Centrifugal weapon could deliver stealth firepower

New Scientist ^ | 5/11/05 | Will Knight

[LibWhacker]

A gun that spits out ball bearings after spinning them to extreme speeds is being developed by a US inventor. The novel design has already caught the imagination of some defence industry experts.

The weapon, called DREAD, was invented by Charles St George, a veteran of the US firearms industry who founded the company Leader Propulsion Systems to promote the idea. He claims a major US defence company has shown an interested in developing it further and has produced a promotional video showing a prototype in action, which can be seen here (Quicktime). He says a new prototype will be developed in August 2005.

The gun consists of a mounted circular chamber that spins the metal ball bearings to high speed. A release mechanism on one side spits the balls out one behind the other, a handful at a time.

St George says the projectiles travel at around 300 metres per second upon release from the weapon, about the same speed as a handgun round. He claims a fully developed DREAD gun would be quieter than a conventional gun, less prone to malfunction, and could contain more ammunition.

DREAD also releases its balls in extremely rapid succession, which allows it to unleash formidable firepower against a target. Promotional material for DREAD states: "Due to its extraordinary high rate of fire capability, it delivers its bullets 8.5 millimetres apart, thereby delivering more mass to the target than any other weapon."

Overwhelming and devastating

St George would not specify the range or accuracy of the most recent prototype or explain precisely how the system works, because he says this information could be commercially sensitive.

But a patent issued to him in February 2003 has been found by Marc Abrahams, editor of science humour magazine Annals of Improbable Research. It refers to a "Weapon for Centrifugal Propulsion of Projectiles". In this design, balls are stored inside a series of narrow chambers that radiate from the centre of a circular chamber and which are rotated with the chamber at high speed.

A mechanism beneath each narrow chamber automatically manoeuvres a single ball into a smaller compartment at near its edge. When the trigger is pulled, these balls are released into a guide rail and shoot from the disc rapidly, from a hole at its edge.

"The system seams absolutely feasible," says David Crane, editor of the website DefenseReview.com. The weapon could strike targets with “overwhelming and devastating firepower - we're talking about total target saturation."

Terry Gander, who edits the defence industry journal Jane's Infantry Weapons, adds that similar concepts have been developed in the past. But Gander notes that these have had low projectile velocity and have been proposed as crowd control weapons. "It all depends on the sort of power source you have," he told New Scientist. "I'd be very interested to know what its range is."

But Abrahams finds the idea outlandish. "Anything that seems so far beyond anything else is worth a moment's thought before you completely gulp it down," he told New Scientist. "It is way out on the side of the scale that deals with high levels of imagination.

[Dinsdale]

"Young man, in this house we obay the laws of physics!" Homer Simpson

It does'nt mater what kind of contraption you use to get something up to speed.

Think of this problem. Put a ball trap in front of your device, run the balls back into the gun.

Do you have a reactionless drive? (i.e does the regular recoil of the balls hitting the trap now pull the whole thing forward?)

If you do you are rich beyond averace and have brought the stars into reach. I don't think you do.

[IronJack]

I don't see the parallel you're trying to draw. How does a sling have any recoil? All that happens when you release it is the centripetal force goes to zero, which unbalances the centrifugal force and allows the projectile to fly away tangentially. There is no recoil because there is no equal and opposite force imparted instantaneously to the projectile. It's energy is kinetic at that point, having been imparted (as a moment of inertia) by the act of twirling it. I envision the same physics applying here.

But, as I've said, I might be misunderstanding the construction of this device.

[Dinsdale]

It's not a parrallel, the point is that a 'recoilless' gun is a reactionless drive once you capture the projectiles. At 120000 rounds per minute you could point it straight up and hover (tuning the lift with muzzle velocity or rate of fire), reusing the captured rounds untill you ran out of energy, never using any reaction mass. This is a silly supposition. If it worked it would make the weapons applications dwindle in importance.

The slingperson imparts the final forward velocity on the projectile during the last quarter turn of the sling. During the previous quarter turn the slingperson had done the same work killing the energy in the opposite direction (in the axis of the throw).

Perhaps a sling designed for bowling balls and a trip to the nearest ice rink would satisfy your intuition.

[IronJack]

I'm not satisfied, but I'll give it a rest. Thanks.

[Boazo]

I'm gonna' need some pliers, and a set of 30 weight ball bearings.Ball bearings? Fellas fellas, it's all ball bearings now with jet engines!

[tricky_k_1972]

I know this is an old article for you, but what if you used the energy from the "recoil" and pumped it into a storage battery although that sounds a lot like perpetual motion, at a guess there would be energy loss due to heat, but maybe you could negate most or all of the recoil, or consider some way of turning the recoil force to force in the direction of the spin.

My physics is very rusty here and I'm way out of my depth with this I know, but there must be some way to use that recoil force and therefore negate it and lose some energy to friction.