Chinese try to buy Metal Storm

THE Chinese military allegedly offered an Australian weapons inventor more than $US100 million ($A134 million) to go to Beijing and work on one of the deadliest guns in the world, the Nine Network reports. But Australian and US military forces are said to be determined to ensure the gun, known as Metal Storm and developed in Brisbane, does not end up in enemy hands.

Metal Storm technology is an electronically initiated, stacked projectile system that removes the mechanisms required to fire a conventional weapon. Effectively, the only parts that move in Metal Storm’s technology are the projectiles contained within the barrels. Multiple projectiles are stacked in a barrel. The technology allows each projectile to be fired sequentially from the barrel. Metal Storm’s fully loaded barrel tubes are essentially serviceable weapons, without the traditional ammunition feed or ejection system, breech opening or any other moving parts. Metal Storm barrels can be effectively grouped in multiple configurations to meet a diversity of applications.

The technology is all about firing of projectiles or rounds being controlled by a computer chip rather than a comparatively slow human operating with a mechanical reload system. Both the human and mechanical aspects of automatic weapons that have been with us for more than a century, limit the speed of reload. As computers function in nanoseconds, or a billionth of a second, and the round is not being reloaded the cyclic rate of fire can be measured in milliseconds. The barrels come prestacked and what Mike O’Dwyer has done is work out how to fire the forward round without sympatheic detonation of the following rounds .As each round is fired by electronic signal it arms the following round This was the breakthrough and in itself will change the face of war and policing. Metal Storm cite a round leaving the barrel every three milliseconds or 333.333 rounds a second or 20,000 rounds per minute. These figures are for a single 40mm grenade launcher! The barrels themselves are then stacked so the weapon system consists of multiple barrels that can be fired in any sequence and any number of rounds per sequence. It’s all in the software. This sort of weapon invalidates the human wave attacks that China used so well in Korea. No wonder they want to buy the technology! The Metal Storm website makes interesting reading.