In order to minimise the possibility of an automatic weapon jamming (when someone’s life might depend on it), ammunition needs to be highly consistent.
Today’s invention is a device which fits in the intake end of a magazine. This allows rounds to be passed through it into a magazine itself. As this happens, each round is rotated about its long axis under an internal light and asymmetries detected -using the equivalent of a cellphone camera.
As the rotation occurs, each bullet is also weighed to ensure that the amount of propellent is within specification. If a problem is detected, a round would be ejected onto the floor.
Since jamming often only occurs after a bad sequence of rounds, this device might be used to randomise the bullets by weight and asymmetry in order to reduce the accumulation of dynamical errors (when using cheap ammunition) which contribute to jamming.
An upgrade to this idea would be to fit it to the lower end of a magazine with an open trough into which bullets could be dropped a handful at a time. This would to allow rounds to be added rapidly (and tested) without swapping magazines.
