A MetalStorm weapon firing grenades is too powerful to be released to the public just like any weapon firing grenades is too powerful. There's no real way to directly defeat the threat of RPGs or mortars to VIPs either, other than good intel and planning. I don't see what good could possibly come out of firing lots of small grenades at a nuclear power plant, all that would achieve is a few dozen casualties and putting the plant offline for a while. You could do more damage with a few medium mortars firing HE shells.

MetalStorm is no übertechnology. It is interesting for some applications, like shipboard close defense systems and the like, but it will absolutely not "dominate battlefields". If it's limited to lower rates of fire, then there's very little point to the whole system in the first place.

This might complicate the bursts, depending on whether it fires all three rounds from one barrel. Given the tech it seems likely that it would, in which case doing as you suggest should be a simple matter of programming the thing right and using your PAN to select the bullet type. If it fires one round from each of three barrels you'll only be able to use it in semiauto in that configuration.

Why do you have a barrel full of standard rounds though? What possible application do they have?

Shooting things too weak to require being shot with awesome rounds?

The description gives no limitations on what kind of rounds work. I personally could understand Gel rounds working before Ex-Ex.

Is it really that small? It looks rather bulky in the book to me. Kind of the reason why I decided against even considering the weapon. It's just another glorified stone thrower if you ask me.

Yeah, that sounded fishy to me, too.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding. The Sakura Fubuki uses magnetic acceleration to launch the bullets instead of the chemical explosion of gunpowder, right? Obviously, that would only work if the bullets were metal. (And the bullets would probably be specially made, as they'd only be metal slugs with no casing or gunpowder.)

I'm sure changing between barrels to fire different kinds of ammo would be possible. It would just always have to be ammo containing ferrous metal.

how so? it may be that the gun when fired in single shot basicly alternates between barrels. this way a short burst can still happen. or are you saying that short burst rules are not able to handle more then 3 rounds in a full burst?

And part of the selling point for the real-world tech, judging from their web site. They said they where working on a four-barrel pistol intended for law enforcement. The idea is to load it partially with normal rounds, partially with "less lethal" rounds. Of course, in SR, it'd be "Lethal Explosive, Lethal APDS, and cheap rounds in case some unarmored fool happens by"

Apparently they've managed to get around the obvious problems of that, since they're largely marketing the system IRL for use with explosive payloads. Maybe the projectile is designed such that the pressure is mostly directed at the outer edges or whatever. Incendiary/explosive-incendiary projectiles could take quite a lot of fiddling to make them safe...

That's a good point. 'Flechette' (frangible) rounds probably wouldn't fare too well either. Given the dramatic effectiveness of gel rounds in the 6th World, Yamaha may well have developed one that works with Metal Storm however (since the ability to fire a mix of ammo is a selling point).

Anyone else have any thoughs on the full-auto modification?

There are probably several ways such ammunition might have been given "protection" against those problems. Flechette rounds could have a protective jacket of thin metal that cracks open from the force of the bullet being fired in front of it (with the foremost bullet in the clip/barrel being without such a jacket).

Gel rounds could have a hard coating as flechette rounds and function in the same way.

(Just an idea)

Critias just landed a critical hit on my funnybone.

Gel rounds would have those same problems in more conventional firearms, however. Clearly the necessarily-ambiguous "gel" technology already has a workaround for that.

It's entirely possible that the projectile possesses a much larger self-cohesive bond than adhesive properties; that is to say it only really sticks to itself and doesn't constantly shear off bits due to heat and friction. I mean, it's gel but it's not Jell-o.

Caseless gel ammo would probably look like a very smooth and mostly rigid polymer slug with a tiny blasting cap tacked onto its butt. My guess, anyway.

They face the same amount of pressure, but these cause a very different set of problems in a MetalStorm-tech gun. In a conventional firearm, the pressure is only pushing it forwards, and only the rear end and, to a lesser extent, the outer edges of the bullet would need to be tougher. In a MetalStorm barrel, the bullet has nowhere to go but All Over. To get rid of this problem, the gel bullet would need to be almost as tough all around as a regular one.

It can still be squishy if it has a high coherency - returning to its original shape after being stressed and not spraying gobbets everywhere.

Discarding sabot? Well not really sabot, but a cone over the gel slug that is made of a lightweight material that is in 3 or 4 parts. The pressure from the round ahead will press the cone in on itself, and keep most of the pressure off of the gel round itself. However when the slug itself leaves the barrel, with the walls of the barrel nolonger keeping the base of the cone from siding outwards the pressure will quickly push the cone away.

Once the cone is nolonger a cone the pieces are going to flutter a lot and generally have a lot of air drag. Combined with their light weight they would quickly become a non-issue for damage. Could this take out an eye or something at very close range? Maybe. *shrug* But the chance is likely low enough that it disappears in a puff of abstraction.

P.S. I did not know about the current Metal Storm being able to fire explosive rounds, interesting.

Are you allowed to buy ammunition separate from the barrels for the Fubuki? Because in reality, the loads used between the projectiles vary from the first to the last in the barrel to get around the varying muzzle velocity problem.

The two existing types of caseless small arms ammunition I'm aware of look like this and this. The first is for the G11 and is ignited by a striker, the latter is for the Voere VEC 91 and is electrically ignited.

In SR4, light pistol ammo is light pistol ammo.

We're way in the realm of angels dancing on pinheads here. Sure, we know the physical properties of traditional pins but we're not going to know the shoe size of the average seraphim.

It definitely could. If it can handle pressures above 30,000psi and it's moving at 1000fps, it's not something I wan't coming my way. It will be quite dangerous for several meters in a rather large arc. Of course, the whole idea of gel ammunition for small caliber firearms is ridiculous enough that you can just go with the "puff of abstraction approach".

Sounds expensive. But yeah, if you insert enough technology into it it just might work. So where's my liquid armor, dammit?!

[Edit]But the seraphim in question has been described in the books, and it appears to be about human-sized.[/Edit]

In Fields of Fire.

I think the short answer is "you can't and/or you're not supposed to,", similar to the restrictions SR3 put on multi-barrel guns like the Vindicator. Though I suppose if you have the sort of GM who lets you mix-n-match the loads, and you wanted to drop the money on it, they'd probably allow you to simply affix a suppressor or vent system to each extra magazine you buy. A kind GM might even houserule a price for modified magazines that falls somewhere in-between the cost of a regular clip and a standalone vent/suppressor.

Though looking at the design of the Sakura, muzzle-climb might not be as big of an issue as it is for guns with a single barrel anyhow.

You'd replace the entire barrel, and reload it later.

The rotation of the barrels has nothing to do with the lack of sound suppressors on miniguns. AFAIK, it would be quite possible to attach suppressors to each barrel, it's just that suppressors overheat rather quickly, and also cause more heat to be retained by the barrel (at least the front end of it). Well, that, and there's little point in sound suppressing a minigun.

The problem with suppressing something with a 4-barrel stack would be that sound suppressors (as we know them) are always quite a bit larger in diameter than a barrel. If there's only a small gap, or no gap at all, between the barrels on the Sakura Fubuki, then attaching what we know as a sound suppressor on it would be impossible -- you could suppress one barrel, and the suppressor would partly block all the other barrels.

There is no sound suppressing technology I'm aware of that would completely get rid of this problem. Even with specifically designed materials and/or electronic systems that send sound waves on destructive frequencies against those that the shot fires otherwise creates still require some kind of gas expansion chamber. With suppressors as slim as 1.5x the outer diameter of the barrel, the barrels would have to be stacked quite far apart, leading to a very bulky handgun with any more than 2 barrels.

Now that, I suppose, could work.

Of course, with all this talk about this gun being muzzle loaded with standard caseless ammunition instead of being factory loaded and the end-user only carrying pre-loaded barrels/barrel stacks, I think we can safely assume the gun is not supposed to make any sense at all.

It's a pity, really, if that's how the rules present the gun. On the face of it, a MetalStorm weapon makes so much more sense than, say, the SR3 Ruger Thunderbolt, but then they messed up with the details...

Actually, the reload table for (ml) notes that with a complex action you can 'reload barrel'. Nothing about putting a single round in the barrel, just that the barrel is reloaded. So according to a strict intepretation of the RAW, you put in 10 bullets at once. You could I suppose use a stick of cartridges that you shove into the barrel all at once, but I choose to intepret that as swapping the barrel out.