Longevity

N

Nightcrawler

New member
Thinking about the future again. I'm curious; small arms design has reached something of a plateau. New assault rifles like the G36 and FN 2000 are neat, and have cool features, but don't really offer any *significant* combat advantage over the M16 (the M16's faults notwithstanding). By significant combat advantage, I mean in the usage of modern combat tactics. A guy with an M16 would be at a disadvantage compared to a guy with a Mauser in long distance trench warfare. But for the wars we fight today, the M16 and similar designs are adequate.

That being said, barring a major change in tactics, how long do you predict the M16 will remain in service? The way I see it, the US Military will continue to field one M16 design or another for a long time to come, another fifty years, easy.

Hell, they're saying now that the B-52s might fly until 2045, at which time the design will be ninety years old.

But with the way wars of the future might be fought, the types of small arms carried might not make that much of a difference. Our troops in the Gulf War could've easily carried M1 Garands and BARs and it wouldn't have made one iota of difference to the way the war turned out.

Now, attachments might be made that will aid the soldier in combat. I don't mean bulky, heavy stuff like Land Warrior, but sort of. Maybe a scope that, while weighing less than one pound, could have variable zoom, a laser rangefinder, nightvision, IR, etc. But the basic design of the weapon need not change for such an attachment.

So, whaddaya say? Will the weapons of today be the weapons of tomorrow as well? Pending the development of the next big thing, I mean a new type of small arm that provides a SERIOUS advantage over what we have now, and can be produced as easily and fielded just as easily, I don't think the US Military will be changing rifles anytime soon, for better or for worse.
 
I think we'll use the M16 at least until caseless ammunition becomes viable. Once it becomes a reality, we'll probably field the M16 for at least 10 years after that, until stockpiles of M855 and M193 are used up. Even though the M16 is only fielded in the Air Force and the M16A1 is still in the Army reserve components, we are still producing M193. My guard unit fired several thousand rounds of Lake City 2001 production M193 last month.

Economics has as much to do with weapons selection as anything else does. The M1 was originally designed as a .276 IIRC. However then Chief of Staff of the Army Douglas MacArthur decreed it would be produce in .30 cal because of the cost of replacing the millions of .30 caliber rounds that were in war reserve at that time.

I'd guess we'll be fielding the M16 or one of it's varients for at least another 20 years.

Jeff
 
The reality is that small arms aren't that much of a big deal on the modern battlefield. Armor and aircraft have reduced the traditional role of the rifleman almost out of existance. Thus the small performance gain in switching out the AR15 to something else would be outweighed by the huge cost. Plus, other countries have also been loath to adopt new weapons. The G11 project was scrapped, and nobody seems interested in reviving it. The AR15 does everything asked of it, and does it about as well as most other countries rifles.
 
Caseless

There's this huge assumption that caseless ammo will be the wave of the future. Why? HK tried it and nobody was interested; the caseless rifle offered no significant advantage over a standard one. It did, however, increase the cost of ammo production.

I don't see how caseless ammo would be advantageous over regular ammo. I do, however, think it would have more difficulty functioning when wet, etc.

And let's say all problems are overcome. Still, what's the advantage? A very minor savings in ammo weight? Is that all you get? Would that be worth the trouble of investing the billions it would take to make caseless rifles the standard?
 
Very generally speaking, the propellant forms the "case" instead of brass or steel and the projectile is seated in it. Ignition can be by a variety of means (electric,hot air,primer,etc.). The HK G11 used caseless ammo as did the the Daisy VL and S&W did some work on caseless 9mm with the Model 76.
 
Caseless ammo must be prohibitively expensive, then. Which, I'm sure, would make governments ask why it would be worth switching, which would in turn make the longevity of older, proven weapons a lot greater.

See, I'm back on topic now. ;)

(thanks for the info, bads!)

sapienza
 
I think Nightcrawler mentioned a key as to why the M16 will remain the standard US military rifle for a long time yet. The whole design of the rifle is modular and getting more so all the time as new accesories are developed. Just pull out a couple of pins and switch out the upper from the standard M-16 to a new caliber, optic system, lights, forend grip, electronics, whatever...

I think the next changes will be the configuration that the rifle is produced in and just what kind of accessories the rifle is issued with, but it will still be the same basic m16.

The M-4 is a fairly recent variation, and remember how cool the first M 203s looked when they started making appearances in the movies? Quite a change from the rifles cussed so frequently by the vietnam era vets. What's next?
 
Caseless ammo???

I'm not sure caseless ammo will fly.

The big advantages of cased ammo are:

1. The case protects the ammo from the elements. Long shelf life. Caseless shelf life? Handling issues? Contamination issues? Drop cased ammo in the water and it will still work. Caseless?

2. When the rifle ejects the case, it ejects a lot of heat from the receiver. With caseless ammo, the receiver has to deal with a lot more heat. That'll make it bigger? More expensive? Heavier?

Of course, those sealed magazines in "Aliens" looked like they would protect the caseless ammo pretty well...

But packaging a disposable magazine around the ammo will increase costs, too...
 
One possible advantage: a smaller size (I'm thinking of the G11 ammo) means more ammo can be crammed in a given space, increasing magazine capacity, and allowing more ammo to be moved easier. That weight difference may not mean anything for an individual combat load, but think about the savings in weight for an entire division. Less weight and size means more ammo for everyone.
Personally, I want a railgun though......
 
I'm really surprised people here believe a brass case, brass and chemical primer and propellent, mechanically assembled, would be cheaper than an injection molded caseless round. The chemical process to make the caseless propellent might be pricey compared to other plastics, but think of the savings in expensive metals and machine processes after the "retooling" has been paid off.

Caseless advantages include light weight, compactness, straightline feeding, no extraction cycle to foul on, no ejection port safety concerns (lefties and tight quarters), faster cycle time and decreased need for cleaning. The bullets can come in break-away strips so no extra external magazine is necessary and the feed chute can be topped off without opening the action or removing rounds. For spec ops it leaves no evidence and works better with a suppresor.

Cooling is an issue with all automatic weapons, but the momentary opening of the M16 bolt doesn't affect much, if any, airflow through the chamber. It's not a significant problem, if it was, the rifle would be an open bolt design. Open bolt isn't even used on all machineguns!

It may well be that the advantages aren't worth the wholesale replacement of current weapons; how many WWII battleships do we have on ready-reserve? But there are advantages over brass.
 
after the WWII, almost more than half of population is living in the city or close to city in dense population area, so weapon system and tactics would be changed to reflect that, specifically? not sure, maybe nazi's 90 degree street corner shooting gun resurface? :p
 
Caseless Advantages

Okay, if you don't have an extractor, how do you UNload the weapon? There has to be a way to safely unload the weapon aside from firing it.

Ammunition more compact? That depends on what you want it to do. The G11's ammo was compact because it didn't need a lot of propellant; it fired a tiny bullet less than 5mm in diameter. Many people consider a tiny bullet less than ideal for combat.

Decreased need for cleaning? Hardly. I would think that a caseless weapon would be even dirtier than an AR in operation. If I read correctly, the G11 needed to be kept somewhat clean in order to function.

And with these injection molded rounds. If I drop one and step on it, will the propellant crumble off the bullet? Will they work after being dunked in water or getting rained on?

Maybe you don't *want* to fire a bullet the size of a pellet gun projectile. What if you want to fire a big 7.62mm bullet, or a .50 caliber bullet? Will all of these advantages still come into play? If you had to surround a 7.62mm bullet with propellant like the G11 rounds do to their tiny bullet, you may reduce overall length but the cartridge would be FAT, and the space savings would be lost.

Faster cycle time? Who cares? You can make a modern assault rifle with a cyclic of over 2000rpm (AN-94). Why in the heck would you want it faster than that? Anything more than 800 or so RPM and you're going to have serious controlability problems, unless the cartridge fired is particularly lacking in energy, the gun is ridiculously heavy, or you have some kind of recoil absorbsion system like the AN-94.

Open bolt is used on almost every medium or heavy machine gun in the world. The Russian PKM, the Browning M2, the M60, the MAG-58, the SAW, you name it. Overheating IS an issue with very high cyclic rates and/or sustained automatic fire.

Why would a caseless round work better with a suppressor? The bullet would have to be subsonic, still. You fire a G11 projectile at less than 1100 feet per second and you see how effective it is. Even 5.56mm is seriously lacking in effectiveness onced reduced to subsonic speeds, hence the development of .300 Whisper.

Not meant as a flame, but there's a lot of preconceived notions that caseless technology offers some huge advantage over what we have, and I'm just not seeing it.
 
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Nightcrawler-

For this discussion, picture the basic G11 layout, but I was speaking in generalities. Okay, in order:

You don't need an extractor. A simple unloader device below the rotating chamber would serve to push out the round the way it came in. Or you could have a port below the chamber and the loader could push it through. Not too tough.

Compact ammo? Take a .308, pull the bullet and dump the powder behind it. That's how big, and how light a new .30 cartridge would be; about half the size and weight, same ballistics.

Cleaning. Well, aside whatever you "think" about the propellant, the important part is that the rest of the action is completely inaccessible to propellant gas. Any detritus left in the chamber is pushed if front of the next round by chambering. As to G11 reliability, you can't argue the merits of a system based on one of the first rifles of this type. Would you make general statements about machineguns based on the Maxim?

Round toughness. Step on a .308 case and see how nice it chambers. The caseless round will look and behave like a little chunk of heavy plastic. Yes, it will be waterproof, again, it's like plastic. Plus the projectile is completely enveloped and protected. Anyway, nitrocelulose burns wet or dry; the primer is the problem.

Weight. See above. All rounds are both smaller and lighter. That was one of the primary reasons for switching to .223 as well.

Cycle time equals target recovery time. Even if you're not interested in 3000 rpm tribursts, it is still better for fast semiauto followup.

The HK 21 and 23 fire from a closed bolt. I had thought the M60 did too, but couldn't find a reference. More to the point, which you apparently missed, is that the extraction cycle on a closed bolt auto, like the M16, doesn't do much for cooling. So why is cooling more of an issue on this rifle?

A caseless round would work better for a suppresor because the action doesn't open. Who said a caseless round had to be supersonic? The SEALS are switching to subsonic .223 for use in suppressed weapons. Are you saying you wouldn't have that flexibility with a caseless round? In practice, you would have more flexibility because projectile length wouldn't be as much of a limit as it becomes with a fixed volume brass case.

Your rebuttal seems to be based on the notion that all caseless bullets would be like G11 ammo and that all caseless guns would work no better than the prototype G11. I bet if you lived in Teddy Roosevelts time you would've scoffed at smokeless powder! ("But blackpowder leaves a smokescreen for the cavalry charge!")

Maybe your post did come off a bit like a flame because you began whacking away without considering. Could you really see no way of ejecting a round? Or making subsonic ammo. Come on.
 
>>Okay, if you don't have an extractor, how do you UNload the weapon?
>>Could you really see no way of ejecting a round? Or making subsonic ammo. Come on.

I think he was refering to the historical fact that military always prefer visual inspection of unloaded state of the weapon,(maybe officers always worry about insurbodination?)
since grunt will never be the person who will decide what weapon to use or design,(it's always desktop officers), you can't ignore what those officers favored in the history,
 
I apologize for sounding pissy.

Of course I thought of these things. But everytime anyone suggest caseless rifles, they always point to the G11, insisting that it'll be nearly exactly like it in design, firing a tiny bullet at ultra high velocities. Since the G11 was the only caseless service rifle ever produced, you're probably taking your ideas from that. The rotary feed mechanism you named, for instance, comes from the G11. Rechambering the G11 to fire a larger caliber ammuntion would, from the looks of the internal mechanisms, take significant modification, and would end up being a whole new rifle. The G11 and the caseless cartridge it fires were developed FOR each other specifically. The catridge wasn't developed to replace convnetional cartridge ammunition altogether.

The only real reason HK went with caseless ammo in the G11 was to speed up the cyclic to an excess of 2000rpm. The idea was to make the rifle able to fire 3 rounds before the shooter felt the recoil impulse, thus increasing hit probability.

Can caseless ammo be made waterproof, subsonic, etc.? I suppose, but since it would take quite a bit of work, effort, research, and money to make caseless ammo do what conventional ammo has been able to do for a hundred years, I don't think anyone will bother with developing it to replace standard ammunition anytime soon. All the advantages you named are neat, but very minor. It's not as if modern small arms have any huge failings that caseless would make up for. You made it sound like going to caseless would revolutionize the arms world, and I did and still have to disagree. IF the ammo could be devloped, then maybe those minor advantages would be a selling point, MAYBE. But the development of the plastic-propellant that could do everything and be just as rugged and long lasting as a brass or steel case filled with gunpowder would be a scientific achievement all in of itself...
 
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