Chan's Personal Blog

Lund and Company Invention, L.L.C., a toy design studio based near Chicago, makes toy rockets that are powered by burning hydrogen obtained by electrolyzing water. Now the company is being funded by the US army to adapt the technology to fire bullets instead.

The US Army are interested in arming soldiers with weapons that can be switched between lethal and non-lethal modes. They asked the company to make a rifle that can fire projectiles at various speeds. [...]

The problem with non-lethal kinetic rounds such as rubber bullets and bean-bag rounds is that they tend to be deadly at very close range and useless beyond seventy meters. This was discussed last year at the European Symposium On Non-Lethal Weapons: "The problem is not so much to deliver an effect to a certain distance, but to maintain that effect from the muzzle out to that distance. It is possible to design a constant energy impact projectile by means of a launcher with a controllable muzzle velocity."

So a weapon with a laser rangefinder could calculate the required muzzle velocity and fire non-lethal rounds with just the right energy to incapacitate the target without undue harm. (Note that, there is always an element of risk, and that even a "non-lethal" launcher like the FN303 which has a very low muzzle energy can be deadly. Critics have pointed out that non-lethal rounds can be misused, as was shown in Israel this week.)

The design Lund is currently working on is a lightweight .50 caliber weapon, and he says that the technology is scalable "from handgun to howitzer." There have been attempts to develop similar weapons before, notably by Rusi Taleyarkhan who has since become bogged down in controversy over his Bubble Fusion claims. However, Lund's technology seems to have advanced further and the Army appear keen to pursue it.