . From the link:
Espingols saw action in the Slesvig-Holstein war 1848-1850. A 20-barrel version (“organ espingol”) was developed, but never used.
While it’s possible that the guys doing competitive shooting do this, in the field (according to my brother, and others whom I have spoken to both online and in person) Marine and Army snipers are usually using “match” ammunition, which is civilian market ammo that is noted for it’s accuracy… Remington being popular for consistency, from what I understand.
I know in the past, the British sharpshooters used specially picked ammo, usually the first 100 rounds out of each production batch, as this was alleged to be the most consistent in each batch.
Spiny Norman
Thanks for that. I thought I’d heard of just about every kind of weird and ancient “automatic” weapon but that’s a new one. Maybe someone in Denmark should be hitting up the Australians for intellectual property right money.
So exactly how big would a rocket projectile need to be to deliver several hundred metres/second of velocity a kilometre downrange? I’m thinking it might need to be quite a bit bigger than a normal sniper rifle round.
Spiny Norman - but isn’t the espingol just a variant of the old ‘Roman Candle gun’ concept (picture of a very sophisticated four-barrelled 17th century version here)?
I seem to remember that the MetalStorm concept revolves around being able to electrically fire each individual charge in order to get better control of discharges.
This is the key differentiator which separated it from early roman-candle guns relying on either drilled bullets or bypass barrels, and the extremely similar concept of having stacked charges each with a separate touch-hole and hammer. The latter is basically exactly the same thing as MetalStorm, but problems with ignition flashing past the bullets, and the practicalities of multiple hammers, etc. made them impractical. If this link works it should take you to some fairly disparaging commentary about weapons of these types dating back to 1560-1660.
I don’t know if it is still the case but before WWII my mother worked at Western Cartridge and hand loaded match and big game ammo. Cases and bullets were checked for tolerance, power weighed, and the case with powder was weighed again, and a visual inspection of each case to ensure it had powder in it. As my mother once told me if a rhino is charging you, and the round does not go off, the next tree is too far away.
