future weapons tech

while i generally consider myself a pacifist, ive always had this fascination with u.s. military hardware. its probably the sci-fi nerd in me exerting its influence, but ive always been interested in the myriad of high technology that runs rampant (and on many occasions, secretly) thru the defense departments r&d. in the past, new technologies took years…even decades to develop, test, and implement. in modern-day warfare however, the rules and environments change too fast for the old methodologies to keep up. tech these days are developed on the fly, harkening back to the days of ww2…when necessity dictated that new hardware be battle-ready within months. popular science has an interesting article today that takes a look at five of these emerging military tech developments, some of which are down-right frightening.

RAILGUNS
anybody whos ever seen the movie eraser, or played the games quake or metal gear solid should be quite familiar with the rail gun, a launch system that uses electromagnetic rails to launch a heavy metal slug a ridiculous distance. for those that dont know, railguns are already a reality…tho implementation of the 20-year old technology is currently limited because of the massive amounts of energy required. thanks to the development of next-generation all-electric battleships however, the navy is looking to develop destroyers that utilize railguns in conjunction with satellite targetting. the premise is that the destroyer acquires a target, launches its projectile at mach 7 into orbit, and a satellite guides the projectile back down towards the target…vaporizing it thru sheer kinetic energy. very scary. the technology is currently in development and probably wont be seen til 2015 at the earliest.

RODS FROM GOD
a similar technology to the satellite-guided railgun, but instead of having a railgun launch the projectile, the projectiles are stored in satellites orbiting the earth. a pair of satellites, a carrier and a guidance vehicle, would acquire a target, drop a projectile (a 20 ft tungsten rod for example) into the atmosphere, and the rod would be guided towards the target on earth in excess of 36,000 ft per second (the speed of a meteor)…essentially assuring that the target will not exist in a matter of seconds. fucks sake, thats a scary technology. a variant of the technology that seems more viable would be to utilize icbms instead as carrier vehicles.

A MILLION ROUNDS A MINUTE
and now for whats probably the scariest of the technologies highlighted…not only because of its capabilities, but also because the technology is already being tested and implemented. metal storm is a new gun technology currently being developed that does away with all moving parts of a traditional gun. metal storm instead relies on “electronic ballistic technology and computerized controls,” to send signals to the bullets so they fire. with each bullet computerized and not requiring mechanical moving parts to discharge, the gun is capable of launching a million bullets a minute in a constant stream. a million…shit. while a handheld gun would most likely not want such a high rate of fire…as the article points out, “no soldier would want to reload every three milliseconds“…a vehicle-mounted gun could. the high rate of fire would make the vehicle an effective “aerial-denial” weapon. “…if you’ve got one of these mounted in an aircraft and have a rocket-propelled grenade coming at you, you can in an instant have 200 little bullets intercepting it.” and creating a multi-barrel variant with all barrels capable of joint-firing would make a pretty sick gunship…an a-10 warthog on steroids. while the defense department is currently funding development of metal storm, it would still take another 5-10 years before they are put into use.

> future weapons technology (via pop sci)
> metal storm official website