brianeyci wrote:
The logic is based on you saying that heavier and more lethal grenades are available, and also you saying that lighter weight weapons are pointless because men are going around in vehicles, which is why I quoted your words.
Lightweight is relative, XM-307 still needs a two man crew to carry and use it, and cannot be fired without its tripod. I never said one damn thing at all about individual weapons in my initial post, so you made a leap of logic with no basis.
I see. Are you sure it is impossible/won't work well?
I’m pretty damn sure much, and as I said, even if it could work, a proximity fuse is not what you want. With a time fuse the solider decides at what point the grenade bursts. A laser rangefinder is used to enter the initial range, but controls on the weapon allow the user to adjust that range to whatever they want. That way if you can’t easily lase the point you want to burst the grenade over (say it’s a spider hole in the middle of a flat area) then you can lase something nearby and then adjust the range manually until its on target.
If you use a proximity fuse, then the shell decides when it’s going to burst all on its own. It might decide that some freaking grass or a highly reflective surface (any really small proximity fuse will be laser or infrared based) halfway to the target is grounds for exploding. Proximity fuses make sense for shooting at aircraft, when nothing else is around to trigger the fuse, and for indirect fire artillery when the shells plunge on the target. It does not make sense for a direct fire weapon that has the shell skimming along near the ground. It would also be even more complicated, expensive and simply physically bigger in an already small projectile.
It is possible to have a range gated proximity fuse, so that the fuse will only function after a certain distance has passed… but that means you now need to pack the same spin/distance measuring fuse these 25mm grenades already have AND the proximity fuse all into the same package. That’s been done in 40mm caliber (a naval gun firing 2lb shells far larger then 40mm grenades, just to be clear), but the resulting fuse assembly is bigger then the entire 25mm grenade for XM-307. It also costs far too much money to be worth firing against anything but aircraft or missiles. Designing a fuse which will allow the 25mm ammo cost down to be kept to a to a realistic level is part of the reason why development has taken so long.
I think I can find examples of fuses outside of military use which are that minaturized.
Umm, who the hell else but a military would have a requirement for a tiny proximity fuse able to withstand 20,000 gravities of acceleration and with a 10+ year shelf life????? By all means though, if you can think of something, do post it.
And why use such a complicated system to arm the fuse rather than a mechanical or electrical system? These are obvious questions, but I believe fair questions for fucked up military procurement.
Because a mechanical fuse setter would add a billion very tiny moving parts to the fuse and the gun, and make automatic fire impossible. Real mechanically set time fuses have to be set on the loading tray or on a dedicated fuse setting machine before they are loaded into the breach. That will not work remotely well on an automatic weapon.
With a direct electrical connection you’d have to physically put a plug into the shell. Does that sound realistic to you? To have the gun ALWAYS align a tiny plug and plug hole precisely, insert and remove the plug in a tiny period of time, and do this over 200 times per minute in a hot firing chamber?
In fact while induction is a hard way of doing things, its actually simpler then trying to get one of the other theoretically possible methods to work in this application. For much larger artillery pieces with a half dozen to a dozen men as crew and ammo that is already manually loaded they are more practical.
Sidewinder wrote:Is the US Army going to get ANYTHING useful from the FCS Project? Or will it be like the
ACR, a lot of money wasted on technology that just isn't mature enough to meet the necessary performance standards?
They’ll get some useful equipment no matter what happens. For example a lot of the work for FCS is all on developing new computer systems, networking, sensors ect… which may end up simply being installed on existing tanks and APCs like Abrams and Stryker.
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956
Not that I would want to be shot by anything.... but I REALLY wouldn't want to be shot by THAT! 
- PeZook
