Railroad
Routinely Derailed
From the Telegraph, a UK Newspaper. My interest is in the weapon, secondarily in the Chinese' clumsy attempts to get the information.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/10/04/wchina04.xml
China tried to poach supergun inventor
By Nick Squires in Sydney
(Filed: 04/10/2006)
Chinese secret agents have made repeated attempts to poach an Australian scientist behind the invention of a high-speed gun that could revolutionise warfare.
The gun with its electronic firing mechanism, called Metal Storm, was invented by Mike O'Dwyer, who is based in Brisbane.
He claimed this week that Chinese government agents offered him more than $100 million to move to China and work on the gun.
"What I was expected to do in Beijing was to divulge all the knowledge I had to enable prototypes to be built for the weapons system to be developed," he told Channel Nine television.
"[They] said 'We don't need any Metal Storm weapons, we don't need any of the paper work, the history — what we want is you. We want you and your family in Beijing'."
Mr O'Dwyer kept details of all the approaches, made over the past decade and passed the information to the Australian government, which has invested around £4 million into the project.
Last year the Chinese made another attempt. An Australian-Chinese businessman, Jun Yang, said an agent told him: "The Chinese Liberation Army wants to buy Metal Storm. It's very advanced technology. When you return to Australia we want you to purchase it for us."
Mr Yang cut his ties with the agent and revealed details of the plot after joining the Falun Gong movement, which opposes the Communist regime.
Mr O'Dwyer has retired from Metal Storm Ltd, but the industrial espionage tactics were confirmed yesterday by company executives. They said fresh approaches had been made in the past few months.
"We get inquires all the time but the implication of these was that the technology would end up in China," said the chief operating officer, Ian Gillespie.
Metal Storm was reaching the final prototype stage after successful testing by the US military, he said. "We expect production to start in 12 to 24 months."
Hailed as a revolution in weaponry, Metal Storm's firing mechanism is initiated electronically rather than by the traditional percussion method. It has almost no recoil and no moving parts, meaning that stoppages are less common than in normal firearms.
Bullets or grenades can be fired at a rate of one million per minute, either from a single weapon or multiple barrels grouped together in pods.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/10/04/wchina04.xml
China tried to poach supergun inventor
By Nick Squires in Sydney
(Filed: 04/10/2006)
Chinese secret agents have made repeated attempts to poach an Australian scientist behind the invention of a high-speed gun that could revolutionise warfare.
The gun with its electronic firing mechanism, called Metal Storm, was invented by Mike O'Dwyer, who is based in Brisbane.
He claimed this week that Chinese government agents offered him more than $100 million to move to China and work on the gun.
"What I was expected to do in Beijing was to divulge all the knowledge I had to enable prototypes to be built for the weapons system to be developed," he told Channel Nine television.
"[They] said 'We don't need any Metal Storm weapons, we don't need any of the paper work, the history — what we want is you. We want you and your family in Beijing'."
Mr O'Dwyer kept details of all the approaches, made over the past decade and passed the information to the Australian government, which has invested around £4 million into the project.
Last year the Chinese made another attempt. An Australian-Chinese businessman, Jun Yang, said an agent told him: "The Chinese Liberation Army wants to buy Metal Storm. It's very advanced technology. When you return to Australia we want you to purchase it for us."
Mr Yang cut his ties with the agent and revealed details of the plot after joining the Falun Gong movement, which opposes the Communist regime.
Mr O'Dwyer has retired from Metal Storm Ltd, but the industrial espionage tactics were confirmed yesterday by company executives. They said fresh approaches had been made in the past few months.
"We get inquires all the time but the implication of these was that the technology would end up in China," said the chief operating officer, Ian Gillespie.
Metal Storm was reaching the final prototype stage after successful testing by the US military, he said. "We expect production to start in 12 to 24 months."
Hailed as a revolution in weaponry, Metal Storm's firing mechanism is initiated electronically rather than by the traditional percussion method. It has almost no recoil and no moving parts, meaning that stoppages are less common than in normal firearms.
Bullets or grenades can be fired at a rate of one million per minute, either from a single weapon or multiple barrels grouped together in pods.
