I've heard about the design for sometime. Their supposed to be installed on some of the Navy's experimental watercraft and tested there for possible installation on their other ships. It's supposed to be a way to prevent things like what happened to the Cole. Also, that's a gatling gun, not a machine gun. It's based of the same idea as the CIWS. In fact, it is a CIWS (Close in Weapons Support) except it's supposed to shoot at terrorist on suicide runs as apposed to shooting down incoming missles. The CIWS uses the same gun that's on the A-10 Warthog, firing Tungsten bullets. They don't have a firing pin, and instead are fired using electrical pulses. This allows it to fire at a rate of somewhere aroung 3-4500 rounds per minute in short bursts. This gun uses the same principles, but without the tungsten rounds, but it still has electrical firing and an extremely high firing rate.
The CIWS is fully automated, and only fires at incoming missiles. This system is semi-automated in that it doesn't require a human to aim it, and it automatically tracks and identifies targets and threats. It still requires a human operator to "release batteries" and let it open fire. The whole concept is that Navy ships require a sentry watch at all major threatpoints at all time. Keeping all of these sentries qualified and placing at all threat areas is taxing on the personell and expensive. Placing these guns at all the threat areas reduces the sentry watch to one person at a time, greatly reducing the strain on the watchstanding needs on the personnel of Navy ships in foreign and domestic ports.
