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The next stage of gun technology
05-13-2011, 01:24 AM
Okay, every knows that ant modern military personal or crew-served weapon consists of the following things:
1. Barrel
2. Firing mechanism
3. Recoil mechanism.
Note that 2 and 3 can jam..probably at the least possible time.
Now..supposed you have:
1. Stack able ammo which you can place inside the barrel. Magazine is an option if you want it, though you don't really need it.
2. The ammo is case less and ignited electronically. That eliminates the need for both firing and recoil mechanism.
What do you get? Metal Storm Tech
They showed a segment of the system on cable last night and I was blown away (sorry for the pun). The weapon system can be sized from a handgun to a 40mm greande current, though as far as I can see there is no limit on size. And why stop at one barrel when you can group them, In one way it would be a throw back to the old gatling in design, but you'd have prodigous rates of fire. The hand gun version has a rate of fire of 3 rounds/sec. A that's just one barrel. Start grouping them and sizing it up and the rates of fire start climbing. And no jamming either because of no moving parts! And in munitions ranging from ball, AP, explosive rounds in either contact or air burst mode and I see mutiple uses.
Whoever came up with the concept must be a Whispered! This technology give the phrase "Bullet Hell" new meaning!
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it's neat and all, except they have been trying to get this working for 17 years.
There are obviously some rather significant hurdles yet to be overcome.
Thought the wikipedia page mentions they got a $3.4M contract for PNG's correctional services officers, so maybe there is some future here.
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Ah stackable ammo.
It's all fine and good until 1 round fails, and then the one behind it fires into it. Then promptly jams and explodes.
The great thing about guns. Any moron can be trained to maintain them in a shootable condition. That's a big plus. Things that rely on batteries and complex electronics to time ignition are far more prone to permanent failure, rather than a mechanical linkage which might lock up one time in a hundred, but'll usually be pretty quick to clear when it does. Electronics repair is much more time consuming than clearing a dud cartridge.
Electronics might be more reliable in theory, but when electronics fail, they usually fail for good.
Guns are mechanically simple, because guns work well the way they are.
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ordnance11 Wrote:2. The ammo is case less and ignited electronically. That eliminates the need for both firing and recoil mechanism.
...
Whoever came up with the concept must be a Whispered! He must be, if he can ignore Newton's Laws that way.
(I can't see any way that venting the propellant gases won't cause recoil. It doesn't matter how they're ignited.)
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I remember seeing this sort of think on futuer weapons a while back, looked nifty and fired at an alarmingly fast rate.
but also aprentlty costed a mint just to make the barel/clip for one gun.
Interesting weapon if they could make it cheper.
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Rob, you still have Recoil, you just don't _care_, because you don't have to use it (plus those hideous gasses) to recock the weapon.
Metalstorm works best in science fiction.
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I should note this is not the first, nor the third, time that someone (including me) has posted something about Metalstorm technology here in the forums over the years. And while, yes, it is cool as all hell and scary as all hell, it has not seen either improvement or wide-scale implementation in the eight years or so since the first time it was brought up here. I think that says something right there.
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I saw a TV demo of Metalstorm on a navy ship during an exercise. The point was made that the remote-controlled Metalstorm with it's ammo already inside the gun made it ideal for situations where gun crews would be subject to sniping or shrapnel. At least until all the ammo was fired off and then you had to take the gun totally apart to reload it.
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Stephen Mann Wrote:I saw a TV demo of Metalstorm on a navy ship during an exercise. The point was made that the remote-controlled Metalstorm with it's ammo already inside the gun made it ideal for situations where gun crews would be subject to sniping or shrapnel. At least until all the ammo was fired off and then you had to take the gun totally apart to reload it. I'd say that's the biggest issue right there. Even with the current CIWS setups, you have enough ammo for about six to eight engagements, and then reloading can take about fifteen minutes as long as you got a well drilled gun crew working on it. On my ship, it'd always take a while to get the dummy ammo changed out for the live rounds, but in real world ops? Heh, you can bet they won't waste time with that.
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I thought one of the ideas of metalstorm was that to reload you just replace the barrel. Something which on most modern guns is real easy to do.
Then again I do much like the relative simplicity of the classic Gatling gun over some of the proposed replacements.
Heh, that would be something, a modern material constructed Gatling gun firing the caseless rounds the H&K G11 uses/used.
*casts summon: Ed Becerra*
Y'know, if I'd access to a decent workshop & the training, one of the first thing I'd try to build a 1866-era Gat. Then a more modern version designed to use .50BMG.......
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Rod H Wrote:Y'know, if I'd access to a decent workshop & the training, one of the first thing I'd try to build a 1866-era Gat. Then a more modern version designed to use .50BMG....... That'd be some serious firepower there. Though it might be a bit too unwieldy to qualify as a traditional crew-served weapon. Probably more like the automated 25mm machine guns they're starting to put on USN ships.
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Dartz Wrote:Ah stackable ammo.
It's all fine and good until 1 round fails, and then the one behind it fires into it. Then promptly jams and explodes.
The great thing about guns. Any moron can be trained to maintain them in a shootable condition. That's a big plus. Things that rely on batteries and complex electronics to time ignition are far more prone to permanent failure, rather than a mechanical linkage which might lock up one time in a hundred, but'll usually be pretty quick to clear when it does. Electronics repair is much more time consuming than clearing a dud cartridge.
Electronics might be more reliable in theory, but when electronics fail, they usually fail for good.
Guns are mechanically simple, because guns work well the way they are. Have you ever pulled apart an M60? They may be less complicated than say a Browning .30 LMG but there are parts there that are still prone to failure. Like the buffer spring or the firing pin. The most reliable weapon is the weapon with zero moving parts.
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Perhaps, but I'm also under the impression that in such cases the bad part is usually fairly recognizable and one can put in a replacement without it being a major hassle. Whereas with electronic equipment, even figuring out where the problem is can be an adventure.
On a completely different issue, it could be I just haven't been keeping up with developments in the field (since I haven't), but I thought caseless ammo was still had some significant issues in it's own right. Has that changed?
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Morganni Wrote:Perhaps, but I'm also under the impression that in such cases the bad part is usually fairly recognizable and one can put in a replacement without it being a major hassle. Whereas with electronic equipment, even figuring out where the problem is can be an adventure. I can attest to this. Having a weapon system that offers no moving parts to absorb the recoil generally don't do to well in the long run - wear from metal fatigue beats out wear from friction big time. And this is to say nothing of how that tends to throw off your aim.
As for electrical gremlins... Yep, been there, done that. We once had a casualty in our gun's firing circuit - had the gun down for two weeks before we got it all sorted out. Was it the firing control circuit card in the EP2 panel? Looked like it - damn thing was a crispy critter and that's a helluvan achievement considering how over-built these things are. But nope, not it. Switches? You'd think so, but no. Firing pin? We were hoping so, but nada. We got desperate and had the Fire Control techs run a full diagnostic on their stuff, but it was clean, too. By this time we knew there was a short in the system somewhere, but we couldn't figure out where.
Eventually, we began to systematically tear apart the electrical boxes the firing circuits went through, and eventually found it: a terminal board inside and electrical box located on the top of the gun. Saltwater had seeped through the seals on the gunhouse and into the electrical box. Had us righteously cheezed off that it wasn't sealed up tight - we knew that it at least wasn't any of us responsible for it since none of us had ever been into the damn thing.
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@ Morganni: Gunderson's law prevails every time. The part fails at the worst possible way in the worst possible time. I had my M60 had a runaway fire (just kept on firing without my finger on the trigger) and had to stop it by breaking the link. It was a broken recoil spring. And the part didn't look any different from the last time I inspected it.
@ BA: If you can determine from field tests how many rounds would have to pass through before the aim is significantly degraded, then add a safety margin, you can have the barrel swapped out. Whether that requires field or depot level maintenance depends on the size of the barel.
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Kind of puts me in mind of a quote from Montgomery Scott in Star Trek III.
Quote:SCOTTY: "The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain!"
There's a REASON the M1911 is STILL considered one of the top handguns in the world, you know. (actually there's a lot of reasons, but I'd say the main one is reliability.)
Now mind you - if/when personal weapons are needed in exotic environments like - oh - space, we might start seeing stuff like metal storm or directed energy weapons find a place. As good as modern firearms are, they just don't work very well in hard vacuum or micro-gravity. Something like Metal Storm might do the trick, there.
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They work fine.
Powder burns happily in vacuum. There's no air in the cartridge anyway. The hard part is keeping things lubricated properly, and radiating heat from the weapon. Brass cartridges are great at removing heat from machineguns, while big metal barrels with caseless ammunition tend to get dangerously hot.
That, and guns work without batteries. That's always a bonus. No good having a multi-megajoule railgun if your generator's been shot out, or if your enemy is too flimsy to dump all that energy into their structure without punching through-n-through.
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nothing new
05-16-2011, 04:25 AM
I've been meaning to mention that the stacked or superposed loading concept has been around since at least the 16th century.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superposed_load
It's not directly mentioned in the above link, but I remember seeing plans for a early 18th century volley gun with 50 barrels each loaded with twenty rounds. What caught my attention was the triggers set near the end of the barrel. I remember it used special fused bullets that passed the explosion through to the next bullets powder charge so it could be touched off only in groups of twenty shots per trigger pull.
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