I'm not sure whether you've seen the metalstorm 40mm grenade launcher, but it's about the same size as a LAWS, obviously thinner, but able to be used in multiple discharges, electrically slaved etc... if their 60mm mortar round comes to fruition (which appears to be a CTD announcement away), then you have a more useful but multiple firing weapon that can be controlled electronically for grid work etc... what calibre did you have in mind for this dispoable mortar?

Laws is ~84mm. If the metalstorm 40mm GL is the one I saw on the metalstorm.com site, may4A2_Talon_Firing.rm.ram, I am impressed. Although the barrel seems in fact rather heavy--experimental bull barrel of course, safety first. I haven't seen how you reload it yet. Are the tubes or barrels disposable, like a Pringles can that's out of chips? Disposable barrel liner that's a magazine? My comments: 1) Yours is a single platform of single or multiple (M) tubes, each with up to 4? 6? rounds. Mine is a distributed platform on N single tubes with N (Nx1) rounds. One jam, one grenade thrown at you that hits, one sniper with a robot-sized target, and all your firepower is out, say 96 rounds or whatever. My sniper has to hit a target the size of a milk bottle, and if he or a gremlin, etc., does, then he has to hit 95 more to see that not a shell gets off. Counterbattery might get you, but there is nothing to get in my case--drop a shell or a 500lb LGB on the position my shell came from, and you are hitting a dirty patch of ground about a yard across, and a coathanger. I am 300m away, laughing, and pushing the button to set off the next one, set up on the clifftop 100m behind and 200m above me, or behind a rock somewhere. If your weapon is analogized to a machine gunner, mine is a suicide bomber. The expendable, or disposable, or consumable, or self-contained thrust-assisted-mortar-shell-firing apparatus ("spigot mortar" or better yet "spike mortar" for convenience's sake) weighs 1-5 lbs. It has no chamber except maybe a cup at the bottom. It is rail-launched, perhaps you would call it, if not off a central spigot-like firing base-- that's it. It does not go in the barrel, it goes on the barrel. Maybe it could be used as a (grossly heavy?) rifle (or .50BMG) grenade. Mine has a small charge to get it up through a few hundred feet or through forest canopy, then rocket or jet assist, with snap-out control surfaces or vectored thrust, perhaps with some sort of aerofoil, wings or a ring foil, that let it travel non-ballistically - uh, dynamically--and maneuver. This is how it aims itself. The barrel need not be laid per se; the round just pops up like a hypertrophied Bouncing Betty, then seeks its target below. Think of Stinger on a coathanger. No expensive seeker head, but remote vectoring from data fusion or onboard computer. Say, from GPS binoculars. Or some other kind of seeker head and fuzing. Yours is a submarine. Mine is a field of captor mines. You don't have to sail through the minefield, you just have to sail NEAR the minefield, and the mines will come to you. They could be called small land captor mines. This is its use in man-portable fashion. Basically, I take Metal Storm, take away the gun, leave the grenades, put brains in them, put them each in a beercan half-buried wherever across the landscape you like, string them together to something like Metal Storm's CPU, and fire them off whenever a target somes within range, or whenever I like, and they find their own tartgets or are directed to them. My big burden then is how fast I can designate targets and stream them to the datalinks of the shells. I don't have to traverse, I can engage separated targets simultaneously. You could also fire them from a platform. Again, they are low-impulse, they are PGMs, they are any size you like. What size would I make them? Any size the market demanded. They have no reason to be 81mm or 120mm caliber as they need not fit any kind of bore, they could be 5-inchers or 32-pounders, long or short. They could also grow or shrink as modules are added or removed. How big would you like a shell to be?

[Counterbattery might get you, but there is nothing to get in my case--drop a shell or a 500lb LGB on the position my shell came from, and you are hitting a dirty patch of ground about a yard across, and a coathanger. I am 300m away, laughing, and pushing the button to set off the next one, set up on the clifftop 100m behind and 200m above me, or behind a rock somewhere.] Nope, sorry. There is an acoustic warfare solution that is able to isolate the shooter and if slaved to a FCS, can return fire within <1 sec. Accuracy at maximum unadvertised range is 1.5 ft. US Treasury (read Sec Service) is using a version of it on certain vehicles for sniper and small arms protection. The French used it against mortar and sniper teams in Bosnia. The package can be static or vehicle mounted. Either way it has proved itself in the field and under direct operational fire.

[Laws is ~84mm. If the metalstorm 40mm GL is the one I saw on the metalstorm.com site, may4A2_Talon_Firing.rm.ram, I am impressed. Although the barrel seems in fact rather heavy--experimental bull barrel of course, safety first. I haven't seen how you reload it yet. Are the tubes or barrels disposable, like a Pringles can that's out of chips? Disposable barrel liner that's a magazine?] Barrels are swapped out. Data is classified, but its barrel and misfire rate is impressive beyond all benchmarks set for other systems. In fact, I can't recall seeing misfires and jams in thousands of discharges - this is for a CTD, so it's not the cleanest of solutions but obviously delivering where the numbers are important.

[Think of Stinger on a coathanger. No expensive seeker head, but remote vectoring from data fusion or onboard computer. Say, from GPS binoculars. Or some other kind of seeker head and fuzing.] And the difference on a MS 40mm solution is??? The 60mm solution is still being worked on, the op parameters are the same. It can be lightweight and disposable if desired. I'd rather have a weapon that provides 12 opportunities to send someone to sleep than a single shot - especially when the 60mm solution might be not much bigger than the total single package. The 40mm rounds are much much lighter than a conventional. Actual weight is classified, but it's enough to make someone go "what the??"

[Yours is a submarine. Mine is a field of captor mines. You don't have to sail through the minefield, you just have to sail NEAR the minefield, and the mines will come to you. They could be called small land captor mines.] It all depends on the sensor grid, the FCS and the respondent system. What you are talking about is stuff that is being tested in realtime now.

[Basically, I take Metal Storm, take away the gun, leave the grenades, put brains in them, put them each in a beercan half-buried wherever across the landscape you like, string them together to something like Metal Storm's CPU, and fire them off whenever a target somes within range, or whenever I like, and they find their own tartgets or are directed to them. My big burden then is how fast I can designate targets and stream them to the datalinks of the shells. I don't have to traverse, I can engage separated targets simultaneously.] Again, AI loaded mine fields with proactive sensor and seek systems are currently being looked at. The sensor detects movement, identifies the opportunity through issues such as ground pressure, mobility speed etc... and selects an appropriate system to respond and neutralise. The sensors to do this are available now and can seek out a target of opportunity within 40km - well out of the range of a manportable arty solution and well able to determine what volume of fire it will return to the compromised grid section.

No no, you don't understand. I was never within 300m of the thing. I fired it from 300m away by Wi-Fi or something, or it was on a timer, or detected a Chinese tank column, or someone tried to mess with it, or maybe because it detected incoming shells and fired to intercept or counterbattery according to this very acoustical/FCS you describe. Your thing IDs the point of origin of the bang. That is the base of the spike mortar. That is a coathanger, or say as much as two railspikes, of metal. Go ahead, blow up a coathanger.

[You could also fire them from a platform. Again, they are low-impulse, they are PGMs, they are any size you like. What size would I make them? Any size the market demanded. They have no reason to be 81mm or 120mm caliber as they need not fit any kind of bore, they could be 5-inchers or 32-pounders, long or short. They could also grow or shrink as modules are added or removed. How big would you like a shell to be] I don't dispute anything about what you see the opportunity is, but their are countermeasure systems currently existing that have been used to test exactly what you propose. Like anything, solutions and counter solutions taking a somewhat evolutionary path where subject to temporal demands, one will have situational dominance due to various operational issues and interventions. There are a number of US/NATO/Aust funded solutions currently experimenting with what you propose in various guises.

[No no, you don't understand. I was never within 300m of the thing. I fired it from 300m away by Wi-Fi or something, or it was on a timer, or detected a Chinese tank column, or someone tried to mess with it, or maybe because it detected incoming shells and fired to intercept or counterbattery according to this very acoustical/FCS you describe. Your thing IDs the point of origin of the bang. That is the base of the spike mortar. That is a coathanger, or say as much as two railspikes, of metal. Go ahead, blow up a coathanger] But the repondent system will invariably return fire with grid saturation depending on the threat ID. eg, The French have responded with both 35mm direct fire and with long range heavier mortars. In all instances the single shooter was eliminated with relative comfort. Of course that can change with a threat emanating from FIBUA, but then the response system will be different and I would assume that troops responsible for holding that patch of land have been doing their job properly and engaged in aggressive patrolling (like what is std UK behaviour). If your'e going to take the citadel approach, then you kind of deserve to get shot at. ;) (jkng)