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The Small Arms Thread, Part 8: 2018; ICSR to be replaced by US Army with interim 15mm Revolver Cannon.


Khand-e

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Ensign beat you to the announcement I'm afraid.

 

This is awesome, It's like having 2 competing Russian news agencies.

There is only one way to deal with him, 1970-s Soviet style - intrigues between generals news agencies. This may end up as good as T-80U or as bad as T-80.  :P  

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Tungsten is harder, but DU is self-sharpening (adiabatic sheer of the penetrator during erosion).

 

DU is cheaper, but probably only in the USA.  The USA has fuckloads of uranium-bearing ores, and fuckloads of spare uranium enrichment capacity.  On top of that, the US barely uses fast-neutron breeder reactors, and produces power exclusively with a once-through fuel cycle (THANKS JIMMY CARTER) so that DU isn't particularly useful to the nuclear industry.

 

The result?  A bunch of 238UF6 sitting around in stainless steel storage tanks while engineers puzzle away coming up with a use for the stuff.  So they end up using it as ballast in airplanes, weights for oil-drilling equipment, armor inserts in abramses, and AP material.

 

I don't know if any other country in the world is in that sort of weird situation.

 

DU is probably also a bitch to machine thanks to the pyrophoricity.  You've got to be really careful with machined shavings of a material that bursts into flame spontaneously when it has enough surface area.

 

Back in the 60's the brits thought DU would be cheaper in L15 than the tungsten alloy, because apparently the alloy they used was quite hard to make properly

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Mostly proof that 7.62x39 is not a great round for full auto fire, actually.

 

Also, Brandon Novotny is a very cool guy, very ernest and easy to talk to. I do think their MK 47 will find a place in the market. It's different from other AK-magazine using non-AK rifles in that it is properly set up to accept AK mags. Most other rifles do not have the proper support in the magwell, but the MK 47 does.

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http://rg.ru/2015/01/28/avtomat.html

 

Well, according to this information AK-12 was not adopted. 

 

Translation with my edits.

"......As very informed military-industrial complex expert told us, Kovrov started works on new carabine using AEK-971 as a base (automatic carabine with balanced recoil). Izhevsk just did not had time to prepare relevant documents to obtain public funding for the new machine. Therefore, the AK-12 was created with the money of the company, as people say, "on their own initiative"."

 

"As a result, two samples were presented to the State Commission: A-545 by Kovrov and AK-12 by Izhevsk. All last year they were going trough state trials."

 

"Both weapons showed approximately the same characteristics, although the A-545 had greater accuracy ["groups"]. In December 2014 tests were completed. Both designs got a number of remarks about some problems with them, and manufacturers were required to eliminate them no later than February of this year. In the Izhevsk, according to experts, the elimination of shortcomings still continues."

 

"And even after the decision of the commission, weapons should go through a year of performance test in the Army, which surely will show new challenges for designers. So it is too early to say that the Ministry of Defence decided on adoption of new weapon for the Army." 

 
"During the work on the "Warrior" and the new complexes of small arms, military industrialists and Army representatives agreed that the AK-12, and A-545 are transitional designes towards a truly new generation of small arms weapons."
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To be honest, I find the SIG 556, which can change between 7.62x39mm and 5.56x45mm a pretty nice looking design, haven't got to try one though so, no idea if it actually properly supports AK magazines.

 

It doesn't. It also has serious QC and reliability issues.

LoooSeR, the English translation of that article is pretty unintelligible. I take it the rifles are still subject to testing?

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Form follows function. You'd think he'd learn to hold the thing sideways when trying to extract a round though.

 

I recommend a weapon with a higher rate of fire. A bolt action would do nicely, and the ammo weight would be neatly amortized by the fact that it fires the rounds put through it.

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Even though we have a separate "smart phone" page, I feel a "smart gun" topic doesn't deserve anything more than a mention here at the moment.

 

My home state of Washington has an initiative process. I'm not sure how you can legislate smart gun usage - although that doesn't seem to stop folks from trying - but given the fragile and complicated nature of firearms even its current state, is a truly "smart gun" feasible?

 

Here's the article in my former newspaper...

 

http://www.seattleweekly.com/home/956555-129/the-smart-gun-debate-comes-to-washington

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That would be a very good thing to have. It would address a lot of the most obvious ways people end up dead because of guns (kids and stolen guns) to a much better degree than the legislation that's just to feel good about doing something. The tech working or not is a pretty major question though.

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The tech isn't ready yet.  All attempts to introduce it so far have been obvious scams of some variety.

 

A gun is a terrifically unfriendly environment for electronics.  They live in damp holsters all day, when they're fired they produce split-second accelerations of several hundred Gs, the combustion of their propellants creates fouling and water, and they're routinely exposed to various solvents and slowly leak lubricants.

 

As soon as the tech does work cops will be all over it, given how many cops get shot with their own weapons.

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I haven't seen the blue prints (duh) But with the current tech, couldn't you just take a screw driver to the electronics to a stolen gun, pop it out and jury rig whatever needed to be done to disengage the safety?

 

 

Conceivably you could have something like a Glock where the fire control group is embedded in a big plastic molding, and the chip is baked in there with it.  That would at least make bypassing the chip obnoxious, if not exactly impossible.

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Conceivably you could have something like a Glock where the fire control group is embedded in a big plastic molding, and the chip is baked in there with it. That would at least make bypassing the chip obnoxious, if not exactly impossible.

Yeah. I can see that. Although that gets into the earlier issue regarding the stresses of electronics while firing the weapon.

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It doesn't. It also has serious QC and reliability issues.

LoooSeR, the English translation of that article is pretty unintelligible. I take it the rifles are still subject to testing?

Sorry for late answer, but yes, rifles will be tested further. They only got through first 'stage' - testing by state commission in 2014. Second 'stage' would happen this year, and it will be Army field tests. Currently, both AK-12 and A-545 are not adopted by Russian Army.

 

AK-12 did not got state funding because Kalashnikov screwed up something with documents, but AK-12 was tested by state commission anyway. Development of AK-12 was covered by company funds.

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I just wonder at how mechanical guns are, to the point that asking about the possibility of an electronic gun gets me blank stares.

I would have thought that an electronically locked, electronically fired and electronically secured gun would be pretty trivial to make, but can't find even a test example.

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