Centrifugal weapon under development

Centrifugal weapon could deliver stealth firepower


"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."

"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."

Article


I wonder how big it is, what would it be used against, etc.

simple idea really they just took a softball/baseball/tennis ball pitching machine and said "hey this could be deadly if you put the right ammo in it". Take a spinning flywheel like die grinder with a rubber, drive wheel (think roller coaster propulsion system) and in case it something like a turbine housing with an ammo feed and bingo one high velocity "sling shot". If you say had a hopper with 100,000 small 1 oz BB's and fling them at high velocity and at a high rate of fire, the combined kenetic/mass effect of the ammo will shread any non-hardened thing to bits.

Make the weapon capable of having three or more "drives" with a few angles of seperation from each "tube" and you get an effective low cost, massive destruction area affect weapon.

Even steel sheet can be defeated by this type of attack as each successive bb deflects and stretch the steel until it it finally breached, maybe it will take 100 bb's to breach 1/8 steel but if you have a fire rate of say 200 or 300 a second you could have potentially 100 or 200 rounds entering the breach and hitting whatever is on the other side not to mention the richochet effect prior to breach and after as the BB's run into other more hardened objects inside.

Would be great against radar masts and other sensitive electronic installations as the damage to the electrical arrays would make them in operable

Think about if the ball bearings they used weren't just the size of bb's, but something like 1in diameter. Having something spitting out 200 of those per second could do some damage. Maybe have an automatic range finder so say 3 tubes could be positioned to one target from different angles like said above.

Wow! this could be the gun of all guns.

120,000 rounds per minute, how much does a .308 or a .50 caliber cost per round?

Man, you could level a house using a .50 caliber at 120, 000 rounds per minute.

The cost to fire this gun could be its death, but if it saves the life of one American solider, I say give this gun to each grunt and let them loose!!!

GBA!

www.military.com...

No heat, no recoil, no sound, no gunpowder, no flash -- just 120,000 rounds per minute of pulverizing power. The next generation of weapons systems has arrived: the DREAD centrifuge-powered weapon system.

According to its inventor, not only is it possible, it's already happened. An updated version of the weapon will be available soon. It will arrive in the form of a tactically-configured pre-production anti-personnel weapon firing .308 caliber projectiles (accurately) at 2,500-3000 fps, at a variable/programmable cyclic rate of 5,000-120,000 rpm (rounds-per-minute). The weapon's designer/inventor has informed DefRev that future versions of the weapon will be capable of achieving projectile velocities in the 5,000-8,000 fps range with no difficulty. The technology already exists.

That's a pretty nifty idea, and I bet it doesn't legally qualify as a firearm (yet). I guess it's time to dust off my work bench. It will work much better than my old centrifugal weapon (i pick people up and swing them around a few times before bashing them into one of those thorned palo verde trees)

Joking aside though, it seems like a weapon like this would be more easily defeated by any kind of armor than a bullet and would be difficult to design AP rounds for because the function of the weapon could concievably impart a tumble to a non-spherical projectile. I'm just not sure if it will be worth the money on a battle field. Other than being the most highly effective way to kill large groups of unprotected civilians what will it be good for? Sure it would play hell with electronics, but how many completely unprotected electronic systems are there on the battlefield?

Is there anything I'm missing that might make this weapon versatile enough to merit the cost of development and deployment, or is this just a glorified potato gun that a some bored engineer dreamed up because there his company didn't have any real projects to work on?

You guys are slacking up here.
No picture posted yet?
Here is an article with promotional video [scroll down to end of article for the link].
World Exclusive Video! DREAD Weapon System: Devastating, Jam-Proof, and Silent.




seekerof

[edit on 11-5-2005 by Seekerof]

There have already been several threads a few months ago about the DREAD. There seems to be alot of repetition in this forum, if people don't see it on the front page then they seem to assume it hasn't been posted.

Sounds to me like they simply re-invented an oldie but goodie...

I knew a guy that had a really nice leather one with a pocket, he ordered a case of lug nuts from Ford Motors, and man let me tell ya, that thing wasn't anything to sneer at. He busted all the boards out of his barn with it, and got so accurate he could hit small bugs on trees, etc.
They were for a long time a staple in military campaigns, it was said that without 'slingers' you could not win in open warfare.

[edit on 12-5-2005 by twitchy]

Punkin Chunkin!

This has been done for years at the Punkin Chunkin World Championships in Delaware. It's a contest each year to see who can shoot a pumpkin the furthers. The categories are air powered, centrifugal, and catapault. Some of the centrifugal ones use 350 Chevy's to spin a huge arm at several hundred RPM's and then release the pumkin.

There's some links to video clips of them firing pumpkins here.