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A gun that spits out ball bearings after spinning them to extreme speeds is being
developed by a US inventor. The novel design has already caught the imagination
of some defence industry experts.
The weapon, called DREAD, was invented by Charles St George, a veteran of the
US firearms industry who founded the company Leader Propulsion Systems to promote
the idea. He claims a major US defence company has shown an interested in developing
it further and has produced a promotional video showing a prototype in action,
which can be seen here
(Quicktime). He says a new prototype will be developed in August 2005.
The gun consists of a mounted circular chamber that spins the metal ball bearings
to high speed. A release mechanism on one side spits the balls out one behind
the other, a handful at a time.
St George says the projectiles travel at around 300 metres per second upon
release from the weapon, about the same speed as a handgun round. He claims
a fully developed DREAD gun would be quieter than a conventional gun, less prone
to malfunction, and could contain more ammunition.
DREAD also releases its balls in extremely rapid succession, which allows it
to unleash formidable firepower against a target. Promotional material for DREAD
states: "Due to its extraordinary high rate of fire capability, it delivers
its bullets 8.5 millimetres apart, thereby delivering more mass to the target
than any other weapon."
Overwhelming and devastating
St George would not specify the range or accuracy of the most recent prototype
or explain precisely how the system works, because he says this information
could be commercially sensitive.
But a patent issued to him in February 2003 has been found by Marc Abrahams,
editor of science humour magazine Annals of Improbable Research. It refers to
a "Weapon for Centrifugal Propulsion of Projectiles". In this design,
balls are stored inside a series of narrow chambers that radiate from the centre
of a circular chamber and which are rotated with the chamber at high speed.
A mechanism beneath each narrow chamber automatically manoeuvres a single ball
into a smaller compartment at near its edge. When the trigger is pulled, these
balls are released into a guide rail and shoot from the disc rapidly, from a
hole at its edge.
"The system seems absolutely feasible," says David Crane, editor
of the website DefenseReview.com. The weapon could strike targets with “overwhelming
and devastating firepower - we're talking about total target saturation,"
he wrote in an article posted to the site.
Terry Gander, who edits the defence industry journal Jane's Infantry Weapons,
adds that similar concepts have been developed in the past. But Gander notes
that these have had low projectile velocity and have been proposed as crowd
control weapons. "It all depends on the sort of power source you have,"
he told New Scientist. "I'd be very interested to know what its range is."
But Abrahams finds the idea outlandish. "Anything that seems so far beyond
anything else is worth a moment's thought before you completely gulp it down,"
he told New Scientist. "It is way out on the side of the scale that deals
with high levels of imagination."
