[Colonol Dekker]

The aussies own the patent on that technique, Electrical firing i mean. Go and google METAL STORM, or IRON STORM, i forget which.....

[achtung]

Didn't some guy out in the Mid-West already make something like this (sentry turret)?  Without the infrared camera and such?

[Colonol Dekker]

Yes, they're called guns

[achtung]

Yes, they're called guns

What does that have to do with 4chan?

[Colonol Dekker]

Pleasse tell me you can see a dancing red monkey.......................*slaps self in the face*


In any case, Metal Storm was concieved by our Australian friends

[Flipside]

You got anti-hotlinked again Decker, at least it's only a bit of text saying 4chan.org this time.

My main concern is that there are other people on a battlefield than the enemy, and that's your own army. Trying to explain to a soldiers' parents that their son died from friendly fire from a misprogrammed auto-turret is not going to be a nice experience, and certainly is going to be all over the media before the barrel stops spinning.

[Colonol Dekker]

Well obviously, But you have to bear in mind that we're trained to avoid stupid things like No-go areas. I'm assuming that these things will have a locked FOV or only face a certain direction. Until in the future dog tags or uniforms contain IFF technology. Blue on Blues 99.9% of th etime are down to human error anyway.

[NGTM-1R]

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.

Maybe in the bizzaro world...

The Mk 15 Phalanx Close-In Weapons System fires standard 20mm calibur rounds, the same ones that are fired from the standard gun system on most US aircraft. Replacement of the Phalanx is not currently contemplated, as it performs quite well enough to deal with all current targets.

[spartan_0214]

IMHO, this thing is scary (Who on God's Green Earth would give this to South Korea?).  AIFF (Artificial Identification Friend or Foe) is hard to program. You have to tell it certain features to look for, and us humans (last time I check anyway) are significantly different person to person. It'd only make sense to put that monstrosity near the DMZ because anybody who's trying to cross that thing either has an extremely accurate WMD (Icarus anybody?) that can take out the 100-mile(?) long minefield that makes up the DMZ, or an IQ barely above 2.5.

IMHO, that thing should be taken apart until we can get a decent AIFF algorithm.