Assault rifles

[adam_grif]

Where the M-16 gets into trouble is its use of a direct impingement gas system, which unnecessarily fouls the chamber and bolt assembly.
A short stroke piston system, such as that on a REC 7 or HK416/417 largely solves that problem.

DI isn't all bad, it does have upsides in addition to the fouling issues.

[HELLHOUND]

In fairness to direct impingement, I'm given to understand it has less recoil than short stroke systems.

[JointStrikeFighter]

The main advantage of DI system is mechanical simplicity and *slightly* improved accuracy.

[Stark]

A thread about assault rifles turns into M16 apologism. Who saw that coming?

JSF is the accuracy 'improvement' similar to the bolt/semi rifle 'improvement', ie meaningless at rifle combat ranges? Totally worth a system that causes reliability issues.

Then again, let's not forget how shit the mag design was too.

[JointStrikeFighter]

A thread about assault rifles turns into M16 apologism. Who saw that coming?

JSF is the accuracy 'improvement' similar to the bolt/semi rifle 'improvement', ie meaningless at rifle combat ranges? Totally worth a system that causes reliability issues.

Then again, let's not forget how shit the mag design was too.

Yeah its meaningless; half minute of arc silliness.

and it's probably completed wasted on the M4's horrible stock

[montypython]

Wrt the AN-94, from Max Popenker's website the AEK-971 is both lighter and simpler than the AN-94 with better 3-round and full-auto accuracy, and knowing his experience with said rifles I'm not surprised seeing the AN-94 being used only in limited numbers for specialized applications.

[Sea Skimmer]

Why is McNamara so prevalent in these 60s-era US military blunders, anyway? He's a SecDef, SecDefs don't get to choose every single tiny detail of military matters, do they?

Yeah they do, and they can fire any officer who disagrees with them. They also make up the budget for the president, and the presidents budget will be mostly what is passed. What is more, even if congress does give money to something that was not in desired budget, the Secretary of Defense can refuse to spend it. This is how McNamara killed the YF-12 fighter program for example. He just didn't spend the money. McNamara increased the number of civilians working on the Department of Defense by a factor of twenty five in a single year! This was specifically so he could bring as much power and control of every last detail in the military into his sight. He thought his super management skills would revolutionize the Pentagon if only they could be applied thoroughly enough. But since by his own words he wasn't qualified and didn't know what he was doing he made endless dumb decisions.

One of the many things he did was start gutting the militaries in house technological development capability. Some of that was justified since the officers running it were stupid as hell, and gave us such great weapons as the M-14 with a bipod as a light machine gun, but so much was lost that the military became unable to decide what it wanted anymore. They don't have people in house who can tell them what stuff should cost, so that process is contracted out. That wasn't all NcNamara, but it started under him and picked up steam steadily. Now Obama wants to expand that into NASA too... great plan.

[Korto]

Realigning sights is done by <Snip>. An enemy soldier just needs to wait until you finish fighting in close combat, then gun you down with little fear of effective return fire.

Conceded. Pain in the arse in the field. The targetting computer that I mentioned could help, by showing exactly where you're actually aiming as you sight a point, and I see it as not even needing to fire a shot, but concession still stands. The forcefield doesn't actively track, but instead passively absorbs incoming energy.

If your enemy has impact-absorbing armor that is designed to stop bullets, you will not be able to hurt him through it with a mace. Maces achieve their armor-penetrating effect by deforming armor, not by acceleration trauma. To hurt somebody by accelerating their whole torso (which is what you will do if you smack somebody in rigid armor with an object that does not penetrate or deform the armor) you need to do something truly drastic, like run into them with a MACK truck at fifty miles an hour - unless you can bash them hard enough in the head to cause a concussion or spinal injury.

Bullets and heavy impact weapons are different beasts. A mace has a lot of momentum. A bullet has little and relies on kinetic energy (and does so very effectively, no argument here). (All AFAIK) For some numbers... Lets assume a human head weighs 5kg, a mace head 1.2kg, and you swing at 60mph (or 26.7m/s), and an acceleration of 65 gees is fatal 50% of the time (numbers all from google) (I'm using human numbers and assuming it can all scale up). I'll also assume 1cm of padding under the hard armour plate.
The mace has a starting momentum of 1.2 x 26.7 = 32kgm/s
On a direct head hit, the head has to accelerate from motionless to 5.2m/s over the time it takes that 1cm padding to be used up
Momentum must be conserved, so assuming head and mace move together, the end velocity of the head is 32 / (5 + 1.2) = 5.2m/s
Using v^2=u^2+2as --> a = (v^2-u^2)/2s = 1332.0 m/s/s = 136 gees
The guy's dead, whether or not the armour is even scratched.
Problems - I've assumed a perfect hit, on the head, without any "rolling with the blow" (hey, is there a name to the "assuming perfection" fallacy, where you believe something will work in the real world because it's possible on paper if everything works out exactly right?). A similar hit on the torso (assume mass 67kg and momentum evenly distributed) results in only a 1.1 gee accel, which would be completely ineffective. The mace mass could be increased (eg, a wood-splitting axe apparantly weighs 3kg), although not enough to make a torso hit dangerous (does create 500 gees on the head, though. Ouch)

If your fights are going to last longer than a few seconds in close quarters - as fights in heavy armor tend to do - how are you going to protect your soldiers from enemy riflemen, or even snipers, while they are engaged in close combat?

The aim is (and I'm not saying I've come anywhere close to it) to try and make shooting drawn out and only moderately effective, while close combat is fast and devastating. That's meant to be the main defense against snipers. I'll admit it's difficult when you also want the science to have at least a nodding aquaintance with reality.

Please note, I am a 40k fan. As such, I find giant, armored warriors with absurdly Freudian guns, and people charging into close combat in a world with automatic weapons inherently appealing. I'm just trying to provide such criticism as you may or may not decide to employ in making your awesomely ludicrous universe a ever so slightly less ludicrous.

And I appreciate your help. For one thing, I've decided that since there's thousands of these clans, it's senseless that they all have exactly the same gun design, but instead there's countless variants. Some bolted to the forearm, some held normally, some the size of a SMG, others a rifle, and so on and so on. Some cause more problems than others. It'll be storyline fluff, one clan sneering at another for their ridiculous gun design. Of course, the stupid ideas will get stomped quickly, but there's always another one when you have constant isolated experimentation and no real sharing of research.
I may have to re-examine the forcefield and armour, making the field more effective against ranged fire, the armour less effective overall.

[adam_grif]

A thread about assault rifles turns into M16 apologism. Who saw that coming?

You're right, another groupthink circle-jerk would have been preferable.

JSF is the accuracy 'improvement' similar to the bolt/semi rifle 'improvement', ie meaningless at rifle combat ranges? Totally worth a system that causes reliability issues.

There's also weight savings for a DI system (which was one of the main goals of the M16's design), but yeah if we're designing a new gun DI isn't going to be worth it.

Although keep in mind that "reliability issues" not caused by shittacular magazine are caused by the increased fouling that goes on with a DI system, but is only problematic if you aren't cleaning it regularly. Unless you're some shitty third world guerrilla outfit, you have no excuses for why you aren't cleaning your gun on a regular basis.

Part of the reason the M16 got such a horrible reputation in Vietnam was that there were rumors being passed around the American forces that the M16 was a "self cleaning gun" and it didn't require regular maintenance. They ended up distributing these ridiculous training manuals in comic-book form following some girl called Connie in an attempt to encourage soldiers to clean the fucking things.

Then again, let's not forget how shit the mag design was too.

Ding ding ding, the magazine was responsible for the majority of all stoppages. They didn't just plague the M16 of course, the SA80 is also notoriously unreliable. When they contracted HK to fix the SA80, the magazine was one of the first things to go.

[JointStrikeFighter]

STANAGS = terrible.

[adam_grif]

STANAGS = terrible.

Nitpick, STANAG magazines are just a set of standards. Anything conforming to them is thus a STANAG magazine, and so even the newer, improved versions are still STANAGs.

[avianmosquito]

You're still using three rounds where one generally is sufficient for a rifleman's purposes.

Normally, I'd agree with you, but not with a 5.56, which almost always takes 2 or more rounds to kill, even through the lungs.

I've only fired M-4s, M-16s, M-249s, M-240Bs, and M2s. So I guess guilty as charged. But you'd have to take my word for it. Same as I'd have to take your word on firing an AN-94. Or being an expert on firearms. Especially on the internet, where anyone can make that claim.

I can't prove it, but here's something that might lend some credence. (it it's still up) Go on youtube, search "little girl, big guns" and look for one about 6 minutes, with me and my daughter, out in the woods. We're out there shooting, but for the video I'm just having her fire weapons children are supposed to have issues with. I start with a thompson, then a pump shotgun, then a musket. The video ends with me waling off screen and her running after me. It was taken down a while ago when my old channel closed, but someone mirrored it a while back and I believe it's still up.

[JointStrikeFighter]

STANAGS = terrible.

Nitpick, STANAG magazines are just a set of standards. Anything conforming to them is thus a STANAG magazine, and so even the newer, improved versions are still STANAGs.

it's just a set if standards for a shit magazine.

[avianmosquito]

I'll be posting a short story, small bits of which were quoted here, under "fanfics" (despite being original fiction.) In about a week. It will involve this weapon (or at least the carbine) heavily, be written in first person, start in medias res (my first attempt at such) and take place in england. I'd appreciate feedback during this time, but don't expect responses.

By the way, I'm open to suggestion in regards to the title.

[Feil]

Korto:
Your calculations with regards to maces to the head are based on assumptions that just don't match reality. Heavyweight boxers, fighting unarmed, can frequently deliver 1000 pounds of instantaneous force and have been clocked at upwards of three tonnes http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/6529755.stm. On a 5kg mass in an isolated system, 1000 pounds implies a 90-gravity acceleration. Yet boxing related deaths are as rare as deaths in any other sport, and knockouts to the head usually occur as a result of nerve strikes, not concussion. In historical re-enactment groups, people in armor bash one another in the heads with sticks that are supposed to weigh the same as medieval weapons - for a light-hearted game that you can do all day without so much as an ambulance standing by. They may not always strike with full intent, but even so, your calculations imply that a mace overkills its target by 100%, and accidents happen.

[[R_H]]

STANAGS = terrible.

Nitpick, STANAG magazines are just a set of standards. Anything conforming to them is thus a STANAG magazine, and so even the newer, improved versions are still STANAGs.

it's just a set if standards for a shit magazine.

It was never ratified as a STANAG, it's actually still a draft. Part of the problem is that old clapped out magazines are being used and contributing to weapon failures (which was a significant source of failure in the dust tests). Besides there are good alternatives to the Alu mag, which are being procurred (the PMAG, if I'm not mistaken).

[Stark]

Nitpick, STANAG magazines are just a set of standards. Anything conforming to them is thus a STANAG magazine, and so even the newer, improved versions are still STANAGs.

If only everyone else used magazines that contributed to feed problems.

Even AU uses it's own, superior, magazine.

[JointStrikeFighter]

Auspattern steyr mags are improved on the original steyr spec mags too.

[Aaron]

It was never ratified as a STANAG, it's actually still a draft. Part of the problem is that old clapped out magazines are being used and contributing to weapon failures (which was a significant source of failure in the dust tests). Besides there are good alternatives to the Alu mag, which are being procurred (the PMAG, if I'm not mistaken).

Plastic mags? Colour me skeptical, the plastic ones we had originally (now replaced with metal) fed fine but broke easily.

[JointStrikeFighter]

It was never ratified as a STANAG, it's actually still a draft. Part of the problem is that old clapped out magazines are being used and contributing to weapon failures (which was a significant source of failure in the dust tests). Besides there are good alternatives to the Alu mag, which are being procurred (the PMAG, if I'm not mistaken).

Plastic mags? Colour me skeptical, the plastic ones we had originally (now replaced with metal) fed fine but broke easily.

Yeah thats why Austria, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Taiwan, Oman, Belgium, Coratia, Libya, Poland, Slovenia, Brazil, Switzerland, The Netherlands and Germany all have so many problems with plastic mags

[Stark]

Plastic mags? Colour me skeptical, the plastic ones we had originally (now replaced with metal) fed fine but broke easily.

Most plastic mags in use these days are either thicker (like stock SIG ones) or heavily ribbed (like ADF ones) for strength. There's basically no downside (not that they wouldn't still be better than SHITAGS - the mags with 100% more jamming OR YOUR MONEY BACK).

[Aaron]

Most plastic mags in use these days are either thicker (like stock SIG ones) or heavily ribbed (like ADF ones) for strength. There's basically no downside (not that they wouldn't still be better than SHITAGS - the mags with 100% more jamming OR YOUR MONEY BACK).

Well that makes a little more sense, the ones we had were quite thin. Almost like you'd find on a toy.

[JointStrikeFighter]

Yeah you have to work seriously hard to break a steyr mag; you can pretty much stomp on them and they are still fine.

[[R_H]]

It was never ratified as a STANAG, it's actually still a draft. Part of the problem is that old clapped out magazines are being used and contributing to weapon failures (which was a significant source of failure in the dust tests). Besides there are good alternatives to the Alu mag, which are being procurred (the PMAG, if I'm not mistaken).

Plastic mags? Colour me skeptical, the plastic ones we had originally (now replaced with metal) fed fine but broke easily.

Those were the Thermomolds or whatever the hell they were called, right? The ones currently available for M16/AR15/AR10s are a lot better, and tougher than the Alu mags.

[Korto]

Korto:
Your calculations with regards to maces to the head are based on assumptions that just don't match reality. <snip>

Conceded. Possibly I misunderstood and misused the 65 gees figure. Not sure, but it's been troubling me. I'm thinking I'll make the armour less effective overall, and the shields more effective v ranged fire (they're my damn shields, I can make them turn purple and serve cups of tea if I want).