The Army May Have Found Its Next Rifle in a Colorado Garage

Hey, this is my niche! This article is not very good - think of the last article you read about the internet betting a series of tubes, and your Steve Jobs is a brilliant coder.

The rifle design objectives are pretty poor, but there's some interesting innovations in there nonetheless. Unfortunately, it's mostly academic; modern symmetric warfare places less emphasis on small arms than ever before, and asymmetric warfare suffers huge diminishing returns from small arms investment.

In short, the AR15/M16 family will be around for a while, and that's fine.

This like many "this is the future of weaponry" articles doesn't say what specific this is to fix. There is no problem it is trying to solve it seems like. It is designed to be different without a clear overarching purpose. What is the purpose of having a 4 barrels? This was touched on but never fully examined or defined. I feel like this is slated to just disappear into the annals of "weapons that solved no problem".

This is nothing other than a novelty.

If you want portable bullet count, you use an automatic M4 (750+ rounds per minute).

If you want less portable bullet count, you use a M134 Minigun (2,000+ rounds per minute).

If you want single-shot spread, you use a M500 shotgun.

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Compare Metal Storm's prototypes, which used stacked charges to increase bullet count (but decades later have yet to see practical implementation).