450,000 Rounds Per Minute? Meet China's New "Metal Storm" Gun
The Chinese Communist Party is infamous for quite a few different transgressions and malign acts. Among these transgressions are their knockoffs and egregious copycatting of various Western products and technologies—as I personally witnessed repeatedly when I was an Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Special Agent serving on the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Team at the Special Agent in Charge (SAC) Los Angeles Office.
Mind you, the PRC’s predilection for knockoffs doesn’t just apply to ordinary consumer products. Unsurprisingly, the Chinese are also taking this some approach to hi-tech military hardware as well. For example, the PRC’s artists’ rendering of the prospective H-20 stealth bomber bears an awfully coincidental resemblance to America’s B-2 Spirit. And now the copycatting is being applied toward a weapons system that had initially been designed toward one of the United States’s key allies in the Indo-Pacific (INDOPACOM) region: the so-called “Metal Storm” gun, originally designed in Australia.
The Basics
The latest comes to us courtesy of the online publication Interesting Engineering, specifically a January 5, 2025 article by Bojan Stojkovski titled “China’s ‘metal storm’ gun fires 450,000 rounds per minute, claim scientists.” To wit:
“This generates an unmatched barrage capable of intercepting hypersonic missiles exceeding Mach 7. By comparison, the US military’s most advanced Phalanx [CIWS (Close-In Weapon System)] system reaches only 4,500 rounds per minute…Researchers in Taiyuan, central China’s industrial hub, have devised a novel solution: a replaceable container-like magazine loaded with barrels pre-packed with bullets. After firing, the barrels and the entire container are discarded as a single disposable unit…The box-style rotary firing system boosts loading speed, reduces barrel wear, and maintains accuracy, enabling multiple strikes, continuous operations, and quick counterattacks. The developments were detailed by Lu Xutao and his team from North University of China in a December paper published in the Chinese Journal of Detection & Control…Traditional machine guns with mechanical triggers cannot meet the PLA’s requirement of 7,500 shots per second. To address this, Lu and his team designed an electronic trigger using coils, the South China Morning Post reported.”
As a sidebar note, with all the headlines generated by the PRC’s hypersonic weapons program, it is interesting to now see the flip side of that, i.e. China’s counter-hypersonics projects.
Aussie Origins
As indicated at the beginning of this article, this “Metal Storm” weapon originated in Australia. The Australian-based company that had originally developed the concept indeed went by the name of Metal Storm Inc., the brainchild of a certain Mr. James Michael "Mike" O’Dwyer, who had been a manager at Woolworths Limited before his knack for inventions provided him a new (and more stimulating) source of income.
In the 1990s, Mike and his company developed a 36-barrel test system capable of firing at a mind-blowing rate of one million rounds per minute, more than double the rate of fire of the current Chinese project. In 2006, this ambitious inventor & entrepreneur revealed that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had offered $100 million for the technology.
Naturally, this also caught the attention of the US Department of Defense (DOD), which partnered with Mr. O’Dwyer to explore new battlefield weapon systems. Alas, despite this early promise—“best laid plans of mice and men” as it were—the project ran afoul of insurmountable technical and logistical challenges, leading to its abandonment and the bankruptcy of Metal Storm Inc. in 2012.
Where to From Here?
Time will tell if this Chinese metal storm gun comes to fruition as a production model. Success is hardly guaranteed; but then again, the PRC’s JF-22 Mach 30 wind tunnel sounded way too far-fetched as recently as mid-2022, but if reports from June 2023 are to be accepted at face value, that ambitious project is indeed up and running.
Christian D. Orr is a former Air Force Security Forces officer, Federal law enforcement officer, and private military contractor (with assignments worked in Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Kosovo, Japan, Germany, and the Pentagon). Chris holds a B.A. in International Relations from the University of Southern California (USC) and an M.A. in Intelligence Studies (concentration in Terrorism Studies) from American Military University (AMU). He has also been published in The Daily Torch , The Journal of Intelligence and Cyber Security, and Simple Flying. Last but not least, he is a Companion of the Order of the Naval Order of the United States (NOUS). If you’d like to pick his brain further, you can ofttimes find him at the Old Virginia Tobacco Company (OVTC) lounge in Manassas, Virginia, partaking of fine stogies and good quality human camaraderie.
Image: Wikimedia Commons.