Sunday, February 24, 2013
Wiki Hole
So I went down a wiki hole after looking over this and the following post on Forgotten Weapons. That made me look up SALVO. They thought they might be onto something with a flechette weapon that on paper fire 2300 round per minute and was controllable even though it only weighed three and half pounds, loaded with 60 cartridges. Can you imagine? If that had been more workable we'd have never even heard of the AR, maybe. AR would be a footnote like a Johnson rifle. Their are PISTOLS that weigh more than 3.5 pounds.
Doctrine would involve a lot more Spray and Pray suppressing fire, I'm thinking. There was also a thought, made new again recently, of adding a 12 gauge style grenade launcher. A smaller M203. Like a XM25, but 50 years ago. So, picture Viet Nam with a even MORE walls of bullets and lots of booms from the grenades of every squad member. BrrrrrraaaaaapppppBOOM! BrrrrrraaaaaapppppBOOM! BrrrrrraaaaaapppppBOOM!
But, as we know, such a future-gun didn't really make it out of the gate.
The search for a solution that was solved by the .276 Pedersen was instead settled by the .223. After overcoming LOTS of inertia, prejudice for stopping power over volume of fire, and a conservative mindset in the people in the Army in charge of ordnance decisions. The opposing forces still hanker for more stopping power. Imagine if we had adopted the .276 pre-WWII. We'd probably have people today looking to lessen the ammo weight and increase volume of fire with something like the .223. And the wheel turns and turns.
We could also have had the British .280 sometime around 1950. They actually adopted and optically sighted select fire bullpup to fire it. If your WIKI-wander didn't get there, look up the EM-2
ReplyDeleteThe plan was to agree on a standard cartridge, and if possible, a standard rifle to fire it, but the US Army would not accept anything less than a .30, hence the 7.62 NATO.
The British ended up going with the FAL because the EM-2 wouldn't scale up successfully to 7.62. (Forgotten Weapons has a video of one being fired. The compromise was supposed to be that NATO adopt the FAL, including the US Army. That got reneged on as well.
The Brits are still angry over that, since after having forced the adoption of the 7.62 round, they unilaterally went with 5.56mm, based on research from project SALVO and other Korean war studies. Exactly the same arguments the Brits made in 1947, but the US rejected.
We could have had the equivalent of the 6.8 SPC back in 1950.
The brits are still angry
Yep, that IS a rat hole and a half... And the 'games' that have been played are amazing...
ReplyDeleteGood thing that I know where to get Legal Flechette Rounds in 12 Gauge that feed through Semi-Auto Shotguns like Saigas.
ReplyDeleteBut the range still sucks, and the Dispersement Pattern is Huge.