Agree on all accounts. There is so much we still don't know, especially about the cartridges. The Army could be hiding this information because it's embarrassing... or that could be SOP. I don't have the experience to say, and I doubt many of the detractors do.
I wonder, if one looked at everything the Army ever adopted and counted up the number of items with performance claims that turned out to be false, how many times it actually happened. People point to failed programs saying "look at all the stupid stuff they tried to make!" but the vast majority failed before adoption... which is how the system is supposed to work! And don't even mention The Pentagon Wars, that book is full of stupidity and lies.
I remember reading discussions on the plastic ammunition before the NGSW was awarded. Some (most?) of the commentators had the Sig entry in distant third because it was barely any different than existing platforms and we're talking up the supply chain benefits of the GD and Textron entries. Honestly, the seethe when Sig won was pretty funny. I take it to mean that the other systems just didn't work very well. At least True Velocity is continuing to develop their ammunition, so maybe even.277 Fury will come in plastic someday.
Nice reference on the Trounds too, the Dardick makes a lot more sense when you look at it as a platform for the Trounds instead of a serious pistol design. I think they also had an auto cannon design that used the Trounds to achieve some ungodly fire rate.
I remember reading about it, and the dual cartridge system was the selling point.
You can use normal ammo shooting fleshy enemies, but if you meet something harder to, but the gun can also use the very hot rounds that probably would also cause durability issues.
Guns with very high muzzle velocities or just very big guns often last only cca several hundred rounds before a barrel swap is required.
1930s Polish anti-tank rifle (guys should have just used .50 BMG) with a muzzle velocity of 1275 m/s had a barrel life of just ~300 rounds or so.
Remember that the original .50 Browning cartridge was an armor peircing incendiary round intended for anti-vehicular work, it was only after the US being the US started slapping M2s on everything that someone suggested that making a simple FMJ "ball" variant of the cartridge might be a wise economical choice.
The Army could be hiding this information because it's embarrassing... or that could be SOP
Well, there's no actual upside to publicizing what they actually have. Either it does, and now the enemy knows it does and will beef up their armor that last little bit in response so now their competitive advantage is gone... or it won't, and the enemy knows it doesn't (and that would indeed be embarrassing).
However, I will point out that if a military organization has any brains, they've already tested this. A standard .270WSM rifle with a proper AP projectile will (even at performance levels currently public) outperform 6.8x51 with that same projectile, so if that can't penetrate Level IV armor 6.8x51 almost certainly can't either.
I take it to mean that the other systems just didn't work very well.
There are also a couple of other considerations. The Army tends to be quite conservative in procurement, and the SIG rifle is the closest thing to the M16 (everything else was completely alien in terms of manual of arms, and on top of that the Textron one had a completely different operating mechanism since ejection on that has to be push-through). So, a platform based on the M4 has a massive leg up- they really don't want to retrain everyone, and "the new rifle is an M16, but bigger and with some additional niceties" accomplishes that goal.
On the other side of the coin, the GD rifle would require substantial retraining. It was probably much cheaper to make (given it's 100% extruded aluminum and plastic with very little secondary machining required) in bulk but would have taken a lot of work and bullpups slightly compromise the range of things you can do with the rifle (it's better on a static range when you're not taking weird positions on the ground, but there are some things you really can't do as well, like changing magazines while prone).
Also, the TrueVelocity/GD/Beretta system didn't really measure up in terms of performance- the ammunition wasn't loaded nearly as hot (despite its advanced construction, they could have changed the case material to normal brass with no loss in ballistic performance) and as such needed a longer barrel to compete with SIG's rifle. It was also slightly more complex mechanically and I suspect had a fundamentally-unsolvable heat issue after multiple magazines of fully-automatic fire, much like the Bushmaster M17s (with its all-aluminum construction) does. Yes, the polymer case solves heat at the chamber, but doesn't reduce it at the gas block, and because the gas block is under the handguard it's going to heat that area- this is why the British L85's handguard is made of plastic.
(Aside: I'm aware that there's very little actually documented about how their rifle actually works- I choose to interpret what's written as it being a standard AR-18-derived design, but the entire bolt/barrel assembly is housed within a carriage that moves back and forth so the recoil impulse is less. At least one of SIG's prototypes had a similar system, if I recall correctly.)
I think they also had an auto cannon design that used the Trounds to achieve some ungodly fire rate.
Yeah, the rotating drum "revolver" cannon was honestly pretty cool. I would never have though Plexiglas could be a suitable material for that job, but then again I also didn't think that of MDPE/HDPE (the material the early Trounds were made of- Celanese Fortiflex- isn't special or exotic in any way).
I still believe there is a valid place for Trounds, though. If armor's so good now that it requires multiple hits in the same place in rapid succession to defeat (and ceramic armor is still defeated by normal 6.8x51 in this way)... well, a high speed small caliber burst could conceivably be the solution, and the Wankel Dardick action is known for extremely high RPM with very little complication (unlike the G11 where the solution to malfunctions is "throw the internal mechanism away and get a new one").
As such, I think the answer is a rifle with the rotary action that Trounds enable as well as a helical magazine, with the action and magazine riding on G11-style rails such that any recoil impulse isn't transmitted until the end of the burst. It'll have a lot in common aesthetically with the M1216 shotgun, with a magazine capacity close to 90 rounds, firing a burst of slightly beefed-up 5.56 equivalent at a rate sufficient to put every round into the same ceramic square of the enemy's armor. In this way, you still have 30 trigger pulls before reloading (though this would make magazines quite a bit longer) without fundamentally disrupting the hangup the US in particular has embedded in its culture of "one shot one kill single well-placed shot" marksmanship. Recoil's going to be heavy, but 6.8x51 already has that problem anyway.
I still believe there is a valid place for Trounds, though. If armor's so good now that it requires multiple hits in the same place in rapid succession to defeat
All this talk is as funny as guys talking about ultra-modern tank cannons with even higher muzzle velocities that could penetrate 1.2m of RHA, but what's the point of that when a drone or prone, camouflaged infantry man or just a housecat with the right cybernetic implant relaying fire control information over a laser link can cause a howitzer 12 km away to drop a round into a circle of +-3m around the tank's center.
Good luck defending against that - APS may help somewhat, but the cost is probably the same as a howitzer shell, and tanks usually have like 8 at most, which means after that you're shit out of luck and the tank is scrap metal.
ThisIsSin
The boob tube emits harmful XXX-rays
No_one 1yr ago
ultra-modern tank cannons
This is in the context of small arms, though.
Personal body armor is now so incredibly good that the traditional final boss of anti-personnel armor piercing rounds, .30-06 M2AP, cannot penetrate it with a single hit. I'm relatively certain even .338LM's AP loadings can't get through either, and they can even stop non-AP .50 BMG rounds at sufficient distances (the actual AP stuff will still beat it). When the individual soldier's armor is shrugging off rounds designed to defeat light vehicles, and that armor is available to any industrialized nation at 200USD a plate I would very much agree that any military ignoring this is criminally negligent. Western militaries have all had the first-hand experience of their expensively-trained soldiers not dying is a big deal.
This armor is generally made of ceramic or plastic cells, where even if one cell is damaged it won't stop the other cells from stopping more incoming fire. So at that point, you either beef up your fighting rifle and cartridge to the point you can reliably get through that armor, or you fire more than one round in a burst that's fast enough to score a hit on the same cell of armor, defeating it.
The first approach is not a good one. More powerful rounds are heavier and larger, meaning the individual soldier can't carry as many- a problem once you've spent your entire load of 80 rounds and now you have no ammunition with which to close with and destroy the enemy- and they recoil a lot more so the weight of the gun has to be higher and affordances have to be made not to beat the soldier up too badly. Oh, and at that point your enemy then figures out that they might as well not wear armor if it's not going to protect them anyway (the norm for most conflict involving firearms) so you have these overpowered rifles that can barely keep a sustained rate of fire above that of a WW1-era bolt action rifle.
So we come to the second approach, which has comparatively few downsides. If the enemy decides not to issue armor after all (like Russian forces in Ukraine), you're not caught with some overpowered undersupplied monster rifle, it's still useful when it comes to suppressing fire (even if they know those rounds won't penetrate their armor they're still not sticking their heads into the incoming fire to find out!) because you didn't cut your individual soldier's ammunition supply by 3/4ths, and so on. It still depends on armor being defeatable in this way, and the individual soldier needs to be on target before they fire since it won't fix that, but we know that 6.8x51 at its public power level will still get through today's super-tough armor if you hit the same cell enough times- and there's only one known action that lets you feed/fire more than one round that physically big that fast.
Good points, in context of small arms, burst fire does make a good amount of sense.
Also, I'm suspecting there's a lot of things that haven't been tried. HEAT is probably not the best idea on account of the target being some sort of ceramic, but APDS would probably fit the bill nicely, as I imagine the plates themselves, when penetrated, do cause spalling, right ? APDS in tanks greatly increases penetration.
When the individual soldier's armor is shrugging off rounds designed to defeat light vehicles, and that armor is available to any industrialized nation at 200USD a plate
A plate. Which means, unless the guy is hit once or twice straight into a plate, he's just somewhat less likely to die. Which is very nice for the soldiers, but not really a gamechanger, as artillery is the bigger killer, and if they're shot at comprehensively, just as dead as an unarmored one.
Yet making a practical suit of armor that'd actually render the soldiers largely bulletproof to small arms, etc would still be prohibitively heavy, so you'd need either powered exoskeletons or bodybuilders and some cooling system.
ThisIsSin
The boob tube emits harmful XXX-rays
No_one 1yr ago
APDS would probably fit the bill nicely
APDS in small arms has been tried before. The major problem with it is that a long, skinny dart doesn't have very good killing power- it isn't carrying very much kinetic energy and due to its nature of being a long, skinny dart has a very hard time actually dumping that energy into the target. Other problems include requiring much more precision in manufacture to fly straight and the sabots have a tendency upon separation to bounce off the ground at Mach 4 and injure squadmates (a problem noted in the SPIW trials).
If I recall correctly, exploding ammunition for small arms has some laws of war constraining its use. It's quite trivial to make an explosive 30-caliber projectile (InRange has a few videos about this, with both German and Russian examples used in WW2), but your accuracy suffers a bit unless you make the projectile correctly and the cost per round from both a pure BOM and manufacturing cost perspective increases significantly.
Which means, unless the guy is hit once or twice straight into a plate, he's just somewhat less likely to die.
He's significantly less likely to die. He's also much more likely to remain combat effective after taking a hit, which means that even if you end up causing eventual fatal injury to someone wearing this he's still probably going to be able to shoot back.
And while I agree that artillery is going to shred you no matter what armor you're wearing, that's not as effective when your enemy is either dug in (which a peer army could and would do) or irregular (in the case of civil war).
that's not as effective when your enemy is either dug in (
... I don't mean artillery of the kind the Taliban are using - a few rusty 120 mm mortars with a few shells, but the kind actual armies use.
You've heard the stories out of the Ukraine, or seen the pictures, right ? With accurate artillery fire, unless you have a deep shelter several meters under the ground, you're pretty much dead.
Perhaps the next step would be some sort of dead-zone generation tech that nullifies remote weaponry. Hard to say what that could be, though: StingRays on steroids, Gap generators, Minovsky particles?
Even in a helical mag 90 rounds is going to be... Well maybe you could come up with a clever way to multi stack Trounds and make them telescoped, but that is still going to be a chunky mag. Sounds badass though.
People point to failed programs saying "look at all the stupid stuff they tried to make!" but the vast majority failed before adoption... which is how the system is supposed to work!
I don't have the link on hand, but imagine I linked to that post about the US military testing to failure here.
I do have to wonder, does the US military produce more procurement boondoggles than other nations on average/per capita? Are we just so materially-rich that we can afford to try stupid shit, whereas any other nation would really have to save up to even think of replacing anything?
Right now I'm watching my town's snowplows spread salt before it RAINS. And the core reason they're doing it is because we got no snow this year, so they need to use up some of their salt supply to keep the supplier contract in place. Maybe somebody's brother in law, maybe rational inventory management within bureaucratic restraints.
The military works the same way, plus a bit of extra corruption. They need to produce stuff all the time to keep the industry humming for when they need something.
I would appreciate if you could find that post, I don't think I've read it.
I do have to wonder, does the US military produce more procurement boondoggles than other nations on average/per capita?
My gut feeling is that it is partially true. There are almost certainly more boondoggles in other countries that we don't hear about because they aren't as open as the USA and they don't get the same media attention.
However, the US military is terrified not of their adversaries technologically surpassing them, but of them merely closing the gap. All of US strategy relies on overmatch, the theory that you don't just outperform your enemies, you can totally crush them if desired. In the situation where your advancement is plateauing, the bad guys are rapidly catching up, and you're at a severe disadvantage in manpower but you're flush with money and brain power, why not throw everything at the wall and see what sticks?
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Agree on all accounts. There is so much we still don't know, especially about the cartridges. The Army could be hiding this information because it's embarrassing... or that could be SOP. I don't have the experience to say, and I doubt many of the detractors do.
I wonder, if one looked at everything the Army ever adopted and counted up the number of items with performance claims that turned out to be false, how many times it actually happened. People point to failed programs saying "look at all the stupid stuff they tried to make!" but the vast majority failed before adoption... which is how the system is supposed to work! And don't even mention The Pentagon Wars, that book is full of stupidity and lies.
I remember reading discussions on the plastic ammunition before the NGSW was awarded. Some (most?) of the commentators had the Sig entry in distant third because it was barely any different than existing platforms and we're talking up the supply chain benefits of the GD and Textron entries. Honestly, the seethe when Sig won was pretty funny. I take it to mean that the other systems just didn't work very well. At least True Velocity is continuing to develop their ammunition, so maybe even.277 Fury will come in plastic someday.
Nice reference on the Trounds too, the Dardick makes a lot more sense when you look at it as a platform for the Trounds instead of a serious pistol design. I think they also had an auto cannon design that used the Trounds to achieve some ungodly fire rate.
...don't know.
I remember reading about it, and the dual cartridge system was the selling point.
You can use normal ammo shooting fleshy enemies, but if you meet something harder to, but the gun can also use the very hot rounds that probably would also cause durability issues.
Guns with very high muzzle velocities or just very big guns often last only cca several hundred rounds before a barrel swap is required.
1930s Polish anti-tank rifle (guys should have just used .50 BMG) with a muzzle velocity of 1275 m/s had a barrel life of just ~300 rounds or so.
Remember that the original .50 Browning cartridge was an armor peircing incendiary round intended for anti-vehicular work, it was only after the US being the US started slapping M2s on everything that someone suggested that making a simple FMJ "ball" variant of the cartridge might be a wise economical choice.
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Well, there's no actual upside to publicizing what they actually have. Either it does, and now the enemy knows it does and will beef up their armor that last little bit in response so now their competitive advantage is gone... or it won't, and the enemy knows it doesn't (and that would indeed be embarrassing).
However, I will point out that if a military organization has any brains, they've already tested this. A standard .270WSM rifle with a proper AP projectile will (even at performance levels currently public) outperform 6.8x51 with that same projectile, so if that can't penetrate Level IV armor 6.8x51 almost certainly can't either.
There are also a couple of other considerations. The Army tends to be quite conservative in procurement, and the SIG rifle is the closest thing to the M16 (everything else was completely alien in terms of manual of arms, and on top of that the Textron one had a completely different operating mechanism since ejection on that has to be push-through). So, a platform based on the M4 has a massive leg up- they really don't want to retrain everyone, and "the new rifle is an M16, but bigger and with some additional niceties" accomplishes that goal.
On the other side of the coin, the GD rifle would require substantial retraining. It was probably much cheaper to make (given it's 100% extruded aluminum and plastic with very little secondary machining required) in bulk but would have taken a lot of work and bullpups slightly compromise the range of things you can do with the rifle (it's better on a static range when you're not taking weird positions on the ground, but there are some things you really can't do as well, like changing magazines while prone).
Also, the TrueVelocity/GD/Beretta system didn't really measure up in terms of performance- the ammunition wasn't loaded nearly as hot (despite its advanced construction, they could have changed the case material to normal brass with no loss in ballistic performance) and as such needed a longer barrel to compete with SIG's rifle. It was also slightly more complex mechanically and I suspect had a fundamentally-unsolvable heat issue after multiple magazines of fully-automatic fire, much like the Bushmaster M17s (with its all-aluminum construction) does. Yes, the polymer case solves heat at the chamber, but doesn't reduce it at the gas block, and because the gas block is under the handguard it's going to heat that area- this is why the British L85's handguard is made of plastic.
(Aside: I'm aware that there's very little actually documented about how their rifle actually works- I choose to interpret what's written as it being a standard AR-18-derived design, but the entire bolt/barrel assembly is housed within a carriage that moves back and forth so the recoil impulse is less. At least one of SIG's prototypes had a similar system, if I recall correctly.)
Yeah, the rotating drum "revolver" cannon was honestly pretty cool. I would never have though Plexiglas could be a suitable material for that job, but then again I also didn't think that of MDPE/HDPE (the material the early Trounds were made of- Celanese Fortiflex- isn't special or exotic in any way).
I still believe there is a valid place for Trounds, though. If armor's so good now that it requires multiple hits in the same place in rapid succession to defeat (and ceramic armor is still defeated by normal 6.8x51 in this way)... well, a high speed small caliber burst could conceivably be the solution, and the
WankelDardick action is known for extremely high RPM with very little complication (unlike the G11 where the solution to malfunctions is "throw the internal mechanism away and get a new one").As such, I think the answer is a rifle with the rotary action that Trounds enable as well as a helical magazine, with the action and magazine riding on G11-style rails such that any recoil impulse isn't transmitted until the end of the burst. It'll have a lot in common aesthetically with the M1216 shotgun, with a magazine capacity close to 90 rounds, firing a burst of slightly beefed-up 5.56 equivalent at a rate sufficient to put every round into the same ceramic square of the enemy's armor. In this way, you still have 30 trigger pulls before reloading (though this would make magazines quite a bit longer) without fundamentally disrupting the hangup the US in particular has embedded in its culture of "
one shot one killsingle well-placed shot" marksmanship. Recoil's going to be heavy, but 6.8x51 already has that problem anyway.All this talk is as funny as guys talking about ultra-modern tank cannons with even higher muzzle velocities that could penetrate 1.2m of RHA, but what's the point of that when a drone or prone, camouflaged infantry man or just a housecat with the right cybernetic implant relaying fire control information over a laser link can cause a howitzer 12 km away to drop a round into a circle of +-3m around the tank's center.
Good luck defending against that - APS may help somewhat, but the cost is probably the same as a howitzer shell, and tanks usually have like 8 at most, which means after that you're shit out of luck and the tank is scrap metal.
This is in the context of small arms, though.
Personal body armor is now so incredibly good that the traditional final boss of anti-personnel armor piercing rounds, .30-06 M2AP, cannot penetrate it with a single hit. I'm relatively certain even .338LM's AP loadings can't get through either, and they can even stop non-AP .50 BMG rounds at sufficient distances (the actual AP stuff will still beat it). When the individual soldier's armor is shrugging off rounds designed to defeat light vehicles, and that armor is available to any industrialized nation at 200USD a plate I would very much agree that any military ignoring this is criminally negligent. Western militaries have all had the first-hand experience of their expensively-trained soldiers not dying is a big deal.
This armor is generally made of ceramic or plastic cells, where even if one cell is damaged it won't stop the other cells from stopping more incoming fire. So at that point, you either beef up your fighting rifle and cartridge to the point you can reliably get through that armor, or you fire more than one round in a burst that's fast enough to score a hit on the same cell of armor, defeating it.
The first approach is not a good one. More powerful rounds are heavier and larger, meaning the individual soldier can't carry as many- a problem once you've spent your entire load of 80 rounds and now you have no ammunition with which to close with and destroy the enemy- and they recoil a lot more so the weight of the gun has to be higher and affordances have to be made not to beat the soldier up too badly. Oh, and at that point your enemy then figures out that they might as well not wear armor if it's not going to protect them anyway (the norm for most conflict involving firearms) so you have these overpowered rifles that can barely keep a sustained rate of fire above that of a WW1-era bolt action rifle.
So we come to the second approach, which has comparatively few downsides. If the enemy decides not to issue armor after all (like Russian forces in Ukraine), you're not caught with some overpowered undersupplied monster rifle, it's still useful when it comes to suppressing fire (even if they know those rounds won't penetrate their armor they're still not sticking their heads into the incoming fire to find out!) because you didn't cut your individual soldier's ammunition supply by 3/4ths, and so on. It still depends on armor being defeatable in this way, and the individual soldier needs to be on target before they fire since it won't fix that, but we know that 6.8x51 at its public power level will still get through today's super-tough armor if you hit the same cell enough times- and there's only one known action that lets you feed/fire more than one round that physically big that fast.
Good points, in context of small arms, burst fire does make a good amount of sense.
Also, I'm suspecting there's a lot of things that haven't been tried. HEAT is probably not the best idea on account of the target being some sort of ceramic, but APDS would probably fit the bill nicely, as I imagine the plates themselves, when penetrated, do cause spalling, right ? APDS in tanks greatly increases penetration.
A plate. Which means, unless the guy is hit once or twice straight into a plate, he's just somewhat less likely to die. Which is very nice for the soldiers, but not really a gamechanger, as artillery is the bigger killer, and if they're shot at comprehensively, just as dead as an unarmored one.
Yet making a practical suit of armor that'd actually render the soldiers largely bulletproof to small arms, etc would still be prohibitively heavy, so you'd need either powered exoskeletons or bodybuilders and some cooling system.
APDS in small arms has been tried before. The major problem with it is that a long, skinny dart doesn't have very good killing power- it isn't carrying very much kinetic energy and due to its nature of being a long, skinny dart has a very hard time actually dumping that energy into the target. Other problems include requiring much more precision in manufacture to fly straight and the sabots have a tendency upon separation to bounce off the ground at Mach 4 and injure squadmates (a problem noted in the SPIW trials).
If I recall correctly, exploding ammunition for small arms has some laws of war constraining its use. It's quite trivial to make an explosive 30-caliber projectile (InRange has a few videos about this, with both German and Russian examples used in WW2), but your accuracy suffers a bit unless you make the projectile correctly and the cost per round from both a pure BOM and manufacturing cost perspective increases significantly.
He's significantly less likely to die. He's also much more likely to remain combat effective after taking a hit, which means that even if you end up causing eventual fatal injury to someone wearing this he's still probably going to be able to shoot back.
And while I agree that artillery is going to shred you no matter what armor you're wearing, that's not as effective when your enemy is either dug in (which a peer army could and would do) or irregular (in the case of civil war).
... I don't mean artillery of the kind the Taliban are using - a few rusty 120 mm mortars with a few shells, but the kind actual armies use.
You've heard the stories out of the Ukraine, or seen the pictures, right ? With accurate artillery fire, unless you have a deep shelter several meters under the ground, you're pretty much dead.
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Perhaps the next step would be some sort of dead-zone generation tech that nullifies remote weaponry. Hard to say what that could be, though: StingRays on steroids, Gap generators, Minovsky particles?
... if you propose inventing magic, you're welcome to try, I guess.
Let me know when you manage to gain access to this simulation's console, okay ?
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Even in a helical mag 90 rounds is going to be... Well maybe you could come up with a clever way to multi stack Trounds and make them telescoped, but that is still going to be a chunky mag. Sounds badass though.
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I don't have the link on hand, but imagine I linked to that post about the US military testing to failure here.
I do have to wonder, does the US military produce more procurement boondoggles than other nations on average/per capita? Are we just so materially-rich that we can afford to try stupid shit, whereas any other nation would really have to save up to even think of replacing anything?
Right now I'm watching my town's snowplows spread salt before it RAINS. And the core reason they're doing it is because we got no snow this year, so they need to use up some of their salt supply to keep the supplier contract in place. Maybe somebody's brother in law, maybe rational inventory management within bureaucratic restraints.
The military works the same way, plus a bit of extra corruption. They need to produce stuff all the time to keep the industry humming for when they need something.
.. is that even working, given that Ukraine hasn't had artillery fire parity with Russians since some of the ill-planned early attempts at Kiev ?
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This causes everyone's cars to rust.
It'd be legitimately better to just dump the salt in a hole, should they really need to waste it.
Almost anything would be better, as usual in economics transfer payments to salt companies would be the superior choice.
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I would appreciate if you could find that post, I don't think I've read it.
My gut feeling is that it is partially true. There are almost certainly more boondoggles in other countries that we don't hear about because they aren't as open as the USA and they don't get the same media attention.
However, the US military is terrified not of their adversaries technologically surpassing them, but of them merely closing the gap. All of US strategy relies on overmatch, the theory that you don't just outperform your enemies, you can totally crush them if desired. In the situation where your advancement is plateauing, the bad guys are rapidly catching up, and you're at a severe disadvantage in manpower but you're flush with money and brain power, why not throw everything at the wall and see what sticks?
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