The Gun Thread

try this link https://youtu.be/rIjHE2atom8

Edited by TairaMai on May 1st 2020 at 5:25:23 PM

OMFG: What do you guys think of this little monster?

"The specifications are incredible, four 6 mm barrels cut side by side within one steel block. New ammunition blocks fired by electromagnetic actuators that could theoretically give the weapon a firing rate of 250 rounds per second."

It can fire four bullets simultaneously. The bullets are encased in a block instead of individual cartridges. There is an electronic triggering device. He has a working prototype.

This seems like one of those real neat little engineering experiments that has absolutely no function or usefulness in an actual combat environment.

That's all very nice, but we'll have to see how it does in the full rigors of a combat environment first, or else it'll end up like the Gyrojets.

Or like Metal Storm

Neat concept but wholly impractical. The key here is how it loads and fires ammo. It requires what amounts to a removable breech and chamber. This creates an impractical weight for an infantry weapon and multiple barrels mean multiple problems. The same weight for 30 rounds in a large metallic block would make this an impractical weapon. Multiple barrels requires each barrel to be maintained separately and each barrel has its own separate ballistic pattern. Miniguns get over by rapidly rotating barrels and being used as a mounted weapon.

The prototype weighs 6.5 lbs, although I imagine that doesn't include the ammunition. I'm not sure how he achieves that weight, given the four-bore barrel and what I assume is a battery pack in the shoulder stock. Also, I wonder about the cooling properties of the four-bore under sustained fire. But the barrel would be very rigid, and therefore accurate, maybe that allows for thinner overall barrel width?

Regardless, this is obviously a test bed for the practicality of several new technologies, not a contender for the new standard rifle. Don't look at it from a service point of view, look at it as a possible harbinger of rifle innovations a generation or more from now.

Oh, and apparently there is a five bore version as well.

I can’t see multibarrel designs ever really catching on for individual weapons.

Edited by archonspeaks on May 4th 2020 at 6:37:49 AM

Well, if you look at it that way, it would probably be extremely fun for the civilian market.

Found some additional details:

The five bore version was an early model, it's four bore now.

He claims it won't be very heavy: "In practice, Charge Block ammo, shot-for-shot, is roughly equivalent to conventional cartridge ammo," he said, "depending on which caliber it's compared to. It's lighter than 7.62 and slightly heavier than 5.56. It outperforms both."

The ammo blocks are designed to withstand 80K psi.

The loading process is strange: "Even better, the blocks snap together and can be loaded as a partial stack. So, if you fire six blocks and want to reload, there's no need to empty the rifle. Just pull the load knob and shove in your spare stack. The weapon will accept six blocks, and you can snap off the spares and put them back into your pouch."

He claims heat isn't a problem: "In the L4, ... the chamber is integral with the Charge Block," he said. "Every four shots, the Block is ejected, along with its heat, and a new, cold one takes its place. The barrel is constructed with a thin, hard-alloy core, and a light-alloy outer casing that acts as a finned heat sink. In continuous operation, the barrel will reach an elevated temperature, then stabilize (like a piston engine). Each bore in the L4 carries only a 25 percent duty cycle, spreading the heat load and quadrupling barrel life."

And rate of fire: "All of this combines to allow an effective rate of fire somewhere between 60 and 100 shots per minute."

Mind you, I have no idea if all or any of these claims can be substantiated. I would need to see some test results before trusting any of it. But still, a very innovative design.

Innovative but is it actual useful?

Only time could tell. How useful is any experimental prototype?

From a civilian angle it would be fun, he'd just have to see how well it takes to maintain (cleaning and all) and how much the ammunition would cost together.

I often remind myself that folks gotta get the bullets and load the magazines or clips themselves before having a fun time at the range. Plus the cleaning is always nice, although it will take some time.

Heads up to Taira: Link works, thank you.

Edited by TheWildWestPyro on May 4th 2020 at 7:53:27 AM

I am not buying his claims on pretty much most of his design. The demonstration of his mechanism makes loading clumsy and he would have to use larger, bulkier, and high metal content blocks. He is not getting weight savings with that. I am not holding out for his claim of being lighter given the design requires solid blocks of ammo which are not lighter by any stretch of the imagination compared to conventional magazines. I also doubt his claims about heat unless he has a really slow rate of fire or he is using some truly exotic propellant he is going to have some serious heat build-up.

You want to see improvements to weapon design we have a real example with the newer CTA designs and efforts for the new assault rifle competition.

We got to see a host of problems of stacked or block style loadings with the failed effort from Metal Storm. I am not really seeing much in the way of improvement in his design.

Frankly, he sounds like another guy trying to push design to make a buck not actually offering real innovation or solutions. A solution hoping to find a problem to sell a novelty.

Any wild deviation of the standard gun/rifle working has never caught on.

The idea of a weapon as a "bullet hose" or "fires many projectiles in one shot" got disproved by the Army's ACR project, the failure of metal storm and the failure of the OICW. The weapons were either inaccurate, too heavy or in the case of the OICW - too heavy for the wimpy firepower of it's 25mm grenades.

The Next Gen Squad weapon and LSAT are showing that Big Army is sticking to it's guns by going to a conventional layout.

Given that we may be facing Russian "little green men" or the PLA in the next decade or two, Big Army does have to look into any technology.

Ian points out that the firearms industry is awash in neat ideas as his entry states:

All the google searches on this guy and his wundergewehr trail off after Jan 2019. Big Army is still pressing on the NGSW.

Edited by TairaMai on May 5th 2020 at 1:55:10 AM

My first thought: cleaning and maintaining that will be a whole barrel of "fun".

...

Sorry, the awful pun was just sitting there.

Ah, you guys are just debbie downers. There's no way anyone can deny the sheer coolness factor. I found some videos:

IEN Now. Shows the gun being fired and loaded.

Digital Trends.com interviews someone manning the manufacturers booth at Shot Show 2018.

The manufacturers website, which features a marketing video.

Like I said before, from an organizational and user standpoint the multibarrel design really isn’t offering any kind of advantage over a single barrel. It’s harder to take care of, harder to zero, and introduces all sorts of issues into the supply chain. There’s a laundry list of problems. What few advantages it does have are vastly outweighed by the issues. Even assuming all of those claims are true, which I don’t think they are, there’s no overcoming the issues inherent to the design.

Multiple barrels make sense for crew-served or mounted weapons, but not for individual weapons.

Edited by archonspeaks on May 5th 2020 at 1:33:54 AM

Well, without knowing anything about this particular weapon beyond what I linked to, it's obviously three times more barrels to clean (but that's it, just the barrels), presumably you zero all four bores at once (they would have to be very accurately aligned), but since there are fewer moving parts, I don't see the supply chain issues.

Obviously, the main claimed advantage is the ability to put four or five bullets into one guy at the same time. That's more kinetic energy than a shotgun round.

That's not much of an advantage in practical use.

Why not? It makes shot placement less critical.

If all the barrels are fixed in a block like what’s claimed then there’s only one zero for the whole assembly. Outside of that you’re going to have different POIs for all the different barrels, which you could zero for individually but will get further apart the further out you go. It would be a real pain in the ass for sharpshooting. From a logistics point of view, a single barrel is going to be a lot easier and cheaper. If the barrel gets messed up you can replace one barrel, rather than having to replace multiple for an issue in one barrel. That’s without mentioning the issues with ammunition.

Realistically I’m not seeing the advantage you gain by firing multiple bullets at the same time. A person can only be so dead. Moving to a round with better terminal ballistics like the 6.5 is better bang for your buck.

Edited by archonspeaks on May 5th 2020 at 4:01:19 AM

I would take a shotgun over that contraption any day. US military standard copper-coated 00 shot is 9 pellets per 2 and 3/4" shell. The shotgun is both simple, reliable, and easy to maintain. Its only real downside is ammo bulk and weight.

Like already noted once you start punching further out the worse your accuracy is going to be. Each barrel has its own point of aim. You can only zero out to a limited point before the statistics of ballistics defeats you.

That and the claims about heat would require a violation of the laws of thermodynamics. Casings carry away heat but not all heat same would hold true for this contraption. You're still pushing hot expanding gasses through the weapon and dealing projectile friction.

The ammo blocks would be logistically intensive given they require solid blocks rather than something easily packable like bullets in ammo cans or magazines.

You would need a mechanism to shift around the ammo blocks as you fire and recoil mechanism to manage the recoil of several shots firing at once. Electrical ignition while generally impressive is more expensive and requires additional maintenance.

More DAKKA does not remove the need for shot placement.

I don't see any cool factor in a gun that looks so painfully clunky.

Edited by TuefelHundenIV on May 5th 2020 at 6:20:39 AM

There's also the added weight of the ammo blocks for transport and in the field. Additionally, the reloading seems that it would be far more tricky to fit it in while under fire, unlike a traditional magazine.

Furthermore, all the videos use the same footage of the one guy firing it.

I don't actually know, but I will take the devil's advocate position here. The consistency of a single barrel firing bullets sequentially at a target is measured by a metric called "Minute of Angle", which is basically a way of measuring the circular area that bullets fall into at a given range. This circular area will expand with increasing range regardless of the firing platform or cartridge used, but obviously some weapon systems have smaller inherent MOA's than others.

Now, presumably, a multiple bore barrel will be engineered such that the bores are as parallel to each other as possible. I do not know what manufacturing tolerance is theoretically possible, but obviously something higher tech is needed than boring a hole with a drill (one of the articles mentions a computer controlled electric arcing technique). Thus, the bullets fired from the bores will have more or less dispersion from each other, not unlike the MOA of sequentially fired bullets. I propose that the bores do not have to be absolutely parallel to each other in order to be an improvement in accuracy, they only have to match the MOA of a single barrel rifle, because the multi-bore is firing four or five bullets simultaneously, and therefore achieves the same effect as a burst of fire from a single barrel, but in less time. One might expect that the four bullets will be inherently more accurate than four bullets fired sequentially because recoil will not affect the MOA of the multi-bore's accuracy.

I take it as given that it is better to hit a target with more bullets rather than less.