what are the practical applications for such a weapon?

it seems that "blowing your load", so to speak, in such a quick manner would yield a high miss rate.... and are there ammo containers that have over a million rounds?

I'm going to admit I am ignorant on this which is why I'm looking for theDuke866 or anyone else in the military to comment..

here's a video btw:

http://www.thatvideosite.com/view/2133.html

4/25/2006 1:21:46 AM

It seems that has the efficacy of a more powerful single munition (some type of explosive maybe), but it uses the smaller, cheaper, more portable "bullets."

But, I don't know anything about weapons...

4/25/2006 1:34:33 AM

i think a practical use for it is to set it up in your front yard, with infrared motion detectors driving servo motors.

just let it run all night and see what surprises you can find in the morning. it will make getting out of bed fun again.

4/25/2006 1:43:35 AM

and it doesnt fire 1 million rounds in one minute.

more like, it fires 100 rounds in 0.0001 minute.

4/25/2006 1:46:07 AM

defense against missles.

Can't see the video atm, but if it's what I think it is, they're also selling it as a mine sweeper. They also applied the technology to launching grenades

4/25/2006 2:36:23 AM

Yeah, blowing up missiles is the main reason you develop such a rapid-firing weapon.

We used roughly similar shit in the Gulf War on some of our important ships to shoot down incoming scuds, which, if memory serves, never came, and which, if they had come, wouldn't have been accurate enough to hit ships anyway.

That, or possibly just annihilating certain lightly-armored targets.

[Edited on April 25, 2006 at 2:52 AM. Reason : ]

4/25/2006 2:49:52 AM

phalanx. It's the last line of defense. If you ahve to use it, serious shit is going down.


bah. damned statistics. it's inflated because shooting a bunch of rounds simultaneously out of several barrels. It's like taking a musket that fires 1 round a minute, lashing together 10 of them, firing them at once, and saying it shoots 10 rounds per minute.

[Edited on April 25, 2006 at 3:02 AM. Reason : sdfsdf]

4/25/2006 2:55:50 AM

If it's the gun I've seen, it's nothing but multiple barrels each containing multiple bullets and charges. No moving parts at all.

4/25/2006 3:21:37 AM

^ yeah, 50 separate barrels simultaneously shooting two rounds each in the space of 1/200th of a second.

therefore, we can extrapolate that to 1 million rounds per second.

in theory.

golly, numbers sure are fun.

4/25/2006 3:36:26 AM

the crazy thing is that the space between the bullets is actually shorter than the length of the actual bullets.

and yes, what everyone else has said already.. it would be used for missle defense usually onboard a ship. And, if they are being used... some serious shit is going down, because the missles shouldn't be that close in the first place.

4/25/2006 7:29:37 AM

Quote :

"and it doesnt fire 1 million rounds in one minute. more like, it fires 100 rounds in 0.0001 minute. "

right. it sounds like a single shot being fired, but it's actually like 100 or something. i'm pretty sure that there is no primer, and the propellants are ignited electronically. they can put several bullets in each barrel, and fire them and pretty much whatever rate they want.

you'd never be able to fire 1 million rounds at such a rate...the barrels would overheat long before that happened.

4/25/2006 9:44:00 AM

the practical applications of the weapon, in the most literal sense of the word practical, (read: not necessarily efficient) are as force protection countermeasures against mortars and RPGs, atleast that is what most of the R&D money it's recieved thus far has been used for

if you can sync this platform up with a munition tracking system, you could effectively fire a wall of ammo at it and deny the capability of the enemy's weapon. sort of like a ridiculously excessive shotgun blast. however there aren't many other practical uses for it

4/25/2006 9:51:06 AM

i bet it would make a pretty fun handheld shotgun.

4/25/2006 11:03:40 AM

Metalstorm, right?

I'm gonna just go off of what they had on their website back when god knows when. Essentially, they came up with the idea of hooking this up to more than just the anti-missile electronic bullet firing junk you saw in the video. The idea of having it fire grenades and mortars electronically, and linking these up to, say, a commander's digital network, gives it the ability of "area denial." Essentially, hooking up hundreds of these in the field such that they are pre-targeted on roadways and areas where the baddies would end up driving through will give them the ability to conveniently kill the hell out of whatever is out there. So you set up a bunch of these in the hills, an enemy group comes through, then they electronically fire all several hundred mortars and grenades set up in these things at once (since they can by synced electronically and fire one after the other in quick succession) and the ground is pulverized in an area the size of say 100 yards by 300 yards. Everything in there is dead, and if you fire it at the right time you can basically eliminate an enemy force before they know what the hell is going on. It's not a bad idea, assuming it's cheap to produce and use the metalstorm system.

4/25/2006 3:48:34 PM

that is what the company thought they could use it for, however current ops don't really make that kind of a tactic effective..

the pentagon is only looking at now in any capacity (again it's only gotten RDTE money so far as I know, no procurement) as the aforementioned force protection. denial of mortar attacks (think the shotguns in the aston martin that shot the mortars out of the sky in the ice drivign scene of the bond movie with the diamond guy)

it would be a pain in the ass to fire this thing and have to reload due to error or because it got faked out or something, especially multiple synced guns like that

4/25/2006 3:53:20 PM

this gun is going to revolutionize pc gaming

4/25/2006 3:53:44 PM

I think we've missed the most obvious purpose of this gun, which is, quite simply, just being baller as hell.

4/25/2006 3:56:51 PM

i can kill zombies and nazis twice as fast

4/25/2006 3:57:10 PM

baller as fuck sir

baller - as - fuck

4/25/2006 3:59:34 PM

No, see, the thing is, I know it's baller as fuck, and I'd actually typed that -- but then I remembered that you used that quite a bit and didn't want to seem like I couldn't think for myself.

I remember that kangaroo thread.

Speaking of which, God help us if the Red Kangaroos ever get ahold of this gun.

4/25/2006 4:13:29 PM

pretty sure its impossible to shoot 1 million rounds per minute

if 1 million is 1000 X 1000, i just dont see how its possible to have that many bullets fired in 60 seconds

4/25/2006 4:31:06 PM

Quote :

" Essentially, hooking up hundreds of these in the field such that they are pre-targeted on roadways and areas where the baddies would end up driving through will give them the ability to conveniently kill the hell out of whatever is out there. So you set up a bunch of these in the hills, an enemy group comes through, then they electronically fire all several hundred mortars and grenades set up in these things at once (since they can by synced electronically and fire one after the other in quick succession) and the ground is pulverized in an area the size of say 100 yards by 300 yards. Everything in there is dead, and if you fire it at the right time you can basically eliminate an enemy force before they know what the hell is going on."

see also: artillery

Quote :

"pretty sure its impossible to shoot 1 million rounds per minute if 1 million is 1000 X 1000, i just dont see how its possible to have that many bullets fired in 60 seconds"

that rate is, in fact, possible. they just can't sustain it for 1 minute to actually fire 1,000,000 rounds. The barrels would overheat long before that, and supplying 1,000,000 rounds would be kinda tough.

4/25/2006 4:45:01 PM

I guess I don't know anti-aircraft systems that well, but it seems like firing a large burst like that would disperse quickly and therefore be useless unless the missile was *really* close...


so are you talking about situations in which the incoming missile is, let's say, 50 feet from the bow of the ship?

4/25/2006 11:15:43 PM

yeah, a close-in weapon system (CWIS)

like the phalanx

4/25/2006 11:19:31 PM

I just can't see 6,000 round/min being insufficient to kill something.

Plus, for the above scenario-- can't our current artillery pieces already do the simultaneous impact thing, or was that only going to be possible with the Crusader?

4/26/2006 1:17:33 AM

the phalanx will soon be no longer

4/27/2006 8:40:26 PM

Ive heard weapons like these are being used now at locations such as the Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Labs.

4/28/2006 1:03:08 AM

I think this is supposed to be on Future Weapons (Discovery Channel) tomorrow night at 10.

5/2/2006 10:48:53 PM

Quote :

"can't our current artillery pieces already do the simultaneous impact thing"

Yeah, but I guess if you want to look at it as building a better mousetrap, having it electronically controlled, disposable, and cheap could make it easier just to set this sort of crap up so that it doesn't need any human present to fire it and can be triggered automatically when enemy units enter the area. Just a giant booby trap or something.

Typical artillery just requires that you reload it inbetween shots (just talking about standard field artillery). This new system could theoretically make firing times faster, but again it would make reloading times longer (since you're changing the whole tube out inbetween salvos).

If it was implemented correctly, it could allow for a different strategy that might have a higher shock value. If they developed a system that could allow, say, 500 artillery rounds to all go downrange within a couple seconds, they could create a better killing machine. The enemy would have virtually no reaction time and would get blowed to shit all at once (but again our present artillery can almost do this on a reasonable scale). A lot of modern weapons that we have can also have this same effect (like an anti-personnel cluster bomb, those are nasty).

If they pick this as a weapons system in the future, I'm sure it'll end up having its own advantages/disadvantages just like anything else. I doubt it'd be an amazing super duper replacement/upgrade for the weapons systems we have now.

5/2/2006 11:15:55 PM

this is totally a zionist conspiracy

do you know how much a million bullets costs?

thats like spending 500,000 every time you pull the trigger

i hope they're shooting edomites

5/3/2006 12:07:47 AM

With a million bullets in a minute they'd be turning the edomites into jelly.

5/3/2006 12:15:54 AM

i know someone whose mouth would be watering at the idea of Edomite Jelly and Jam

5/3/2006 12:22:09 AM

Quote :

"I think we've missed the most obvious purpose of this gun, which is, quite simply, just being baller as hell."

5/3/2006 6:37:02 PM