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Posted on 07/15/2003 9:29:56 PM PDT by Recourse
Metal Storm: Rise of the Machines
How one company is creating guns that fire a million rounds per minute and revolutionizing the way we think about weapons.
by Victorino Matus 07/16/2003 12:00:00 AM
A FEW WEEKS AGO, in between segments about a robot that helps dig through rubble and a mosquito-zapper made by a high schooler at a science fair, CNN's Fredricka Whitfield had this tidbit to offer:
"An Australian inventor has come up with a gun that fires a million rounds per minute. It's called Metal Storm and it uses electronics to control the blast of projectiles, which can shred a target or throw up a defensive wall against an incoming missile."
That tantalizing tease was pretty much the extent of CNN's reporting on Metal Storm, and who can blame them? There's so much else in the news. Like the Laci Peterson case.
CNN's website, meanwhile, was a bit more helpful but it still left me wanting more. What is this company called Metal Storm? What exactly are they developing? Besides guns, could they also be working on cybernetic terminators?
Not quite. When I got to Metal Storm's branch office in Arlington, Virginia (main headquarters is in Brisbane, Australia), I was surprised to find how accessible it was. No retinal scans or steel vaults here. Just a simple office with six employees. One of them, G. Russell Zink, senior vice president for business development, was kind enough to spend an hour with me.
Metal Storm is an electronic ballistics technology company created by Mike O'Dwyer, whom Zink, a retired Army lieutenant colonel, likens to Thomas Edison. O'Dwyer's key technological leap concerns the absence of movable parts--in other words, weapons without locking mechanisms, hammers, firing pins, or ammo clips. Weapons that are fired electronically.
Take the O'Dwyer VLE smartgun. It's the world's first completely electronic "solid state" handgun--the only parts that move are the bullets, stacked directly in the barrels (the model I held had four barrels, though the successfully fired prototype is a seven-shot, single-barrel handgun). There is no chance of jamming and the safety features include a coded receiver that prevents unauthorized use by children or criminals. The gun can be set to kill (with bullets) or stun (with bean bags) and features "rapid reload" capability. A recoil barrel allows several bullets to be discharged, one after another, so that you'd feel a kick only after the last shot is fired, thereby improving accuracy. If that isn't enough, the gun can talk.
How do the bullets leave the barrel? The Metal Storm website explains it best:
The bullets are stacked in a barrel, with each bullet separated by a propellant load, such that the leading propellant can be reliably ignited to fire the bullet, without the resulting high pressure and temperature causing unplanned blowby ignition of the trailing propellant load, and without collapse of the projectile column in the barrel. This unique concept has been accomplished through the invention of a bullet which on the one hand expands and locks in the barrel in response to high pressure immediately in front of the bullet. As a consequence, each bullet in turn can be fired in sequence from the barrel, and an individual barrel tube, loaded with numerous rounds and exclusive of any ammunition feed or ejection system, breech opening, or any mechanical operation whatsoever, when provided with an electric priming system is, in effect, a complete weapon. (It's no surprise that O'Dwyer currently owns 51 patents.)
For three bullets to leave the barrel in one shot takes 1/500th of a second--an equivalent of 60,000 rounds per minute. Keeping this in mind, O'Dwyer has taken the notion of in-line stacking to even greater heights. New applications of Metal Storm technology include a successfully tested 6-barrel 9mm system that fires at a rate of 240,000 rounds per minute and a 36-barrel prototype that fired a burst of 180 rounds at a rate of more than one million rounds per minute. But it's not just 9mm weapons being tested. Both 40mm grenade launcher prototypes and 60mm mortar rounds have been fired at similar rates.
SO ADVANCED is the technology that Zink says he isn't worried about possible competition. Indeed, the official "vision statement" of Metal Storm refers not to "next-generation" but rather "generation-after-next" defense systems for Australia's armed forces as well as the United States "to enhance national security." The company's chief concern is to make sure the technology is safeguarded from "potential enemies."
O'Dwyer's father, explains Zink, died during the Second World War when he parachuted into a heavily infested Japanese part of the South Pacific. "Since then, Mike has always wanted to contribute to Australia's allies, find some way to help them." In Metal Storm, he most certainly has. (And it doesn't hurt to do business almost exclusively with the United States, the biggest spender on defense amongst Australia's allies.)
The Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) calls Metal Storm a "revolutionary new weapons technology"--this from the agency that brought us the M-16, the Internet, and stealth.
But DARPA's endorsement carries even more weight because Metal Storm is an Aussie company. "For whatever reasons, technical or political, the truth is that DARPA doesn't spend much time or treasure on foreign ideas," says Douglas Harpel, president of Aerospace Intelligence, LLC. "There are exceptions, but they are few and far between and they are almost entirely in the past. There is a view that U.S. tax dollars for research and development should go to American firms, and 'U.S.-only' restrictions have slowly crept into DARPA solicitations. If DARPA is now taking a serious look at Metal Storm, it is an indication that the technology has been judged to hold substantial 'leap ahead' potential for U.S. warfighters." (Harpel also notes that "strong DARPA interest is also an indication that the technology is not resident in the U.S. industrial base, at least at the level of maturity evidenced in Metal Storm.")
So secretive is this new technology that from a recent test-firing at Blossom Point, Maryland, DARPA has allowed only a 19-second clip of it to be shown to the public. (It's an impressive 19 seconds. Click here.)
Interestingly, the 40mm pods and related artillery envisioned by Metal Storm are defensive in nature--placed before open terrain to defend against invading forces--basically replacing the use of "dumb" landmines. A small team of specialists using a laptop can verify incoming targets, fire nonlethal shells if the target is civilian, or, if the target is hostile, fire extremely lethal shells that rain down at such speeds (a video describes it as "a swarm of bees") there will be no time for a counterattack.
Metal Storm is also interested in aerial applications, attaching grenade pods (14,400 grenades per) onto Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAVs) for extremely precise surgical strikes, where friendly and unfriendly zones are delineated by computers, greatly reducing the chance of collateral damage.
In addition, Metal Storm hopes to provide a new level of security for U.S. embassies around the world by installing gun pods in key locations that can launch dummy rounds as well as high explosive rounds in the event hostiles come across the "embassy killing zone." Flashbang ammunition to disperse dangerous crowds is also an option, creating a loud noise to scare off an enemy without causing unwanted casualties. Pods can also be placed aboard ships to ward off possible terrorists and prevent what happened to the USS Cole.
Metal Storm's applications are seemingly limitless. On the drawing board are defensive mechanisms for submarines against high-speed torpedoes and urban terrain robots. Urban terrain robots? Zink didn't go into detail about this and so I can only offer what I think they might look like.
Victorino Matus is an assistant managing editor at The Weekly Standard.
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Electrical propellant ignition is used a lot, and the Russians made an interesting throw away almost non-metallic pistol with it. This Fire Storm business is essentially single use, ammunition and firearm are one thing, technology intended for automated use.
Very good point.
This gets my vote for "last line" missile defense system.
1. Fill 747s with ammunition and shoot liquid metal clouds of death into incoming warheads.
2. Hollow out entire Kalifornia mountains, fill 'em with ammo and install gun turrets designed to knock out incoming chinese nukes.
3. Since my "line the borders with nuclear waste" idea isn't gaining any traction, why not install 500 or so unmanned, heat-sensing "Metal Storms" along our borders?
What will the enviro-wackos say about this?
Killjoy....
No kidding. And what if your whole "barrel" of bullets is screwed up from the beginning. I seem to remember reading something about them being able to fire with three or something un-shot bullets in front of them....but Murphy's Law says someones gonna end up with the smelly end of the stick and have one not work at all. No quick tap and rack to get a "working" bullet.
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