Metal Storm Weapons

Nice, but where's the trigger?

This article or section is incomplete. You can help IMFDB by expanding it.

Metal Storm AICW with 40mm grenade launcher using a 3-round reloadable stack

Metal Storm multi-barrel pod mounted on UGV - 40mm

Metal Storm Weapons are a series of proposed (and prototype) weapons created by the Australian company, Metal Storm Ltd. These weapons use stacked rounds in a single barrel with electrochemical ignition, allowing for enormously high fire rates due to a lack of moving parts. While quoting a cyclic fire rate of any kind is slightly misleading (since these weapons have no action and therefore no cycle of function) their headline proof-of-concept demonstrator, a 36-barrel rig, fired 180 rounds at a total fire rate of one million rounds per minute (ie, 5 rounds from each barrel at ~27,777 RPM), making it the fastest-firing gun in existence. This rig had notable pressure problems due to firing rounds while the preceding round was still inside the barrel, and was not a practical weapon system. The Metal Storm VLE pistol appears to have also essentially been a proof of concept demonstrator to show how much the technology could be miniaturised.

The technology's main shortcomings are reloading and varying ballistics; a Metal Storm weapon must have an entire pre-loaded barrel or barrel section replaced each time it is empty, and since the rounds are stacked in the barrel, each successive round travels down a longer barrel and therefore has slightly different ballistics. This has largely limited practical applications of the technology to mortars and repeating grenade launchers where varying accuracy is not a major concern.

Weapons using Metal Storm technology have been featured in the following video games and television series: