it’s unix, not eunuchs

Yeah so iRobot, the company that produces the house vacuuming robot known as the Roomba, has been producing industrial robots for years now. And they’ve been clearing some explosives and what not in Baghdad.

So it should be no surprise that when Metal Storm approached iRobot for a rolling chassis to suit their 40mm Firestorm cannon, they replied “Can Do!” The end result is a machine that fires non-traditional bullets that fire at a rate of thousands of rounds a second. There are no moving parts except for the bullets themselves.

It should be noted that while it is capable of firing that many rounds, my examination of the robot doesn’t show any way for it to carry anywhere near that many rounds. So, yes, it can fire very quickly, but so could soldiers in Vietnam because the M16’s fired fully automatically. Unfortunately that frequently left the squad with no ammunition about a minute into a battle because they’d get scared and use it all up. That’s why M16’s now fire 3 round bursts. You have to pull the trigger a lot more times before you burn up all the ammo.

Now obviously a drone won’t have to deal with fear but reloading still looks like it’s going to be an issue to me. Now for cool stuff, VIDEO! This isn’t the iRobot drone, but it is a Metal Storm machine gun that can fire up to a million rounds a minute.

And Here’s what the actual robot looks like