From: avatar (avatar@renegadeclothing.com.au)
Date: Wed Jan 29 2003 - 01:40:40 MST
With all the comments on the Nanotech SuperSoldiers site about machine gun firing at flying objects, I thought I'd raise this old reportage, still chugging along as of 2001. (For all romantics who don't believe a beam weapon can be aimed superfast by computer programme.) Wonder how you could get this arrangement to continuously load? Electromagnetic injection? Avatar
Transcript from ABC tv
8/7/1999
Australian inventor creates world's deadliest gun
MAXINE MCKEW: It sounds like something out of science fiction -- a revolutionary gun capable of firing more than a million bullets per minute, 100 times the rate of fire of a conventional machine gun.
But there's nothing hypothetical about the weapon called Metal Storm.
The brainchild of a Brisbane inventor, it's being hailed as the ballistic breakthrough of the century.
Already, the Defence Departments of Australia, the US and Britain are keenly observing trials of this electronic gun.
Today, Australian investors took their chance to get a slice of the action as the company made its debut on the stock market.
But, as Bernard Bowen reports, Metal Storm may have other uses besides military action.
MIKE O'DWYER, INVENTOR: This is the nine-millimetre, 540-round pod that has fired at a rate in excess of one million rounds a minute.
GRAHAM BUGDEN, WEAPONS MANUFACTURER: It will revolutionise the firearms industry in this world.
BERNARD BOWEN: It's being hailed as the biggest breakthrough in ballistics since the invention of the machine gun late last century.
MIKE O'DWYER: It's the first time that, as I like to say, 19th century mechanical guns have been able to, literally, move to be 21st century electronic weapons.
BERNARD BOWEN: It is called Metal Storm and its inventor is Mike Dwyer.
But what's puzzled ballistics brains worldwide is how a former grocery wholesaler from Brisbane with no qualifications hit upon the idea.
MIKE O'DWYER: I'd been working on this going back initially some 20 years.
I've put 15,000 hours of development into it and, certainly, I couldn't improve on conventional technology. That's highly developed.
So I did the only thing that I could think of of coming up with something new. I had to go right outside the existing system.
Maybe not having a ballistics background makes it easier for me to do that, in that I didn't know what couldn't be done.
I can recall watching World War II footage of kamikaze aircraft attacking Allied ships and the difficulty of dealing with them and, particularly, I looked at the amount of workings on the guns on board the ships that were trying to defeat those aeroplanes.
BERNARD BOWEN: Mike O'Dwyer believes the major military application for his invention is its ability to do what those World War Two ships couldn't: put up an effective defensive shield.
MIKE O'DWYER: If we can get a metal storm of projectiles out, we can defend against that missile.
BERNARD BOWEN: And it's done without any moveable mechanical parts, delivering the equivalent of 1.5 million rounds per minute, courtesy of its electronic trigger.
By way of comparison, the fastest rate of fire of conventional weapons is a mere 10,000 rounds a minute, with about 30 metres separating the bullets.
Metal Storm rounds fly through the air only centimetres apart.
PROMOTIONAL VIDEO: With Metal Storm technology in its simplest form, the barrel is the weapon, loaded with Metal Storm ammunition.
An electric circuit completes the unit.
MIKE O'DWYER: Where the technology then leads is to this sort of situation, where we have a prototype two-barrel handgun.
BERNARD BOWEN: But Mike Dwyer believes rate of fire is only one of the weapon's major breakthroughs.
Another is security, particularly in its handgun application.
MIKE O'DWYER: This is a technology that can electronically limit access to the gun to an authorised owner.
We could, for instance, use voice activation, we could use fingerprint, palm print, numeral pad, swipe card.
BERNARD BOWEN: So, if a weapon is stolen, it can't be fired. That's won Metal Storm an unlikely ally, the anti-gun lobby.
HELEN GADSDEN, COALITION FOR GUN CONTROL: We're all for improving gun safety.
If this technology can be applied to guns that people do have in the community, I think that's very positive.
The weapons manufacturer who made all the Metal Storm prototypes believes the key to its success lies in its simplicity.
GRAHAM BUGDEN: It is the most exciting thing that's ever happened to me as an individual.
It is also the most exciting thing that's ever happened to this company in the 16 years of our existence.
HELEN GADSDEN: It's great to see inventions coming out of Australia, but something as deadly as this, I really begin to wonder how useful that is.
BERNARD BOWEN: Do you think there is the need for a weapon like this.
HELEN GADSDEN: I don't think so.
I certainly would hope that it would never be used, but I guess the reality is it is a defensive weapon and if the defence forces believe it's necessary, I guess that's what they believe.
MIKE O'DWYER: If we can provide military systems that defend our country and our way of life and if we can deliver a handgun that, at the end of the day, saves lives, then the answer is I'm obviously exceptionally comfortable with what I've been able to achi eve.
BERNARD BOWEN: Mike Dwyer points out his invention isn't solely for the military, believing it also has agricultural and industrial application.
MIKE O'DWYER: Think of this: what if the bullets weren't bullets?
What if the bullets were packages of other stuff and maybe bigger packages.
What, for instance, if they were packets of fertiliser that we can hook up to a computer and as a farmer drives through a field, it can automatically be programmed to distribute fertiliser.
DR NANDA NANDAGOPAL, DEFENCE SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY ORGANISATION: It is very, very simple, but elegant, technology and easy to develop and implement it.
BERNARD BOWEN: The Australian Defence Force and the American military are enthusiastic after both test-firing various forms of Metal Storm.
DR NANDA NANDAGOPAL: We have a keen interest in exploring the technology and look at its possible applications for our own defence force.
BERNARD BOWEN: Mike O'Dwyer is keen to develop the technology in Australia, despite lucrative offers from the United States.
But there appears no lack of support here, with his company hitting the target of $12 million 10 days after the launch of a public float.
While Metal Storm is being hailed as a quantum leap in warfare, Mike O'Dwyer believes he hasn't yet scratched the surface of what his invention is capable of.
MIKE O'DWYER: Thirteen million round a minute as a burst rate is not a difficult figure for us to arrive at.
If I take my mind as far as I can, but still trying to keep it realistic, then 72 million rounds a minute is about as big a number I've sensibly come up with.
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New Gun Fires 'Laser of Lead'
>From Wired
Sep. 28, 2001 PT
SYDNEY, Australia -- It may not be ready for George Bush's "first war of the 21st century." But it may well be ready if there's a second.
In perhaps the most audacious upgrade of high-speed weaponry since the introduction of the Gatling Gun, Australian inventor Mike O'Dwyer has developed a machine gun that can fire bullets at a rate of 1 million rounds per minute.
Firepower like this is causing the U.S. and Australian militaries to sit up and take notice.
Both are funding deeper research into O'Dwyer's ideas, which he cooked up in his garage during more than a decade as an Australian retail store executive.
Osama bin Laden, however, needn't worry. The research is long-term and isn't expected to yield any new lethal weapons anytime soon.
Even so, the implications of the new technology's ability to change warfare are immense. And somewhat amazingly, the theory is pretty simple.
Rather than use mechanical firing pins to shoot bullets one by one, O'Dwyer's gun holds multiple bullets in the barrel -- one behind the other.
Electronic charges set off in different parts of the barrel, just fractions of a second apart, fire the bullets in blindingly fast succession using traditional gunpowder.
The result is akin to a laser beam of lead and it offers several advantages over a regular machine gun.
First, the new gun is solid-state and electronic, meaning there are few mechanical parts to jam.
Second, more bullets can be fired with one squeeze of the trigger before the gun recoils.
But perhaps most remarkable of all, the unique ballistics of firing projectiles close together means that the bullets farther back of the pack actually push those in front of them, thereby increasing bullet velocity.
O'Dwyer has filed for at least 58 patents on the invention, and the U.S. and Australian militaries together have put up roughly $50 million for further research.
In the United States, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the central research and development organization for the Department of Defense, is engaged in several studies of the technology, says Jan Walker, a spokesperson for the agency.
DARPA's primary interest is developing a high-performance sniper rifle for special operations, Walker said.
"The technology offers high accuracy, low weight as compared to a .50 caliber rifle, increased lethality, a high rate of fire and electronic controls," Walker said.
Just how lethal? That depends on how many rounds you want to fire and how many barrels you want to put to use. In a test firing of 36 barrels, lashed together and firing full bore, the gun reduced a series of 15 wooden doors to toothpicks in just two-tenths of a second.
The feat earned O'Dwyer's technology a place in the Guinness World Records for the fastest firing ballistic weapon, said company spokesman Peter Wetzig.
However, DARPA has also been examining the technology as a potential replacement for landmines.
By lashing together a series of rapid-fire barrels filled with mortars and using remote control for when and where they fire, the technology could allow friendly forces to pass through a mined area unhindered.
It could then be used to hit an enemy advancing through the same area with a huge destructive force -- all delivered in the blink of an eye.
And it's portable, meaning there's no messy leftover mines to dig up that could injure local friendlies years after a conflict is over.
Since 1997, the United States has refused to endorse an international treaty banning future production and use of traditional landmines. This has been largely due to worries that the United States would have to replace its installed base of roughly 1 million traditional landmines in the 155-mile long and 2.5-mile wide demilitarized zone between North and South Korea.
The new technology has potential as a landmine replacement, but Walker stresses that kind of application lies far down the line -- and may never prove suitable.
Meanwhile, other military uses for the technology could include installing it aboard robots to clear the way for ground troops or aboard jets to provide protective cover for reconnaissance planes.
But these applications are also somewhat tentative, Walker said.
Meanwhile, O'Dwyer is keen to develop civilian applications for the technology.
For instance, multiple laser-guided, fire-fighting, foam canisters could be launched in rapid succession to help snuff out high-rise building fires where traditional ladders can't reach.
Similarly, laser-guided fire-fighting canisters could be used against industrial fires where explosions present a major safety threat.
O'Dwyer has also adapted the technology for a police revolver. The all-electronic handgun uses the technology to ensure the gun can only to be fired if its user is wearing a special ring that emits an electronic signal.
This means the gun would be worthless if it is taken from a policeman by an assailant.
In addition, the gun can fire both lethal and non-lethal projectiles. But so far, no police forces have stepped up to buy them.
When New York's World Trade Center was destroyed on Sept. 11 by two hijacked civilian airliners, O'Dwyer had just returned to Australia from a series of speaking engagements in the United States and Europe to plug the technology.
"The level of activity for us has increased dramatically in light of events in the U.S.," said O'Dwyer's executive assistant, Sally Kaye.
Australia's Deloitte Touche Tomatsu, a global accounting and consulting firm, has placed Metal Storm Ltd. -- O'Dwyer's company, listed on the Australian Stock Exchange -- on its list of "rising stars."
"We haven't come across anything quite as unique, or as revolutionary, as what Metal Storm has in terms of technology," says Julia Bickerstaff, a Sydney-based technology specialist at Deloitte. "Thus, it's kind of hard to compare (it) to other companies."
Others who are similarly impressed include America Online's founder James V. Kimsey. In March, Kimsey invested about $1 million in Metal Storm in a private placement for a 0.4 percent stake in the company.
On Friday, Metal Storm's shares closed at $1.14 Australian dollars a piece.
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