Posted on 10/25/2002 2:42:32 PM PDT by vannrox
Edited on 06/29/2004 7:09:27 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
SYDNEY, Australia -- It may not be ready for George Bush's "first war of the 21st century." But it may well be ready if there's a second.
In perhaps the most audacious upgrade of high-speed weaponry since the introduction of the Gatling Gun, Australian inventor Mike O'Dwyer has developed a machine gun that can fire bullets at a rate of 1 million rounds per minute.
(Excerpt) Read more at wired.com ...
Sounds like a logistics nightmare. Imagine trying to have enough ammo on hand? That weapon has a thirst for resupply like a liberal's thirst for tax dollars |
As the article suggests, you could go into high-volume toothpick production.
What made the invention of the machine gun significant was that the ammunition could be stored separately from the barrel and only loaded as needed. Someone with an M-16 can hold hundreds of rounds of ammunition ready-to-use in a package which doesn't weigh too much above the ammo itself. By contrast, with something like this "metalstorm" concept, rapid reloading isn't possible and thus one must have an inch or so of full-weight barrel associated with every round one is going to fire.
Finally, I find this notion of firing "a million rounds a minute" absurd. Quoting such a rate suggests that the firearm could, in a minute, dispense a million rounds. The reality is of course orders of magnitude lower than that.
To be sure, an M-16 with a normal magazine probably couldn't spit out 800 rounds in a minute (or whatever it's cyclic rate is), but it would be possible to interface such a gun with a hopper-fed magazine that could--if kept stocked--do precisely that. Even without such a magazine, a shooter under optimal conditions using "normal" magazines could probably manage to fire over 500 (assuming the shooter starts with 1+30 rounds loaded, and changes magazines every 30 rounds, never letting the gun get empty). Further, while the gun's "peak" cyclic rate doesn't match its sustainable cyclic rate, it's at least related.
By contrast, if a metalstorm gun fires 100 rounds out of each of 100 barrels and takes a minute to fully reload (and I have no idea, logistically, how one could manage to reload one that fast), the real cyclic rate would be at most 10,000 rounds/minute whether the gun fired shots at intervals of 1ms, 1us, or 1fs [the latter allowing for claims of "60,000,000,000,000,000 rounds/minute"]
BTW, if 10,000 rounds/minute sounds fast, consider that we're talking about a gun with 100 barrels, being loaded unbelievably (i.e. impossibly) fast. Someone with a row of M16's each attached to a hopper magazine could probably spit out many more rounds of ammunition per minute than someone with this "metalstorm" gun.
This means the gun would be worthless if it is taken from a policeman by an assailant.
Until the criminal figures out that all he needs to do is kill the cop and take his hands (and rings)
Ah, have the police drop their silly little guns and start using THESE, the great unequalizers.
Even for that sort of application, I would think the limitted overall capacity of the system would severely curtail its usefulness. Correct me if I'm wrong, but there are already guns whose sustained firing rates (from an arbitrarily-large beltfed megazine) are well over a thousand rounds/minute. Ganging those together would seem to provide a much more useful increase in firepower than would this 'metalstorm' thing. Even if there's an incoming missle and your goal is simply to unload as much lead as possible in five seconds, a group of miniguns would seem to be just as capable as the metalstorm, and unlike the latter would be ready to shoot again if another missile followed the first.
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