Gday hardnfast,the one technology that sparked my interest with...

Gday hardnfast,the one technology that sparked my interest with a bang in the first place was the mach 5/50 tech, the one that DARPA is funding the Oz DSTO to develop at this very time, the one that MST got very upset about when DARPA released information about on it;s website a few years ago, Metalstorm had considered it to be top secret and apparently still do? going by the fact that they haven't commented about it, even though the DSTO recently came out and said how well they were doing with the tech at 60mm on a repeatable basis in a protype, not sure if you have ever seen the videos of an early prototype multi barreled weapon, the one with about sixteen golden coloured barrels? it shows the effect quite well, the one where they fire at the rate of " what was it? 3,000 rpm and then at 30,000 and then at a much faster rate, in the low rate one you can almost see the projectiles moving but the faster the rate they fired the faster the projectiles moved because of the double or triple tap effect,I was canned for using that term, but it is the effect where the barrel pressures are increased over the length of the barrel by virtue of the fact that you have up to three projectiles still in the barrel which have all been fired, it causes recompression of the gasses behind the projectile just in front, because it itself has also just been been fired, and so on a third time!

I was absolutely gobnsmacked!

The 40mm low pressure stuff is really good, please don't get me wrong here, and will be the first to market no doubt about that, it is still lighter, faster, more reliable etc,and is far cheaper than some of the systems they are building in the US to achieve similar results, things like laser tech for instance,useed in the less than lethal area, yeah sure they are good, but are they cheap? are they as light?how big a power supply do they need, are they able to be left as stand alone weapons for long periods of time? make no bones about this, but what the US is really waiting for is the high pressure mach 5/50 stuff, this is I believe why we haven't seen any of the other low pressure commercial applications on the market yet, things like the pyrogen fire fighting system, the seismic testing, fireworks systems etc, and many others like the ones you mention,it doesn't make any sense why they haven't been commercialised yet? unless it is because they (MST) have been prevented for the sake of national security from releasing them to market, just yet anyway, by either the Oz or US government, I believe they will stil come in time , but not until mach 5/50 tech is well and truly fielded, reason being that they ( the low pressure applicatiions) are just too similar in operation to the high pressure applications, that is the electronics behind the firing system or the way sealing is achieved in stacked rounds etc! remember the Chinese wanted to get hold of this tech,I will bet they are working on their own version of it right now! why give away the element of surprise? or limit the time that these weapons will have before being cloned?

I also believe that there are certain parties (major Defense Co's)in the US,who don't particularily want MST to become a defense contractor in their own right, they know damn well what is at stake, it could well mean that many of their own weapons become obselete, things like the Phalanx or many Artillery Pieces come to mind !the paid lobbyists have also been very very busy, and the buy American policy hasn't helped either, but I like the fact that MST teamed with ST Kinetics, that will keep the US on it's toes! that is if it doesn't want the tech to proliferate, as they themselves said, in the DIBCS report, they also went on to say that if it did, they may not have anthing to compete with it? also another report by the Rand corporation who supplies intelligence to the US Government said very much the same thing in a document aptly named "Stealing the Sword" there is much much more to this company MST than the average sheeple know!