120,000 rounds per minute

Well, not really.

The DREAD operates like a big-ass sling; ever tie a string to a rock, whip it around really fast, and then let go? DREAD's like that.
 
Unless Newton's third law has been repealed, there has to be recoil.

Spherical ballistics being what they are, how far could that 3000 f.p.s. ball really go before it slows to a trot?
 
Centrifugal machine guns have been developed in the past. IIRC, GE developed one in the '50's or so... I read about it in Small Arms of the World or some such publication. Velocity and accuracy were unimpressive.
 
The problem that I see is that it would act like a gyro and be extremely hard if not impossible to move in an acceptable way. Nice Idea though, I suppose.

flulnu
 
Good grief. I hope no politician reads this! Next they'll be a Bill banning "deadly centrifugal assault weapons". That its never been built, won't work with todays technology, is irrelevant. Its like banning "plastic guns that ignore x-ray detection", or banning cloning of humans lest we get another Fienstein, Hillary, et al. Keep it quiet! They may cancel their August vacation for this "important business". :barf:
 
I would not wont to be pfc that has to load those magazines. 1...2...3...4...5...six hours later...4997...4998...4999...5000.
Done sarge....1 minute later...1...2
Boy wouldnt that suck
 
Centrifuges don't have recoil.
Click to expand...
They sure do when they throw things. A normal centrifuge doesn't recoil because nothing's leaving the system. If something leaves at a high rate of speed (as with this design), there will DEFINITELY be recoil of some sort. It may not be a conventional recoil action, but something's definitely going to move around to balance the loss in the system. Newton is still right.

Also, if you assume the "throwing wheel" is about 1 foot in diameter, it's going to have to spin around 150,000rpm to throw something at 8,000fps. I hardly think it's going to be silent. Also the spin up time will not be anything like instantaneous. The whole time it's ready to shoot, it's already going to have to be spun up. I hate to think what will happen if it's damaged and it becomes unbalanced. If it can throw something at 8,000fps, that's how fast parts will be going when they fly off it.

And the comments about gyroscopic effects are on target.
 
A-hem...

Uh, I balance engines and various other things at work. I have to point out the obvious here. If you get that big metel disc rotating at speed with a bunch of loose projectiles wandering around in there it's gonna thrash around like a gut shot squirrel. The dynamic and kinetic balance are going to be constantly changing with the number of projectiles. Oh, and another observation. One of the other gentleman here mentioned gyroscopic force. I'm no egghead, but have you ever ran a 9" angle grinder? They turn at about 6000 rpm. You can definetly feel the thing squirming in your hands as you go. It would be a bugger to aim this dread deal, even if you could work out the balance problem.
Here's another one. You gotta have some kind of recoil somewhere here. I'm not sure how there channeling the steel balls out of this thing, but regardless of how it's done there's still an equal and opposite force when the projectile leaves the unit.
And yet one more observation. Or I guess a question really. What the heck kind of bearings are they gonna use in this thing? 120000.00 rpm? I haven't seen a bearing in my line of work that will put up with that.
I guess you could say I'm a sceptic :rolleyes:
 
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