Where is caseless ammo?

M

Machineguntony

New member
When I was really into shooting many years ago, I remember reading an article about caseless ammo. It was also a topic of semi frequent conversation.

On its face, it appears that with modern technology, you could have a self contained electrically ignited charge and bullet. The case would be the chamber.

I recently got back into shooting a few months back, and I expected that in the decade that I was out of the shooting sports, someone would have perfected caseless ammo.

So what happened? I hear nothing about it, not even from the military research scene.
 
It seems to be a Great Idea That Doesn't Work. The Volcanic pistol of the 1850s used a caseless round, the brass case quickly proved superior.
 
The prototype G11 made by HK was a caseless assault rifle.

It initially had a few problems but eventually they were all ironed out.
I believe HK even said it was successful but it was a to far before it's time so they never carried on to put it into production.

But caseless in a your standard hunting rifle, never heard of it and certainly not recently.
 
I remember reading about caseless ammo a lot in the 90s. If I recall, the main advantage in a military rifle was a much higher cyclic rate of fire (2 of the 8 steps in the cycle of operation are removed) so a three-round burst stays on target much better. Another advantage was lighter-weight ammo. I wasn't aware the G11 was ever perfected; I was under the impression that they just had too many problems to make it a reliable military weapon.

I also remember reading in a gun magazine in the 90s about a prototype hunting rifle that fired caseless ammo. I think it might have been made by a major company like Remington. The idea was that with electronic ignition, lock time was eliminated and accuracy was improved. Obviously, it never took off; I'm guessing it just didn't offer enough advantages and had too many disadvantages.
 
One of the problems, reportedly, was the shelf life and durability of the caseless loaded magazines. Military use is rough and dirty and those magazines just didn't hold up, I read.
 
Among the problems with caseless ammo that were never solved were:

Excessive heat build up.
When a cased round is fired in a semi or full auto weapon the hot case is quickly ejected, taking much of the heat of firing with it. Caseless ammo allowed the weapon to heat up faster and hotter, overheating the weapon quickly.

The problem of extracting an unfired or dud round was never really resolved.

Even the cleanest ammo still left a residue of ash in the chamber that caused chambering problems.

Ammo durability was not very good.
The ammo tended to deteriorate under storage, especially damp storage, and rough handling tended to cause the ammo to crumble or break up.

Sealing the breech was never as good as cased ammo.

Accuracy was never all that good, certainly not up to cased ammo standards.
 
Google the LSAT light machine gun. It's a program the US Army is working on currently to replace the relatively heavy, unreliable M249 SAW. AFAIK it is the most progress anyone has made towards fielding a weapon with ceaseless ammo.
 
As pointed out, it's one of those things that sounds like a great idea.

Then, millions of dollars are spent to realize that caseless ammo introduces issues that are harder to deal with than just using traditional brass cased ammo.
 
As Theo said, in the 90s it was a topic often discussed.

There are so many advantages to ceaseless ammo. Like any technology, it's going to have hiccups and the first generation isn't going to be the best, but innovation is what drives human beings. Problems like barrel and chamber heating can be solved, and it appears that with the LSAT, they're on the way to solving that issue or any other issue that is mentioned in this thread.

It's always been weird to me that ammunition really hasn't progressed all that much. Sure, we have better powder, etc, but it's still a bullet that is propelled by a charge in a case, ignited by a primer. There haven't really been any big innovations in the last 69 years. The last big innovation is smokeless powder?

Everything else has been small incremental improvements.

As I remember, with ceaseless ammo, you can have higher rates of fire, lighter ammo (so a soldier can carry more), you can even have flexible ammo that can bend, it can be cheaper, etc.

I hope they develop this and that it moves to civilian availability.
 
They tried in the 1960's, came up with the Tround, a triangular caseless round. Not sure what became of it, never got off the ground. An inventor named Dardick was working on it and got some prototypes done.
 
Back in the 1990s the Voere caseless rifle hit the market for a number of years.

It flopped.

One of the biggest problems with caseless ammo that HK couldn't resolve the propellant variations.

Each batch of smokeless powder, even when manufactured to the exact same specifications, has a ballistic signature that is all its own.

When you're using brass-cased (or steel) ammunition, that's not a problem. You can add or subtract propellant as necessary.

But when you have caseless ammo, each propellant block has to be physically the same size, or else it's not going to fit in the magazine, or in the chamber. Because you can't change the dimensions of the propellant block, you can't make the adjustments needed to ensure ballistic uniformity.
 
"They tried in the 1960's, came up with the Tround, a triangular caseless round."

The Dardick gun did NOT use caseless ammunition.

The Tround was the case, and was made of either high-strength plastic or aluminum.
 
Caseless ammo? It's called cap-n'-ball
Click to expand...

Nickel Plated nailed it. Muzzle loaders are the original caseless ammo firearm.

The advantage of the metallic case is the sealing of the breach. In a modern caseless breachloader, the bolt must seal the breach so no gases may escape into the action or into the shooter's face.

Mike makes some very good points about the consistency of pressure. I thought the Germans were on the brink of adopting the HK-11 but that was stopped by the reunification.
 
I believe the too biggest problems with caseless ammo was the cook offs and the propellant being waterproof.

But by the end of the project they had solved both of these problems by changing how the propellant was made.
Technically it was a success but for what ever political reason it wasn't adopted.
 
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