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Metal Storm Is All About Delivering Firepower

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Metal Storm Is All About Delivering Firepower American Antigravity.Com Page 1 of 10 By Tim Ventura & Art Schatz, August 8th, 2006 At a million rounds a minute, Metal Storm is all about delivering firepower. Whether you’re firing bullets from a rifle or grenades from a UGV, this unique new 21st-century weapons technology has you covered. Art Schatz takes us on a tour of the gun of tomorrow… AAG: I'd like to start out by congratulating you on your recent success in the Discovery Channel's "Future Weapons" program. I'd previously read about the Metal Storm technology a few years ago in Popular Science, but hadn't realized how far along you were in the development process until I saw your stunning demonstrations on television. Can you tell us a bit about what it was like to work with Discovery on this show? Schatz: The Discovery Channel has a very professional team and they produce widely watched programs so it was exciting for us to be working with such a fantastic team of people. We are well down the development path now and have come a long way with our engineering effort over the last 18 months. We have a number of products on the development path and we are moving to a very exciting stage with our unique technology. Discovery were so impressed with Metal Storm that they are considering doing another segment on a test range and highlighting our weapon system from the operational standpoint. AAG: How did the concept for Metal Storm actually originate? I mean, people have been complaining about cartridges & magazines for decades, but you're the first company to radically change the equation by actually putting the magazine into the barrel and sequentially firing stacked rounds. Where did this innovative idea come from? American Antigravity.Com Page 2 of 10 Schatz: It originated from an idea the founder had that bullets could be fired from a stacked position in a rifle barrel and that the discharge of the lead bullet would not set off the remainder. The founder, Mike O’ Dwyer, was only several months old when his father died as part of an invasion force into Borneo a few days before the end of World War II. He thought that if his father had a more effective weapon he might have been able to survive and it was this aspect that drove him to consider various opportunities for the improvement of conventional weaponry. He began to conceptualize an idea and eventually took it to local gun shop to build the first prototypes which proved to be the formal genesis of Metal Storm. AAG: Speaking of which, from watching the show it appeared that the ability to stack & fire projectiles seated in rows in the barrel really is the magic that makes the Metal Storm concept work. I understand that you use an electrochemical combustion process to ignite each round individually, and I'm wondering if you could describe the mechanism behind how this solution actually works? Schatz: Actually it is considered electronic inductive initiation and has nothing to do electrochemical combustion. What we are able to do to is send an electronic signal down the barrel using inductive coupling to create ignition. So basically instead of having a standard mechanical hammer hitting a percussion cap to ignite propellant, we use an electronic primer and standard propellant. The fact that this signal is sent electronically means that we can send multiple signals down the barrel to multiple projectiles at extremely high electronic rates. AAG: The ammunition you're firing is typically caseless, right? I can't picture this weapon being capable of ejecting traditional spent cartridges, and yet it seems like developing caseless ammunition adds an extra design challenge to the technology. Can you tell us about the different types of Rapid Fire: Projectiles are stacked in the ammunition that you're capable of firing with this barrel and fired electronically in sequence. device? Schatz: No, we are not using caseless ammunition and we have none of the problems that are associated with attempts to commercialize caseless ammunition. Metal Storm combines off the shelf warheads with our own unique patented tailpiece. We have fired HE, thermobaric and airburst munitions however we are also able to fire munitions according to customer requirements. The great thing about Metal Storm technology is that we can fire different munition natures simultaneously, or at variable rates of fire. We can provide for a scaled response from the same weapon pod and we are also capable of providing very rapid and intense bursts of firepower. The ability to simply and immediately select munitions to suit the operational situation is a real advantage. AAG: It appears that many of the Metal-Storm weapons feature multiple barrels - including even the handgun that you've constructed. It seems like this is a pervasive design element across American Antigravity.Com Page 3 of 10 your entire line of weapons systems, but I'm wondering what advantages it conveys, especially given the already amazing capability of the Metal-Storm platform to deliver a high-rate stream of projectiles? Schatz: When you consider that Metal Storm stacks its projectiles in the barrel, then naturally the more projectiles the longer the barrel will have to be. We have found that by using multiple barrels we gained two advantages. First, since in reality each barrel can be considered an individual weapon we can use mixed loads of munitions in a single weapon. We might have a barrel that fires sensors, another that fires flares, others that carry less-lethal projectiles with the remaining barrels carrying a variety of lethal warheads from standard HE to fragmentation to air burst or thermobaric rounds. Also, since we would want to carry a sufficient quantity of projectiles for a given mission, having the multiple barrels allows us carry enough ammo in a relatively compact weapon. Sometimes we like to refer to the Metal Storm gun as the box of ammunition that can be fired. In reality you can load the ammo in the factory, ship it, store it, then take it to the battlefield and fire it. AAG: Speaking of which, I'd like to ask a bit more about the "Metal Storm Handgun". This was a new feature that really took me by surprise in the Discovery Special, and I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on how this changes the typical dynamic for handguns in terms of firing rate, accuracy, and ammunition expenditure? Schatz: The handgun was a compact way of demonstrating the stacked round technology as well as incorporating numerous features that an electronic weapon allows. This included “smart gun” technology that would allow the handgun to be fired only by authorized users. While working on a grant from the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) on smart gun technology we became aware of work being conducted by the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) on a Dynamic Grip Recognition (DGR) technology, and we have been working with them since to marry our technologies. The ballistic characteristics and performance of the handgun in terms of rates of fire, accuracy and ammunition expenditure are similar to conventional handguns. Metal Storm's current activities are really focused on our 40 mm systems however we will continue to explore any opportunities for the handgun for the Handgun: The O’ Dwyer VLE Smartgun is the future. world’s first all-electronic “solid-state” handgun. AAG: So many different aspects of the Metal Storm technology are such radical departures from traditional weapons that I can't help but wonder how difficult the early prototypes were to design, construct, and troubleshoot. I mean, you've changed so many paradigms in terms of barrels, firing rate, ammunition, and configuration that I'm wondering if you've encountered any difficulties in the integration process? Schatz: The prototypes we have built have worked very well indeed and the technology has performed as expected. There are the normal technical challenges in any new effort but we are very happy with regard to the developments to date. For example, our Redback weapon system and the 3 shot grenade launcher are all progressing well. We have a strong and very capable engineering team aboard now and integrating all the elements of the technology has become American Antigravity.Com Page 4 of 10 more streamlined for us. We have moved forward a long way with the technology in recent times. Ignition systems, fire control systems and munitions have all advanced markedly just in the last 18 months and those elements will all be integrated into the products we have selected to bring to market in the short-term. AAG: Your current designs appear to integrate the Metal Storm technology into rather conventional packages, but given the number and scope of advances that you've made to firearms technology, do you believe that as Metal Storm evolves it may begin to change the shape of the weapon altogether? Will the rifle that we see now disappear to be replaced with something that may appear almost unrecognizable to us at present? Schatz: While that might be a possibility, and the capability to do that is ever present, it’s hard to change perceptions as to what a weapon should look and feel like. For the near term, as we progress, we prefer to keep the fit, form and function recognizable so as not to have to try to educate a new generation of end users to a totally new concept in look and feel. Once we have made substantial inroads into a market, we can then afford the time and energy to ‘experiment’ with new look weapons, but only if they provide beneficial capability to soldiers.
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