[vannrox]

COOL.

[KingKongCobra]

I saw this a year ago and it was interesting. What's the reason to repost it now?

[RightWhale]

Wired seems to be taking an interest in weapons lately. Perhaps the Silicon Valley jobs are being replaced by the armaments industry. Anyway, this weapon is old news. Not Wired, Tired.

[big'ol_freeper]

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

[American Soldier]

Don't know what I'd do with it, but I want one.

[upchuck]

Yeah, but can it plink beer cans off the fence in the back yard?

[supercat]

What's the point? Aside from the electronic ignition, this seems like eighteenth-century technology (I recall reading that someone invented a firearm that worked like a roman candle, with many projectiles and charges stacked in the barrel). And certainly the idea of using multiple barrels is nothing new. Guns with two complete firing mechanisms have been extremely common for a long, long time. Those with more are less common, since one with four would cost and weigh twice as much as one with two, etc.

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.

[Centurion2000]

O'Dwyer has also adapted the technology for a police revolver. The all-electronic handgun uses the technology to ensure the gun can only to be fired if its user is wearing a special ring that emits an electronic signal.

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)

[Logic_3]

Ah, have the police drop their silly little guns and start using THESE, the great unequalizers.

[SevenDaysInMay]

Creative thinking bump.