perfidy

UPI is reporting that Australian company Metalstorm will be demonstrating a new weapons system for the US Military in Singapore next month.

The author of the article is not exactly hip to the intricacies of military technology.

Next month a new high-explosive munition will be fired in Singapore and then tested again by the U.S. Army, heralding what may be a sea change in weaponry: a gun that can fire 240,000 rounds per minute.

That's compared to 60 rounds per minute in a standard military machine gun.

While 240,000 rounds a minute is in fact a lot, his figure for regular machine guns is off by an order of magnitude. Just think back to the last war movie you saw - were the machine guns firing one round a second?

*bang*

*bang*

*bang*

*bang*

Not likely. Nevertheless, this is good news. A metalstorm system could be very useful as an automated point defense system to protect our troops from incoming mortar fire. Hooked to a radar system, once an incoming mortar is detected, the metalstorm pod would quickly rotate toward the incoming and fire as many as a hundred rounds in a fraction of a second. Modern military radar systems are quite good, but the limitation has been in the speed of defensive firing systems. If the rate of fire is 600 rounds a minute (ballpark for a typical machine gun) you may - may - get off a few rounds in the seconds before the mortar hits. Odds are, you'll miss.

The beauty of the metalstorm system is that it does not depend on mechanical processes to fire and reload bullets one at a time. No matter how refined that process becomes (and in the case of electric gatling guns, that is very refined indeed) the mechanics of the process limit the maximum rate of fire. Metalstorm has no moving parts. Bullets are fired electronically, and to get around the problem of loading new bullets, they are simply stacked in the barrel. Each barrel could have ten bullets. Get a bundle of barrels 10x10, and you have a thousand rounds. And they can all be fired in very, very rapid succession. Whole pods of barrels could be replaced as a unit, for easy reloading.

With the electronic firing system, bullets can be fired in patterns, or at any desired rate of fire. Lighting up just the top layer of bullets would create a wall of lead - a hundred bullets fired in a fraction of second. And this - combined with an accurate fire-finder radar, would stand a very good chance of hitting an incoming mortar round.

Metalstorm has lots more ideas for its technology beyond mortar defense. They're currently testing a grenade launcher system that could be mounted under an assault rifle in the same way standard grenade launchers can be mounted under the M-16. They've proposed four barreled handguns with a 24 round capacity. These nifty items could fire four rounds simultaneously - before recoil kicks in, for greater accuracy. Air defense, gun pods for uavs, even for use with sub-lethal ammunition - the possibilities are nearly endless.

All they need to do is figure out a way to explode IEDs with them, and we won't have to spend a quarter billion dollars on the F/A/R/C/E 22.

With electronic firing