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Stacked charges are also a unique way of ensuring that only the military or law enforcement organizations ever have a loaded firearm. As I understand it, each barrel is preloaded with a certain number of projectiles and propellant charges. To reload, you replace the barrel (or the entire rig). Sort of like a firearm version of the disposable camera concept.

It would have to display an uncanny level of reliability for anyone to actually consider equipping cops or soldiers with Metalstorm's designs, though. Consider what happens if a charge fails to fire. Not only that round, but all the rounds stacked underneath it, are useless.

Then there's Metalstorm's "Variable Lethality" handgun design. Like a Star Trek phaser, it has setting for "stun" and "kill". The shooter can either launch a beanbag round, or switch to conventional projectiles (and I could swear that I recall reading somewhere that the pistol actually *speaks* when switched to "Lethal" mode, as a warning to fleeing criminals, I suppose. "Danger, Will Robinson!!") Y'know, the camera analogy still holds true. There was a Minolta camera back in the '80s called the "Talker", which spat out instructions in a female voice (with a heavy Japanese accent): "Too dark! Use frash!"

Metalstorm just keeps popping up every year or so, without much (if any) new information added. Things that make you go: "Hmmmm..."