This would be interesting to see as like a defensive structure high damage but long reload maybe even as one of your powers you have to unlock going down the zone denial path since this could be used verse an asortment of different unit types. I could see it doing alot of damage but then having 5-10 second reload depending on the damage factor. This would be something you would have with a player that is playing defense for a LZ or something along those lines.
Along the lines of it being a power to unlock, with that I would say that it would have a limited amout of rounds that it would be able to fire before going off line. This then in turn would start its cooldown timer.
"example lets say it cooldown is 5 mins you deploy one. After 4 minutes you scrap it, it runs out of ammo, or is destoryed at that point once its removed from the field of battle is 5 min cooldown would start to countdown. So basicly with 4 mins on field 5 min cooldown you would field another one 9 mins after it was first depolyed to the field."
This way it would be something you would want to save for defense in case your LZ or other points of interest get rushed.
I don't think the technology will go anywhere. For guns, what you want to happen is for the first bullet to do the job. After that, rate of fire doesn't matter. Also, with today's wars, keeping collateral damage low is critical. Something like Metal Storm will only increase it.
This leaves is only for jobs like missile destruction, something that lasers are being built for. And lasers are already proven to work.
Also, at the end of the day, you would want a smaller rate of fire and small reloading time over insane ROF and reloading time. When you fire at the enemies, they will hide almost no matter how many bullets are flying. But once you start to reload, you are a sitting duck.
What collateral damage? If you have a weapon that can fire x rounds before the thing even has kickback from it that means the weapon it self would have less collateral damage.
"Example M-32 grenade launcher if you fire them down range the kickback from the weapon throws off each round that is fired. Which in turn has a spread effect and in fact would have a larger area of collateral damage."
The metal storm system being that it fires each round with a pulse system and has no moving parts means you can fire more rounds down range more quickly before the weapon or firing platform has a chance to kickback. Which in turn means less collateral damage because the weapon it self is more steady and much more deadly.
"Example lets think of it as a game of horse shoes I land all 3 shoes on the spike within a second and didn't have to do a throwing motion so I had no lose in accuracy. On the other hand the other player because of kickback "throwing motion" lands on it, behind it and in front of it and takes 3-4 seconds. What weapon was more effective in keeping collateral damage down."
On top of that if you want to think of any armored unit like the concret in front of our house then a weapon like you discribed would be rather ineffective since its is slower.
"Example if you try and break through the concret with a hammer or even a slegde hammer, which would have a lower rate of fire and lower reload since you would just be swing. Now that same hammer is on a jackhammer which is modified to hit with the same amount of force as the first person was using but with a faster rate of fire "impacts per second" and a longer reload because it uses a compressed air system would put the concret under a large amount of stress which means at some point you need to change out the air cans. Since the concret "armor" wouldn't be able to deflect/absorb the hit before its hit again in the same point of impact causing it the materia to become more brittle then it would other wise and to fail and puncher."
If you can kill the target before they can react then where are they going to hide? I mean there dead beacuse you defeated there armor and destoryed there ride before they know what hit them. Plus if you have a system with 40,000 rounds of ammo not all the rounds have to go to one target. So lets say it only takes a force of 8,000 rounds to breach the armor of an armored unit with whatever kind of round it fires that means you would be able destory 5 targets.
Keep in mind the Metal Storm system is not limited to normal gun rounds it can fire grenades and if you made one big enough such as I was suggesting being that it would be a defense structure it might even be able to fire 3, 120mm HEAT rounds with no drop in accuracy within a second. Hence the reason it would have a long reload and be able to be defeated by long range artillery or by hit and run in between reload cycles. Not to mention no defense vs air but it could maybe one shot most if not all ground units. Thats why the ablity to deploy it would have a 5+ min cooldown just to field it and the it would have a limited number of of shots it would fire before being scrapped since its no longer useful and the cooldown wouldn't start while one is still on the field so you can have one in reserve to deploy.
As for lasers go to actually work as an AMS with current specs to actually melt through and defeat a missle armor case they have to mount it to a Lockheed C-141 Starlifter with an array of chemical batterys which generate more power then a normal battery and even then it might be able to only defeat 3-5 missles before the battery system is fully drained.
Metal Storm
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