title: handgrenades and horseshoes link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2007/11/19/handgrenades-and-horseshoes/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 605 created: 2007/11/19 16:04:44 created_gmt: 2007/11/19 16:04:44 comment_status: open post_name: handgrenades-and-horseshoes status: publish post_type: post

handgrenades and horseshoes

From El Reg:

**US Navy buys ‘Metal Storm’ grenade-gasm gun**

The gist of the article is that yet another foreign manufacturer whose country of origin just happens to be a member of the “Coalition of the Billing”, has sold some small quantity of their wares to the U.S. military for “testing”.

In this case, while the technology at first seems very cool — stacking multiple projectiles in a “pod” of multiple gun barrels and then launching at a extremely high rate of fire (a million rounds per minute) one after the other until they run out using inductive ignition — the story below the fold shows it to be fairly ineffective for any but perhaps one much less dramatic purpose.. Even idiotic, given the cost.

As explained in the article, the problem with the use of this technology for missile defense (the purpose for which the Navy is looking at it) is that it’s improbable that it will actually hit anything. The author contrasts this with the proven technology in the already-deployed (though still unproven in actual combat) Phalanx anti missile system:

Phalanx actually uses its radar to track the stream of outgoing projectiles and steer them onto target. It taps out short bursts of less than a hundred shots, mirroring the tactics of properly trained humans - just much faster.

As for the “shotgun” approach used by Metal Storm:

If Phalanx fired at a million rpm it would have shot its bolt, so to speak, in less than a tenth of a second - probably failing to destroy even a single target.

In the end, a really high rate of fire is just a very fast way of wasting ammo. And Metal Storm ammo is more complicated and therefore more expensive than normal equivalents, so this is especially unfortunate. It’s also (a lot) more difficult to reload quickly. In the specific case of antimissile/anti-artillery work, you also need to worry about the weight of the multiple barrels, as everything needs to be slewed round very fast.

Metal Storm guns need lots of barrels - for ammunition storage as much as for rate of fire - and these barrels are heavier and more unwieldy if anything than normal ones (because of the need for induction electronics up much of their length). All these are bad things.

Thus the “market” reaction to all this:

Essentially, splurting off huge numbers of superimposed projectiles at flying things in a fraction of a second is fairly foolish, and this has gradually sunk in. Metal Storm stock has tanked, and in 2005 O’Dwyer “retired” as CEO. He has had two successors in that post so far.

But, of course, the U.S. military is famously undeterred by such things as reason, logic, or the facts.

After all, the Union Army went to war in 1861 with muzzle loading muskets instead of the latest repeating rifles available at the time because, well, that’s just how things were done.

A disturbing postscript to this from a quote related by one of the commentors on the El Reg article:

February 25, 1991, during the first Gulf War, the USS Missouri and the Phalanx-equipped USS Jarrett were in the vicinity of an Iraqi Silkworm missile (often referred to as the ‘Seersucker’) that had been fired, either at Missouri or at the nearby British destroyer HMS Gloucester. After Missouri fired its SRBOC chaff, the Phalanx system on Jarrett, operating in the automatic target-acquisition mode, fixed upon Missouri’s chaff and fired a burst of rounds (not destroying the incoming missile). From this burst, four rounds hit Missouri which was two to three miles (5 km) from Jarrett at the time. There were no injuries. The Silkworm missile was then intercepted and destroyed by a Sea Dart missile launched from Gloucester. Incidentally, this is the first validated, successful engagement of a missile by a missile, during combat at sea.

Oh yeah. Nothing like some more facts to reveal that things are even worse than any of us thought.

Copyright 2004-2019 Phil Lembo