Friday, March 12, 2010

Amazing

THIS is amazing. (h/t Firearm Blog) What a wonderfully detailed chronicle of how the .223 / 5.56x45 round came about. Bravo Zulu on this guy for accumulating it in one place and letting me read it. I love these kinds of details.

It includes a lot of related scholarly articles related to infantry tactics as well as stuff of a ballistic nature, the works of political skullduggery behind the scenes by some of the major players, and parallel research into things like infantry fired flechette/darts instead of traditional bullets.

With all this development effort, in an adversarial environment, by all these people. All this head sweat expended. You'd think they'd have to have gotten it right. That there's be something to it. The .223 HAS to be an improvement over things that came before. So I should drop my instinctive unscientific objections and get on board the high velocity flat trajectory lightweight projectile bus and go to town.

Well, not necessarily. A lot of head sweat and scholarly articles went into Marxism and how great THAT was, and we all know how THAT turned out.

5 comments:

Newbius said...

J-T, your link is suspect. Try this one: http://www.thegunzone.com/556dw.html

New Jovian Thunderbolt said...

how did THAT get in there!

New Jovian Thunderbolt said...

phew. sorry about that.

New Jovian Thunderbolt said...

and thanks, Newbius. I musta been reading that post of Tams and copy pasted THAT bad link instead of the actual one.

Daniel E. Watters said...

Thanks for the endorsement. Part of the problem over the years has been that the right hand hasn't always known what the left hand was doing or had already done. Other times, they are kind of aware of what each other are doing, but have been too arrogant to compare notes.

By the way, I recently started a Facebook page for the 5.56 Timeline in hopes of attracting additional feedback.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-556mm-Timeline-A-Chronology-of-Development/259763052133