So what is this Metal Storm weapons company?

[mr friendly guy]

I vaguely remember years ago about an Australian inventor who supposedly invented a gun which fired rounds much faster than conventional ones, and he was going to work with Uncle Sam to develop the technology. I don't remember the name, but after seeing an article from news.com.au, I suspect this is one Mike O'Dwyer. He seemed to have formed a company called Metal Storm manufacturing such weapons, which apparently have both a lethal (for military) and non lethal rounds (for law enforcement).

Now this alleged technology has an interesting history, with the Chinese supposedly trying to buy the technology in 2006. linky and second link. This of course came to light after some um, ex agents became members of Falun Gong.

Anyway, what caught my eye was an article in the technology section of news.com.au, which shows that Metal Storm has gone bankrupt. Intrigued I did a bit of research and found the alleged Chinese espionage connection.


http://www.news.com.au/business/compani ... 6435689065

Weapons developer Metal Storm placed in voluntary administration
Save this story to read later
by: Liam Walsh
From: The Courier-Mail
July 26, 2012 1:30PM

BRISBANE weapons maker Metal Storm - which pitched ideas ranging from an electronic handgun to a three-shot grenade launcher - has finally run out of cash after 18 years of development.
Voluntary administrators were called in this morning to Metal Storm, which has chalked up $115 million in losses.

It followed stumbles in a recent financing deal involving Luxembourg-based Luxinvest Capital Advisers SA. Funding markets are tightening amid European turmoil.

Metal Storm's board is hoping to restructure the operation, or sell of the business as a going concern.

Metal Storm has had a tumultuous history since inventor Mike O'Dwyer developed the concept in 1994 of an electronic gun trumpeted as being able to unleash more than a million bullets a minute.

In 1999, the company listed with a prospectus to raise $12 million, featuring a Jeep with a roof-dome blasting rounds. The technology was promoted as one to shatter "traditional mechanical ballistics paradigms".

Shares rocketed initially, touching the equivalent now of $3.31 in July 2000 as hype surrounded the technology. They were frozen in a trading halt at 0.1c since last week.
Metal Storm in recent years has faced multiple financing crisis, including when a Filipino white knight failed to turn up with promised cash. Each time, it has scrounged adequate financing but the recent delay in financing involving Luxinvest pushed Metal Storm to the brink.
Metal Storm

"After considering all of the available options for Metal Storm and after carefully reviewing the company's financial position, the board has determined that the appointment of the administrators is necessary and in the best interests of Metal Storm's creditors and shareholders," the company said.

The Courier-Mail understands staff have been kept on by the administrators from Dean Willcocks Shepard Recovery & Strategy.

Metal Storm has faced doubters about the validity of its technology. It has missed milestones and switched the focus of weapons development.

One example was of inventor Mike O'Dwyer in 2000 speaking of getting the handgun "to market" within two years. By 2005, Metal Storm benched the gun, saying it needed to focus on systems that deliver revenues faster.

Its latest focus was on a mini-shotgun slung underneath guns.
Metal Storm chairman Terry O'Dwyer told The Courier-Mail today's appointment of administrators was not a reflection on the technology.
"The company has been under financial stress because the company's funding comes from capital that it can raise ... the company's problem is not the technology," he said.

I am sure clearly he was patriotic choosing to work with the Australian government rather than take $100 million of imaginary money from imaginary Chinese agents, agents who were exposed by brave Chinese Australian citizens who just sooo happen to be Falun Gong members with an axe to grind. Clearly a brave noble and HONEST man, we need more of these white elephants brave people in the country.

In case its not obvious, I suspect a) the technology didn't work b) he played the Chinese bogey man card to get funding, and did it in such a way which smacks of lying.

[Mr Bean]

The technology worked fine the problem with Metal Storm was always the whole reloading issue. A comparison was made to general purpose machine guns. When you have a general purpose machine gun, 800 rounds per minute is about the most you want to be throwing downrange as every extra bullet is going to be wasted and your going to heating up a lot faster. Plus you need to carry more ammunition. This is not true of anti-air machine guns when engagement windows are three seconds or less, more is better in that role since you do lots of not firing for every second of firing you do. But for something your infantry are going to be carrying around it's important to balance your ROF against heat buildup, accuracy and suppression effect.

Metal storm worked great in that you could fire a hundred bullets a second or forty grenades a second but it was very much an Alpha strike weapon and not all that useful in most battlefields because reloads were heavy and the insane ROF meant that you were reloading all the time. There were issues as well with particular usage as one of the metal storm claims was being able to hand the things off to computer control and fire the exact number of rounds required and not one more but the example Metal Storm units produced could only fire all of their rounds at once.

So yeah it was a working weapon that was pretty much useless from a cost/usability prospective.

[Zixinus]

[quote]
"The company has been under financial stress because the company's funding comes from capital that it can raise ... the company's problem is not the technology," he said.[quote\]

This is the crux of the problem. Metal Storm works. It just doesn't seem to have a market that is really willing to buy it.

I mean, conventional weapons can kill a man just as well as a Metal Storm weapon can. The only improvement with the Metal Storm concept is theoretically faster fire rate (which is, if I understand this correctly, ofset by the problem that reloading means putting in whole new barrels into the weapon), which is probably used more in video games than in real life. WW2 era rifles can just as well kill a man as they can do today. 5.56 NATO can also kill a man just fine. Burst and automatic fire is sometimes admittedly already overkill compared to a single shot and is mostly used (as far as I understand) more for covering/suppressing fire purposes than anything else (or perhaps in CQC where large amounts of firepower can make a difference).

So, the problem isn't that Metal Storm doesn't work, it's just that there is no sane reason to buy this weapon over a conventional one. Or simply put, the company manufactures stuff that just nobody needs.

Their only recluse, perhaps, is a niché application product where their technology can do something that conventional small arms can't. I cannot figure a situation where that is the case.

[ChaserGrey]

The only application I've heard being seriously discussed for Metal Storm is defense against hypersonic missiles, which can put a premium over ROF over pretty much anything else. But even then, you can probably get "good enough" with a high-velocity radar guided gun like Phalanx or AK-630, which can also be used against targets like small boats.

Far as I can tell, Metal Storm is pretty much a brilliant solution in search of a problem.

[Lord Revan]

really only times you really need insane ROF is either PD- or AA-guns and with both of those fast reloading is really, really important as you're essentially filling the "kill zone" with as much projectiles as possible to increase the chances that you hit the intended target.

those are the only situations I can think of where you'd need ultra high ROF.

which brings an intresting question, what's the effective ROF of the Metal Storm guns during extended use.

[Covenant]

The original metalstorm demo products were area impact weapons that used a cluster of barrels and stacked ammunition to put 1000 rounds or whatever downrange in 300-esque cloud of projectiles, but rearming them requires restocking the entire tube. If you want to think about the sustained ROF of a metalstorm system you either need to assume it fires like a cannon and has an extended reload time (or a massive autoloader) and have a ton of spare ammo tubes to slap into the thing. It's not that different from any other loading process, I would imagine, but it adds the same kind of mechanical chokepoint other weapons have. Assuming you're running a dedicated Supergun platform, you could have as many of those things as you want I bet, and probably an automated loading system and a barrel rotation system to help keep cooling down.

At this point though you've basically back-engineered Metalstorm into a conventional AA gun. It might just be cheaper to have multiple conventional AA weapons than a single super ROF one.

This would have been fantastic if it had come out before the cold war got heavy and we were expecting massed armies and wanted to have remote fireteam-destroying bullet huffers hidden in the German hill country. But in the current arms climate you need smarter weapons, not sprayier weapons.

Metalstorm's bullet-cloud weapons could have possibly been things you slap onto tanks like the smoke poppers, to act as instant reaction fire things that suppress enemy infantry but that's stretching it when you already have an a well-loved machinegun model on anything that can carry one. This is the same problem with stuff like miniguns, it sounds cool but cool is all it does. Logistically and mechanically it makes more sense to do it this way than that way.

I have no idea what these modern multi-weapon items are but they sound entirely useless to me, and apparently to just about everyone else except the Chinese, who apparently only gave up on it after it killed a few hundred workers?

[Nephtys]

It was also my understanding that Metal Storm suffered from accuracy issues. Because of the stacked bullet configuration, each round had a different aerodynamic profile due to both the effects of the round before it leaving the barrel, but also the varying barrel length. Since they were stacked, there could be extreme variation between the first and last rounds out of the tube.

I suppose they did imagine it being used as a CIWS sort of thing. But that's been mentioned before that for ships, conventional multibarrel is more flexible and likely reliable. And for aircraft (specifically helicopters), they're employing to lasers to knock out portable SAMs instead.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

To be honest, I'm amazed Metal Storm has survived for as long as it has, simply because with no-one using or buying their weapons, where have they gotten the financing? It's great in theory, because the only moving part is the projectile itself and cannot jam, but the fundamental issue with it is reloading.

A few years ago I looked at one of the promo videos that demonstrated its capabilities and how it could be adapted to civilian use where the reloading isn't an issue, like firefighting. The video proposed using the system in fighting fires in the upper floors of skysrcapers, by firing canisters of fire-suppressing foam from an array of launchers along the length of the fire engine.

What first got media attention was the claimed "1 million rounds per minute" in this video, but it's immediately obvious that you're out of bullets right away.

[weemadando]

The only really viable ideas were the 40mm under barrel replacement and the handgun.

The handgun especially for law enforcement was interesting as the proposal was for 3-4 barrels inappropriate detachable block wher each barrel has a different round. IIRC the theory was 1 or 2 tubes of "live" ammo (2x tubes for an instant "double tap") and then one tube with mini beanbags and one with pepper balls or what not.

Not a terrible idea, except there's a reason guns and tasers are on separate sides of the belt. And why less lethal shotguns are bright colours.

[mr friendly guy]

The technology worked fine the problem with Metal Storm was always the whole reloading issue. A comparison was made to general purpose machine guns. When you have a general purpose machine gun, 800 rounds per minute is about the most you want to be throwing downrange as every extra bullet is going to be wasted and your going to heating up a lot faster. Plus you need to carry more ammunition. This is not true of anti-air machine guns when engagement windows are three seconds or less, more is better in that role since you do lots of not firing for every second of firing you do. But for something your infantry are going to be carrying around it's important to balance your ROF against heat buildup, accuracy and suppression effect.

Metal storm worked great in that you could fire a hundred bullets a second or forty grenades a second but it was very much an Alpha strike weapon and not all that useful in most battlefields because reloads were heavy and the insane ROF meant that you were reloading all the time. There were issues as well with particular usage as one of the metal storm claims was being able to hand the things off to computer control and fire the exact number of rounds required and not one more but the example Metal Storm units produced could only fire all of their rounds at once.

So yeah it was a working weapon that was pretty much useless from a cost/usability prospective.

Done some further reading, apparently the Chinese were interested in having something similar but for Close-In Weapons Systems and Hyper-velocity Ballistic Missile Interception. (yeah the source is wiki, so take it with a pinch of salt). Any possibilities it might have applications there instead of being a machine gun on steroids?

[Sea Skimmer]

I think Metalstorm did go bankrupt at least once before, I know they've been razor close several times, so they might pull through yet again. I doubt Metalstorm itself will ever go anywhere, but the electrical primer technology might find uses on other weapons.

The only application I've heard being seriously discussed for Metal Storm is defense against hypersonic missiles, which can put a premium over ROF over pretty much anything else. But even then, you can probably get "good enough" with a high-velocity radar guided gun like Phalanx or AK-630, which can also be used against targets like small boats.

That's a pretty dumb idea really. The faster the missile, the more effective range you need to avoid being shredded by all the fragmentation when it breaks up or explodes. 20mm and 30mm guns are already highly questionable against mach 2-3 missiles. Firing faster doesn't really solve this more then fractionally, and the bigger the caliber, the less and less feasible Metalstorm becomes because of recoil and how damn big and clumsy the whole thing would become, also the more expensive. Also loading is also more and more of a problem. A hypersonic missile will only effectively be stopped by another guided missile.

One role Metal Storm did make a bit of sense for, and the only role it has actually be sold for, was a way to arm very small robot ground vehicles with grenades. The US Army built some prototypes with a couple four round grenade launchers on them. But these designs gained no real traction because its really just too limited of a niche to make sense to buy completely custom weapons and otherwise incompatible ammunition for.

Metalstorm has been trying to sell a clip on five shot Metalstorm grenade launcher for infantry for a while, but nobody want's the thing because firstly, it locks you into buying only whatever ammo types Metalstorm decides it wants to make instead vast world of NATO or Russian standard 40/30mm rounds, and secondly because pump action multiple shot grenade launchers that can fire that ammo already exist, as do exploding 12 shotguns rounds and clip on 12 gauge shotguns, and nobody has found much use for those weapons either.

[Purple]

Talking about hypersonic anti ship missiles. If you can detect one in time is there a reason why you would not just put up a WW2 style wall of flak in it's way? It would work better than metal storm or trying to hit the thing with a bullet or canon. Something like a fast firing 40mm might actually be quite good there. And unlike metal storm you could actually make the shells blow up at a nice and safe distance from the ship to prevent damage from either them or the exploding enemy missile.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

From Wiki:

Limitations of gun systems

Short range: The maximum effective range of 20-mm gun systems is about 4500 m; systems with lighter projectiles have even shorter range. The expected real-world kill-distance of an incoming anti-ship missile is about 500 m or less, [3] still close enough to possibly cause damage on the ship's sensor or communication arrays. This makes the timeframe for interception relatively short; for supersonic missiles moving at 1500 m/s it is approximately one-third of a second.

Limited kill probability: even if the missile is hit and damaged, it may not be enough to destroy it or change its course enough to prevent it or fragments of it from hitting its intended target, particularly as the interception distance is short. This is especially true if the gun fires kinetic-energy-only projectiles.

Guns can only fire at one target at a time; switching targets may take up to one second for training the gun.

A gun must predict the target's course and aim at the predicted position. Modern anti-ship missiles make intentional erratic moves before impact, reducing the probability of being hit by unguided projectiles.

Missile systems do not have the same limitations as gun systems. Because of their greater range, a missile-CIWS can also be dual-used as a short-ranged area-defense anti-air weapon, eliminating the need for a second mount for this role.

After an inertial guidance phase, a CIWS missile relies on infra-red, passive radar/ESM or semi-active radar terminal guidance, or a combination of these. The ESM-mode is particularly useful since most long-range anti-ship missiles use radar to home in on their targets. Some systems allow the launch platform to send course-correction commands to the missile in the inertial guidance phase.

[Sea Skimmer]

The problem with any gun is it can only shoot at one target at a time, and it would have no time to adjust its aim, and being a gun the accuracy of its aim depends on a great many factors from the adjustment of the electric motors that move the mounting to the temperature of the air the shell flies through. This just gets steadily worse as target speed increases. Metalstorm wants to solve all that by using shear density of gunfire to make missing impossible but this is the definition of a brute force solution, and those rarely work out well.

Now PFHE ammunition already exists for 40mm and 57mm guns designed to throw out large numbers of small shrapnel balls as you are thinking, it’s fairly viable against current threats but questionable against mach 5+. Bofors claims ~3,000 fragments and sharpnel balls produced by a 40mm round, and the 40mm gun they have fires at 300 rpm which means 900,000 bits of flying metal per minute. Suddenly Metalstorm making a 1 million RPM machine gun isn’t so impressive. The 57mm round is three times as big, though its fragments and balls are also larger, but you get the idea. This is service reality stuff, not conceptual save us from bankruptcy concepts.

One problem with this little bits of metal approach is the faster enemy missiles also tend to be bigger and heavier and just plain tougher, and while knocking small holes in the control surfaces will cripple them, you need to physically disintegrate the missile and its warhead and motor to protect the ship, or else cripple it at a range measured in kilometers so it can crash in time. This is why the US Phalanx mount uses discarding sabot projectiles, which are actually less effective for knocking holes in the enemy missile, but far more effective at exploding warheads and causing internal breakup, and it improved accuracy of the gun by keeping velocity higher.

Also, as gun size goes up, so does innate accuracy. Good reason to use a larger, if slower firing weapon within limits when the threat is fast and needs to be killed as far away as possible. Metalstorm would be working against itself, since it would have to be small caliber to have some crazy high ROF in an acceptable size gun mount, and yet this would also reduce accuracy, and the pattern simply HAS to be super dense because you only get one shot at one target with no time to adjust at closer ranges. Also it gets worse because anti ship missiles are steadily growing more agile which means you have to hold fire until the range is very short anyway.

It works better to just fire a small missile that can correct its aim, and actually may become more rather then less accurate with range, and then blows up with a warhead equivalent to the blast of a decent sized artillery shell rather then a little autocannon round when it hits the target. This is the logic of RAM. RAM and similar missiles are even better because by using IR guidance, the faster and thus hotter the enemy missile, the better the guidance system will work.

Metalstorm as a naval CIWS is just another sniffing up for a problem for the solution they already have. It doesn’t make any real sense against hypersonics, in fact the USN has been testing its defenses against ~mach 4 target drones since the 1970s and RAM is the solution it came up with.

If Metalsotrm was going to be used as a CIWS for anything, I’d suggest a C-RAM role against mortars and artillery is a lot more viable and less technologically demanding for the gun mount, but still unlikely to go anywhere because of limited range. In fact a little tripod mounted Metalstorm cannon, plus the US Lightweight Countermortar Radar might make a fair team, but Metalstorm simply does not have the money to invest in a project like that. Meanwhile most interest for C-RAM now involves guided missiles, lasers and in some cases guided shells from relatively large cannon. The Germans have also fielded a 35mm system firing AHEAD ammo, which is prefragmented as with the 40mm and 57mm ammo mentioned above, but with much different fusing. Each 35mm has 152 x subprojectiles and the gun fires at 1000rpm. That's 152,000 projectiles per minute, once more making a joke of needing Metalstorm for anything.

[Lord Revan]

btw why I asked about the effective ROF is that most guns have insane theoretical max ROFs, I think M-16 has about 1000 rounds/min and the finnish RK-62 (AK-47 derivitive) has about 600-700 rounds/min (acording to wikipedia) but the actual effective ROF is much slower as it takes time to reload and neither of those have that much ammo per mag.

[LaCroix]

btw why I asked about the effective ROF is that most guns have insane theoretical max ROFs, I think M-16 has about 1000 rounds/min and the finnish RK-62 (AK-47 derivitive) has about 600-700 rounds/min (acording to wikipedia) but the actual effective ROF is much slower as it takes time to reload and neither of those have that much ammo per mag.

As far as I know, most automatics do empty their standard Magazine in roughly two seconds. Going full auto would mean that you can empty 8-9 mags in 60 seconds (mag change takes about 5 seconds), makes roughly 250 rounds with a 30 mag. Good rule of thumb is 1/3 - 1/2 of maximum ROF, except for highly drilled people (speed reload 'artists').

Metal storm claims to have ROF of 1000000, proved by firing ~10000 rounds in less than a second. After which you need to replace 100 tubes (the whole launcher) or thereabout, which would take some minutes, I guess. Actually reloading these tubes probably takes days.

Completely useless for real life application. The only thing I found somewhat feasible was their 'Mortar Area Denial System', which would have worked with a conventional mortar or a Mark 19, as well.

[Sea Skimmer]

The fasts firing assault rifle is the FAMAS IIRC at 950rpm. Most are in the 650-800rpm range. Malfunctioning M16s in Vietnam did hit ~1000rpm but this was because the gas system was mistimed and was the direct cause of massive unreliability. If you fire a rifle at even a couple hundred RPM though it will overheat in a few minutes, cooling limits your true sustained ROF to under 20 rounds per minute (quick, bolt action!) Metalstorm is basically a quick change barrel just to reload so it shouldn't be limited by heat much, but it is limited by the ammo being heavy because it all has to be prepackaged in fresh barrels. This is why basically every Metalstorm concept uses a short barrel to keep down that weight, making it immensely unsuited to high velocity applications like anti aircraft guns. Works okay for grenade launchers since the barrels are always puny and the low velocity allows for a thin barrel and firing chamber.

That area denial system was literally doing the same thing you could already do firing a cluster bomb out of a mortar, but yeah, it was interesting as a landmine replacement. Problem is it wasn't going to be very discriminating in the size of area blown up, and people looking for expensive high end landmine replacements generally want more focused effects then a barrage of 40mm grenades.