StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Stark wrote:It's more important to realise that it's unlikely America will ever get a 'real' choice for political, cultural and ennui reasons.

Edward Yee wrote: For some reason now, it seems like the "tacticool" new fad is "M4-types" with even shorter barrels, i.e. 8-inch (Barrett REC7 5.56 mm example) or 7-inch (SIG 516 example)...

Army Engineers at the Picatinny Arsenal, N.J.-based Joint Service Small Arms Program office have been working for the last six years on a radical approach to ammunition and weapons that has the potential to cut the weight Soldiers carry by nearly 50 percent.

Researchers are using so-called "cased telescoped" ammunition that does away with the propellant-holding brass shell and replaces it with a lightweight plastic case. So far the program, dubbed Lightweight Small Arms Technologies, has built three M-249 Squad Automatic Weapon-like machine guns and fired more than 10,000 of the lighter rounds with the same rate of fire and accuracy of a standard SAW.

"This delivers the same lethality as the systems you already have, but it's a lot more effective because it's much lighter," said Korene Phillips, lead engineer for the LSAT program, in an exclusive interview with Military.com.

Engineers have also built a prototype M-4 that fires the lighter rounds. The experimental M-4 weighs about the same as a standard M-4 but has a 40-round magazine that's slimmer than the current one and straight instead of curved. And since half the weight of a legacy bullet is due to the brass case, a Soldier's load of more than 200 rounds in combat will drop substantially, Phillips said.

Born of the Army's "Advanced Combat Rifle" search in the 1980s, cased telescoped ammo and the much more technically complicated "caseless" ammunition were relegated to the laboratory after the Army shifted its gaze toward greater lethality rather than weight reduction, Phillips said. But with the U.S. military involved in two combat zones and a renewed emphasis on shaving pounds off a trooper's load, the Army decided to take another look at the decades-old technology.

"What we were trying to do back then was decrease load and increase lethality," Phillips said. "And we liked to joke that that was breaking the laws of physics."

With millions of dollars in Army research investment, the JSSAP office says it will be ready to put weapons in warfighters' hands by next year. Phillips said eight new SAWs will be built by AAI Corporation. She also said that the office plans to run an exercise with an infantry squad equipped with the new lightweight machine gun and 100,000 rounds of cased telescoped ammo.

It's unclear what unit will get the experimental weapons for the test, which is slated for the summer of 2011, but the Army, Marine Corps and Special Operations Command are playing a key role in LSAT development, Phillips said.

"We're just trying to get a comparison of the squad as it is today with the M-249" and the experimental weapon, Phillips said. "Our plan is just to replace the M-249 in the squad with the [new] weapon and see where that gets you with improvements in your time to complete the mission and your ability to complete the mission."

The standard SAW gunner's load comes in at around 40 pounds, Army officials say, which includes the weapon itself and 600 rounds of ammo. The experimental machine gun with cased telescoped ammo load comes in at 24 pounds.

The new cased telescope-firing SAW looks almost the same on the outside as its M-249 counterpart but uses a rotating action and a novel feed system that fires a standard 5.56mm ball projectile and ejects the plastic case and link from its own port.

"One of the other things we've completely avoided in this system is the failure to feed and failure to eject," Phillips added. "In your SAW system, that's where you primarily have failures and malfunctions."

The M-4 variant of the cased telescope rifle has a so-called "rising chamber" action that's fed ammo from the rear -- what JSSAP engineers jokingly call a "fauxpup" after the so-called "bullpup" operating systems popular with European small arms. It looks similar to a standard M-4, but the operating system actually gives the experimental rifle an extra four inches of barrel length, Phillips said.

While the cased telescoped ammo is almost ready for prime time, the more exotic caseless rounds still need some work, Phillips explained. Testers are having problems keeping the rounds -- which are essentially hard, molded propellant with an embedded 5.56 mm bullet -- from degrading in high heat. They're also expensive, hard to make, and tough on the shooter.

"We haven't had any volunteers to shoulder fire it," Phillips joked, adding her office hasn't gotten the approval to take it to the range. Excessive smoke, inexact timing and other uncertainties have kept the weapon attached to a bench.

"Nobody's knocking on my door asking to shoot it," she added.

Despite the immaturity -- and danger -- of the caseless technology, the Marine Corps is spearheading the research into the ammo because of its advantages in weight and size.

"It's a significantly smaller round of ammunition," Phillips said. "So from a Marine perspective, that's a big deal because of the way they travel."

Army Engineers at the Picatinny Arsenal, N.J.-based Joint Service Small Arms Program office have been working for the last six years on a radical approach to ammunition and weapons that has the potential to cut the weight Soldiers carry by nearly 50 percent.

Researchers are using so-called “cased telescoped” ammunition that does away with the propellant-holding brass shell and replaces it with a lightweight plastic case. So far the program, dubbed Lightweight Small Arms Technologies, has built three M-249 Squad Automatic Weapon-like machine guns and fired more than 10,000 of the lighter rounds with the same rate of fire and accuracy of a standard SAW.

A couple quick things here…According to Kori Phillips, lead engineer on the program, the JSSAP office was told by the infantry center at Benning to concentrate on the light machine gun — in this case the SAW. So at least to some extent, the Army has telegraphed its priority as lightening the M-249 in one way or another (they recently did it with the M-240 by fielding the Mk-48).

And one other interesting thing of note is that they developed a whole new firing system for the LSAT SAW that has a rotating bolt…

The new cased telescope-firing SAW looks almost the same on the outside as its M-249 counterpart but uses a rotating action and a novel feed system that fires a standard 5.56mm ball projectile and ejects the plastic case and link from its own port.

“One of the other things we’ve completely avoided in this system is the failure to feed and failure to eject,” Phillips added. “In your SAW system, that’s where you primarily have failures and malfunctions.”

According the Phillips (and I only half understand what she’s even saying) the chamber supports the entire length of the case which is “key with a polymer case. You can’t have any exposed surface otherwise it will sheer.” It’s a straight through feed and eject and the chamber is not attached to the barrel. Also since the weapon is lighter, it has a lot more kick than a SAW. So engineers put in a “long stroke soft recoil” spring system in it, “so there’s no buffer spring in the butt stock.”

Engineers have also built a prototype M-4 that fires the lighter rounds. The experimental M-4 weighs about the same as a standard M-4 but has a 40-round magazine that’s slimmer than the current one and straight instead of curved. And since half the weight of a legacy bullet is due to the brass case, a Soldier’s load of more than 200 rounds in combat will drop substantially.

Phillips admitted you can’t shave much weight from the already pretty light M-4 system. But the unique characteristics of the ammo allow engineers to fashion a straight mag, just as long as the current one but with ten more rounds.

The M-4 variant of the cased telescope rifle has a so-called “rising chamber” action that’s fed ammo from the rear — what JSSAP engineers jokingly call a “fauxpup” after the so-called “bullpup” operating systems popular with European small arms. It looks similar to a standard M-4, but the operating system actually gives the experimental rifle an extra four inches of barrel length, Phillips said.

The rifle looks almost the same as the M-4 — no magazine behing the trigger, Stoner lovers — but since the ammo is fed from behind the bolt, the same size gets four extra inches of reach out and touch you.

While the cased telescoped ammo is almost ready for prime time, the more exotic caseless rounds still need some work, Phillips explained. Testers are having problems keeping the rounds — which are essentially hard, molded propellant with an embedded 5.56 mm bullet — from degrading in high heat. They’re also expensive, hard to make, and tough on the shooter.

Now here’s where things got dicey. The caseless ammo is just simply not there. Though it offers a huge advantage in weight and volume, the instability of the round and its expense and difficulty in manufacturing have kept it in the lab. But I’ve been around more than a few SAW gunners who’d take the 40 percent weight reduction over nothing any day.

Aaron wrote:Huh, plastic casings. Thats pretty damn neat, wonder what the difference in cost will be.

Shroom Man 777 wrote:Obviously Africa is way ahead of the curve in that they've already got those so-called 5th Gen Systems in use today.

Stark wrote:

General Schatten wrote:Hey Stark, do you happen to remember any of the stuff said about the AUG when you guys were adopting it?

There were complaints about reliability (ie 'wah I don't know how to strip it').

There were complaints about the barrel melting (ie 'omg its not a machinegun' although this was apparently a problem at some point).

There were complaints about all the plastic (ie 'wah toygun').

There were complaints about the sight (ie 'wah it's not like the FAL').

There were complaints about the bullpup layout (ie 'wah I have to learn new drills') specifically about how it was 'impossible' to reload prone.

There were complaints about the foregrip (ie 'wah its better but I hate it').

Basically every firearm rag hated it because it was new/different/modern/etc. Nowadays everyone loves it; any body of guys with specific skills are going to hate change, but later they can genearlly look back and see it was a good thing. Most long-serving ADF guys seem to think it's an accurate, reliable, easy to look after and forgiving weapon. They'd probably prefer the newer furniture with rails and shit, though.

Outside the loss of essential 'shoot guy through a tree' capacity in the change to 5.56 it was a win.

[R_H] wrote:I think the Army will hold off procurement of a new carbine until the LSAT polymer telescope case ammuntion is either ready for use, or rejected.

Mr Bean wrote:Is not caseless the worst possible ammo for an LMG due to the heat issue? A standard LMG needs it's barrel changed every 200 rounds or if i has has a firing rate higher than 600 RPM but caseless cuts it in half or more because you don't get the benefit of the spent rounds taking some of the heat with them?

I asked about “thermal management,” the vexing problem of keeping the LSAT from prematurely overheating. Shipley corrected the misconception that this is particularly challenging in both CT and CL because there is no brass case that ejects along with most of the heat generated on firing. Brass transfers a lot of heat to the chamber, he said, but the CT’s polymer case is an insulator.

The CT’s “combination of a separate chamber and polymer case results in considerable heat isolation,” Shipley explained. “You can fire to the point where the barrel is too hot to touch yet the chamber is only slightly warm.” And Spiegel said that the high-temperature steel used in the barrel was nothing unusual.

“There’s no ‘unobtanium’ [miraculous metal] in the weapon itself,” she said. “The only thing we haven’t made a determination on yet is the chamber for the caseless weapon,” she offered. “We are looking at everything including ceramics, approaching it from all angles. We want to find the optimum combination and that will probably be some kind of ‘sandwich,’ but we don’t know yet.”

Zixinus wrote:Er, no. The G11 died because Germany was about to reunify and there were no funds for giving the army a new gun. This almost drove H&K to bankruptcy. They sort of solved the problem of cook-off by raising the ignition temperature of the caseless ammunition.

[R_H] wrote:I can't help but think that an SMG would be better than a really short SBR (under 10"). Even with heavy grain ammunition, 5.56 will fragment very poorly (not to mention increased muzzle blast, flash and perceived recoil). What about 5.45?

Mr Bean wrote:

Zixinus wrote:Er, no. The G11 died because Germany was about to reunify and there were no funds for giving the army a new gun. This almost drove H&K to bankruptcy. They sort of solved the problem of cook-off by raising the ignition temperature of the caseless ammunition.

That sounds like a vicious cycle.
"Our gun gets to hot and cooks off the ammo!"
"Well then raise the temperature it takes to ignite the ammo"
"Won't that just make our gun even hotter and still make the ammo cook off?"
"Lets find out!"
Can someone please explain to me how that would work?
As for the G11 yes, as far as I have heard you are correct. The G11 was about five or ten years ahead of it's time. It's development was expensive and money dried up fast during reunification.

Stark wrote:If SMGs weren't married to 9mm they'd be more competitive, but changing rifle round would have the same effect. In many ways the weapons are identical these days anyway, and an AP round the handles short barrels better would make it irrelevant.