Metal Storm Weapons

With no moving parts, Metal Storm weapons can lay down a million-plus rounds per minute.

 

To the human ear, the sound of 180 bullets being fired in less than one-hundredth of a second is perceived as one enormous noise. And the fact that some people have heard that noise is testimony to the perseverance of one inventor with a unique vision of the future of weapons technology. "They say that half the engineers in the first company that I worked with wanted me to finish my coffee and leave as soon as possible," says Mike O'Dwyer, recalling the way some of his far-reaching ideas were received.

O'Dwyer's revolutionary weapons concept is based on an electronically fired gun-and-launcher design with multiple rounds stacked in a single barrel. The only moving parts are the bullets themselves. Beyond creating an astounding fast-firing weapon, the concept makes way for the creation of entirely new types of firearms. Among other things, it will allow the shooter to select from different types of rounds and even between firing lethal and nonlethal ammunition. O'Dwyer's ideas were initially met with skepticism, but now they are being taken seriously by the military and police.

"Nothing succeeds like actually building something and pulling the trigger or, in our case, pressing the button to show what happens," he tells POPULAR MECHANICS.

"One of the first things I did was to build a prototype with one short piece of barrel loaded with two projectiles and propellant behind each," O'Dwyer says. "I then fired the leading projectile just to determine whether the system would operate. If it did, the second projectile should stay in the barrel, without being pushed back with the propellant behind it."

Based on the results of that testing, O'Dwyer quickly moved to an expanded firing prototype--a single-barrel design loaded with 15 9mm rounds. "There was nothing particularly optimum about having 15 rounds," he says. "It was just a good number. There was also nothing particularly optimum about 9mm. It was just a convenient size.

"The wedging-system design O'Dwyer used to lock and seal multiple projectiles stacked in a single barrel required each of the 9mm projectiles to be slightly modified from their sporting configurations.

"The 15 shots was a big step for us from two, and electronically firing those 15 shots from a single barrel allowed us to experiment immediately with rates of fire," O'Dwyer says. The smoothbore prototype allowed electronically variable rates of fire ranging from semiauto to the equivalent of 45,000 rounds per minute.

Applying what he had learned about tube loading and firing rates, O'Dwyer constructed a triple-barrel, a nine-barrel, and a 36-barrel firing prototype design that he lovingly named Bertha. "The reason for the 36 barrels was simply to indicate to ourselves and to others the future versatility of this system, in that with the 36 barrels we had 540 rounds on board and, based on the 45,000-round-per-minute rate per barrel, that gave us a maximum firing rate of 1.62 million rounds per minute," the inventor says. Prior to Bertha's well-deserved retirement, O'Dwyer used the demonstrator to achieve a 180-round burst of 9mm rounds (155 grain weight) at a rate of just over 1 million rounds per minute.

New Families Of Weapons

O'Dwyer's experience with the 36-tube Bertha has provided him with a new understanding of the technology--not just the gun. When he speaks of the weapons, he uses the analogy of an inkjet printer. He compares the projectiles to dots of ink exploding out of a print head. O'Dwyer's concept is that of a weapons system capable of delivering a wide range of customized "packages" of varying degrees of lethality.

"While the enormous rate of fire is a major advantage in some significant areas, this is not a weapons system that operates as if it were a shotgun," O'Dwyer says. "This is not an area weapon that deals with a target by overkill. It is about accuracy, precision and electronic controllability."
Other recent Metal Storm demonstrator systems have included a "scaled up" 40mm grenade launcher for the military that fires small "shot bursts" at rates equivalent to 6000 rounds per minute, as well as a Variable Lethality Law Enforcement (VLE) handgun. The fully electronic VLE can be easily safety-keyed to a particular individual or group, preventing its use should it fall into the wrong hands.

Through his company, Metal Storm Ltd., the Australian inventor hopes to apply this technology to a variety of military and commercial products worldwide.