Saving the Robot Sentries

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Well, the good news is that the robot sentries survived the crash.

Someone in Australia has obviously been watching to many repeats of the films Aliens – especially the uncut version where the scene with the footage of the way-cool robot sentries was reinstated.

Why?

Well, in the greatest weaponry advance since a British gentleman called Maxim put together a rapid firing weapon which later evolved into a device called the machine gun, a plucky Australian inventor called Mike O'Dwyer has invented a robot gun that can fire bullets at a rate of one million rounds per minute.

Even odder, is the fact that O'Dwyer – who works in a hardware store selling drills and hammers – cooked this baby up in his garage.

robot sentry

Instead of using mechanical firing pins to blast out bullets one by one, this new weapon stores thousands of bullets in multiple barrels – each shell sitting behind the one in front. Electronic sparks ignite the streams of bullets in order with fractional nano-second accuracy.

What comes out of the barrel has been described as a death ray of lead – with a number of advantages, such as the fact that the solid state weapon is impossible to jam with almost no mechanical parts.

Plus, the gun can spit out almost all its shells before recoil takes effect – and – bullets aside – the electronic gun weighs almost nothing.

There was an unexpected benefit too; because the bullets are traveling in a chain, the shells in front create a slipstream for the ones in front – which causes the range and velocity of bullets to increase dramatically.

The Pentagon (and Royal Australian Army) have taken a keen interest in this garage mechanic’s toy, and are now jointly sticking in $50 million dollars to develop the weapon.

Now that landmines are off the menu as a defensive tool, DARPA, the US defense agency, is looking to use the technology as a replacement.

Set those robot sentries up around the base now !

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OTHER CONTENT - November 2001