It was called the Medusa, made by Phillips and Rodgers initally then bounce around like a white elephant, Yes colt was going to pick it up, even saw a little blurb write up in one of the gun rags about that, then it fell through then Gary Reeder Custom guns I believe made some at one point not sure if it was with their tooling or left over parts they bought, remeber seeing on their website as recent as 6 or 8 months ago, but did't find it in a quick visit there but below is an excerpt from one of Mr. Reeder's "Gun Notes"
"I have had several people call or e-mail me in the last week about the status of the Phillips and Rodgers Medusa. I have been working with Roger of P&R for a couple of months now and will probably pick up the Medusa line. Due to legal considerations the name of the gun will change and some of the lines will be softened and sleeked up. If all goes well. we can look for that one by next summer. We will be buying the tooling from Roger and building the guns ourselves at my shops. For those of you that are not familiar with the Medusa, it is the revolver that will shoot over 30 different cartridges in one cylinder. It was intended for survival situations where just about any ammo in the 38/9mm range would fit in it and fire"
The 30 cartriges were something of an exageration because it included a lot of very rare or defunct rounds.
I beleive it was pateneted so you could search the US Patent office database as well --- I beleive the secret was some kind of funky spring clip extracter star that would eject regular rimed round or catch the rim of an auto cartrige.
IF I recall correctly it had some odd ball number of lands on it's barrel due to a request from the ATF to make it distingisable because of it's "extream" muti-cartrige capacity.
If it was one of the Reeder pistols I would have a lot more confidance in it as I have seen and handled examples of his work and it's first rate, could nto coment on the others who have made it.
When I was thinking about buying one I did find some threads on them various places on line, maybe even here --- acuaracy was reported to not be great as could be expected given all the comprmises that had to be made to make the thing work at all. I decided it was one curiosity I did not need to own.... though if one came along at the right price......
Seems to me an idea that was about 50-60 years too late --- In the 1940's someone who was traveling the world and posessed a revolver that could take 38 spec. 9mm or 380 among others would have something truly useful --- these days with restrictions and so forth who really travels so far from sources of the commonly available calibers and does not bring their own supply?
