It’s so infuriating that the Army wasted a real opportunity to replace 5.56 with something that has better ballistics but kept the advantages of the SCHV concept.
They were stuck fighting the war in Afghanistan for so long that they forgot that Astan has the longest engagement ranges on earth, especially when the bad guys have the hill tops and ridge tops. And they're all pissed off that only the 7.62 MGs and DMRs could shoot back, leaving the rifle squad to having ONE GUN shooting back, but mortars etc weren't being allowed to engage the bad guys.
That'd be 6mm ARC, 105gr at 2750-2850fps and I believe 52kpsi (though that may be the 62kpsi bolt gun numbers). It's a bit of a spicier Grendel, but I like the extra bullet weight in the Grendel over the higher speed. Plus the Grendel can also throw 105gr at 2800fps and 52kpsi.
armourersbench.com
The fact it had a Lead outer casing means that it was a none starter.
The fact alternatives weren't explored suggests the very concept wasn't explored.
Why would anyone want to replace a rifle with a shotgun?
There were so many ways to address this yet they chose the objectively worst CoA lol. Fielding an actually lightweight 7.62 lmg, mass-issue of XM-25 (or 40mm milkors with medium velocity grenades), cheap kamikaze drones a la switchblade 300 et al, raytheon’s “pike” missile, commando mortars, M3/M4 gustafs, etc were all better options than “give everyone a magnum-power battle rifle”.
IMO the whole “Russian/Chinese super-armor” hysteria was an ex post facto justification to justify Army leadership’s pre-existing biases. Big Army’s been trying to field lightweight & affordable head to toe body armor to dismounts for decades & has failed miserably. There’s no reason to think that Russia & China somehow cracked the code. There had however been a vocal clique in big Army that constantly criticized 5.56 (and the SCHV concept in general). After the M855A1 & SOST projectiles largely solved the lethality issue, they latched on to the “body armor threat” to stay relevant.
Definitely in the ballpark, although I’d use additional COAL to reduce the casehead diameter vs grendel to increase mag capacity, and decrease case weight & bolt thrust.
Secret origin story of the HCAR i guess lol.
Copper jacket on an aluminum core, actually.
Longer case means longer receiver and bolt, though, which makes the rifle proper heavier.
Could be.
Ironically one of the reasons for the UK adopting the L403A1 (Knights KS-1) for the new Ranger regiments was it has the same manual of arms as the weapons likely to be used by the troops they'll be advising.
This is what should've been TV's automatic rifle submission...
True Velocity’s Multi-Caliber Belt-Fed Machine Gun - The RM834
True Velocity was one of the three down-selected companies which reached the final stages of the US Army’s Next Generation Squad Weapons program.For the support weapon element of the NGSW program they offered a variant of their bullpup rifle, the RM277.The US Army eventually selected the SIG...www.thefirearmblog.com
Does that 'given minimum terminal ballistic effect' include penetration of Level 3 body armour? There's no point in saying someone argued for a different solution if they're actually addressing an entirely different problem (hit probability vs penetration probability).
That just sounds like overdoing what the G11 was trying to achieve. Good terminal ballistics at a zero recoil double tap. A lot of AK adopters try this too. I guess it's about the recoil impulse being slow enough that a single sighting can allow for extremely precise double taps before the muzzle climbs.
Gen Milley, the mastermind behind this entire dungshow, once testified in front of the committee that without advanced 7.62 tungsten AP ammo and new DMRs USAREUR could very well lost to Russia's advance. Not many months after that he testified that concurrent development in AP ammo could allow existing weapons to defeat these new super body armour. That tech is ADVAP and is applicable to 7.62 and 5.56, but to support this whole bongoodoogle the entire program was cut so short off base that the 5.56 load wasn't even type classified.
There is an early claim in there that has since been proven false:
The US Army finally fixed their marksmanship training program in the 2000s, and more or less doubled the P(hit) at the unknown-distance ranges and in combat.
One should wonder whether it's accurate or not to describe the GP round as "standard" as the incentive behind NGSW is to use the high power tungsten AP round in the first place. Without it the gun's just a slightly better HK417.
I'm puzzled as under the impression the 6.8x51mm with a 113gr bullet was the "standard", with its 113gr and 6.8mm dia, would expect the ballistic coefficient not good compared to the newer generation of long fast twist bullets e.g. the 140gn used the smaller 6.5mm Creedmoor, assuming the 6.8x51 bullet weight was kept deliberately low to avoid high recoil and carry weight which will not help long range performance - anyone have the 113gn bullet figures fired at 2,800fps out to 1,000 yds so as to compare to a 6.5 CM, may be why SOCOM going with the 6.5 CM.
Cutting an already short barrel to that length seems crazy to me, especially when one of the big selling points of this program was supposed to be allowing the infantryman to reach out and take down the enemy at extended ranges. So, they're undermining that in order to bring the weight down to M4 carbine levels? If they wanted something generally the same as the M4 but with greater range the FN IWS would have done that job better.
It's been that way since the beginning with the conflating of range and armor pen requirements
www.twz.com
Looking at the TWZ article, it seems like people have been conflating two different versions of the M7. The PIE M7/M7 Mk2 retains a 13.5" barrel: length is unchanged, profile slightly slimmed; meanwhile the developmental carbine is a 10.5" barrel, which is shorter than the standard M4 barrel, but not shorter than the M4 CQBR
If that's true one wonders what the losing product was like.
If the carbines are a new development*, and they seem to be, then the Vortex selection pre-dates the carbines.
Lot more training intensive than a 60mm mortar, machine gun, or Carl Gustav type thing.
www.twz.com
Same designations as a WWII grenade launcher.
M7 grenade launcher - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Well quite a lot really.
