Sturgeon

A Decidedly Brief And Altogether Inadequate History And Description of The Small Caliber High Velocity Ammunition Concept: A Treatise On Extended Nomenclature And Extraneous Verbosity For The Individual Highly Valuing The Immediate Temporal Period

(THIS ARTICLE ASSUMES FAMILIARITY WITH BASIC SMALL ARMS TERMINOLOGY ON THE PART OF THE READER)

"Small Caliber; High Velocity" is nothing more or less than what it says. Relative to the contemporary norm, ammunition and the guns that fire them should be smaller caliber, while also achieving higher velocity; doing both will increase performance while decreasing weight, recoil, and materiel usage.

Why is this desirable? In brief:

1. The bullet weight of a cartridge is a major driving factor in that cartridge's characteristics. A lighter bullet weight is, from the perspective of the shooter, better than a heavier bullet weight. Lighter weight bullets will induce less recoil, all things being equal, than heavier ones. The bullet of a rifle cartridge also typically makes up a third or more of the total weight of the round; reducing bullet weight is a good way to reduce the weight of ammunition.

2. A faster bullet produces a superior trajectory to a slower one. Less adjustment is needed for distant targets, and the error possibilities for incorrect range estimation are lower. Contrary to popular belief, 5.56mm produces an excellent trajectory for its size; in fact, I have a hard time noticing a difference between it and 7.62mm NATO until about 800 yards. Ballistic tables bear this out; along its supersonic flight range, 5.56mm has a very flat trajectory. PEO Soldier sets 5.56mm's Maximum Effective Range when fired from an M4 at 500m. Compared to that, 7.62x39 lags behind by about 120m, despite having a very similar bullet shape, sectional density, and ballistic coefficient. Note that 7.62x39 produces 80% of the velocity of 5.56 when fired from the same barrel. I created a graph to illustrate the relationship velocity and ballistic coefficient have in terms of informing trajectory. It plots the ballistic coefficient necessary to produce the same drop at 500m as a .151 G7 BC bullet fired at 2,970 ft/s. Note that below 2,700 ft/s, a tremendously high BC is needed to achieve this level of performance. In short, muzzle velocity is the overwhelmingly primary agent in producing a better unadjusted sight trajectory at normal and even extended ranges. If sight adjustment is assumed, this changes, but that is not relevant for the discussion of modern military small arms.

3. For a given trajectory and specific energy*, a smaller-caliber round will be lighter and smaller than a larger-caliber counterpart. This is only true within a certain bound of performance, but the performance needed from modern military rifle ammunition lies well within this bound.

4. Sectional density, a major factor in both penetration and drag, can be maintained as caliber is reduced relative to length. Sectional density is calculated, in common discussion, as mass/diameter^2. Imagine a cylinder .5" in diameter that is 1" long, made from steel. Now imagine another cylinder, also made of steel and still 1" long, but now .25" in diameter. Both cylinders have the same sectional density, but the second cylinder is one quarter the weight of the first.

*Specific energy, .5*mass*(velocity^2)/(diameter^2), is an important metric in approximating target penetration characteristics when assuming homologous bullet design.

Now, how is this bounded? Well, in a couple of ways:

A. In conventional rifle ammunition, the projectile diameter and bore diameter are both coupled together. Change the diameter of the bullet, and you need a wider or thinner bore to accommodate it. Because of this, you reach a limit where so much powder is being used to try to attain a higher muzzle velocity through such a small bore that the fluid flow rate is limited by the extreme necking down of the cartridge case. Therefore, for normal modern rifle ammunition, muzzle velocity does not typically exceed 4,600 ft/s. However, if bore diameter and bullet diameter are decoupled (as through a sabot), or unusually light projectiles are used, velocities at the limit of nitrocellulose's capability are possible, out to around 6,000 ft/s.

B. Military ammunition has other concerns that limit it further. One is the barrel wear of the ammunition; militaries are economical organisms, and they do not want to be throwing away barrels too quickly. Because of this, and because trajectory and weight gains are minimized beyond around 3,500 ft/s, velocity is limited. Another concern is weapon overheating: Beyond a certain temperature, rifles lose a great deal of their accuracy; thus ammunition is maintained below the heat flux threshold for a desired sustained rate of fire for the rifle. This doesn't limit velocity as much as it limits over-boredness, the ratio of the caliber squared over the chamber volume. A small caliber, high velocity round will want to be as overbore as possible, so this does limit the concept for military use.

C. Spin-stabilization only works out to a point, and that point is "about" a 7 caliber length-to-diameter ratio. For military use, the limit is closer to 5 calibers due to stability being absolutely essential from a wide variety of barrels and conditions. Remember our dieting cylinder example up there? Once it gets down below about .18" in diameter, it will begin to have problems.

Now, if one decouples the bore diameter from the projectile diameter, and drag-stabilized, instead of spin-stabilized the projectile, they would run into very different limits. Research into this area, which began in the early fifties with the SALVO project, resulted in micro-caliber finned flechettes fired at velocities up to 5,000 ft/s:

These high velocity flechette rounds weighed very little, while producing exceptional penetration and flatness of trajectory. So, they can be considered the ultimate evolution of the small caliber, high velocity concept.

A detrimentally brief history of SCHV:

SCHV has been around for a while. .45-70, .30-40 Army, and 5.56 NATO were all considered "small caliber" and "high velocity" for their day; all of the principles I describe above were known well before the 1870s. However, the term "small caliber, high velocity" doesn't really get used in official literature until the 1950s when experiments with .22 caliber military rifles really took off. In the context of today, small caliber high velocity refers to a cartridge optimized for low weight and a flat trajectory out to 300m, typically with a caliber under .24" and a velocity above 2,800 ft/s. However, it's important to remember that caliber does not inform performance; A 6.5mm cartridge may perform much the same as a 5.56mm one, if the velocity is high enough and the bullet weight low enough. It's better, then, not to group ammunition sharing a bullet diameter together, but rather group together cartridges that share similar performance characteristics.

I've covered the GPC before, several times on my blog. Feel free to click through these links and read that material, too:

The Case Against a General Purpose Cartridge

The New Caliber Mafia

The General Purpose Cartridge Revisited

Hey guys, I appreciate enthusiasm for the topic, but let's avoid trite back and forths and image macros. We don't want this forum to become SA.

Khand, you're right that at one time (the 1870s), .45-70 was considered small caliber and high velocity.

I am not sure what you're asking. Could you clarify, Donward?

Below this post, I will write up a small bit on what SCHV actually is and why it's a good thing, which may answer your question.

So, the Bulldog basically obsolesces both the pre-rebalance Chaffee and the T71.

I am very pleased with this medilight.

The rocket goes hypersonic backwards? She says they're only for re-entry at 1:30

The rocket stage reenters "nose" first.

I'll go for the Bulldog first, I guess. I'll probably have exp left over, and then I guess we'll see where I dump that.

ED: Nabbed the Bulldog; I have the ability now to research but not upgrade the 416. That does seem like the most interesting one on my list. Pancake tonk!

There should very rarely be any reason to apologize on this forum, and that wasn't an exception, Toxn. 

Don, I would say that was a fitting end to a living mistake, but as you mention, no snakes were involved so that's not really true.

Hey guys, I have recently come into a windfall of free exp, how should I spend it? Here are the tanks within my reach at the moment:
 

Given that our immediate enemies are a bunch of fundamentalists aiming to recreate the Seventh Century Caliphate, I'm not sure if using women to fight them is a net positive or negative in terms of demoralizing or enraging Haji, not that I give a damn what they think.

Would that they were! That would at least be more civilized!

I call those snake food dogs.

No. I'm well aware of the issues with dog breeding. It's one of the reasons why we get our wolfhounds from a breeder who strives for longevity and health in the breed as opposed to superfluous traits.

There are good breeders. The blog of one has been permalinked here since the beginning.

Wait. People put their dogs on leashes where you live? In Seattle you will see Pet Parents carry their Pet Children in handbags, push them in strollers or let them wander about in the restaurant or Whole Foods store that you are shopping at.

As for purebred dogs, I feel that it is good to continue the lineage of useful working breeds. My family has Irish Wolfhounds which are magnificent creatures with a history that is older than the Roman Empire. At my feet as I hunt and peck on my phone are a pair of rescue Akitas that are my wife's and whose breed have a similar fascinating history from Japan.

Don, we were regarding specifically the dysgenic breeds, such as the pug and chihuahua.

However, American breeding desperately needs to be reformed. I am not qualified to speak on this, so instead I'll link to someone who is.

I thought "thong biter" was a new cool-kid adjective for "carpet muncher", which would have made sense given the subject matter and the current - and hopefully fading - fad of personal grooming.

Now I have to creep up out of the gutter and educate myself on this "Thomas Carlyle".

In that case, it would still be unisex, wouldn't it?

I tend to think that the "capitalism-socialism" dichotomy obfuscates things, without lending any sort of useful shorthand. For one thing, the "capitalist" United States is made up of a bunch of different federalized areas with their own sets of rules. Some states will be more "capitalist" and some will be more "socialist".

Moving on, I think while those two ideologies are very polarized against each other, that doesn't mean they're so far apart. It may be more useful to imagine them as two closely related brothers having a feud than anything else. So it wasn't "capitalism" that caused this, but our own special-as-apple-pie American brand of dissent that isn't actually that closely related to a certain economic model, and is not that far off from the socialist-realism-and-manifestos brand, either.
 

Thanks for the clarification, Sturgeon. My apologies for incorrectly interpreting 'thong biters'.

"Thong-biters" is a reference to Thomas Carlyle's line about cutting the straps that hold the devil restrained. Then, a "thong-biter" is someone who would see those straps cut, even if they have to use their teeth.

There's no need to apologize for misunderstandings on this forum, unless they result in some form of violence. 

I do feel that WWI was different, as it was a) massive on a heretofore-unseen scale, involved industrialized societies, followed a century of peace in those societies and d) happened in the age of mass media at the nexus of media production.

One of the strange effects of mass communication has been the homogenisation and fixation of culture. A war like the great war, happening in the place it did to thr people it did is a great way to take overburnished ideas of manly virtue and smash them. We can see this just by comparing art and literature before and after the war.

So, I didn't intend to say that WWI wasn't special in any way; rather that I am annoyed at this idea that nobody ever came home from a war disillusioned with the ideas of glory and honor before. That's a common one, and it's just total BS. If you think I'm being unfair in pointing this at you, I would argue in my defense that from my perspective what you said is indissoluble with this.

Will World War I hold the same mystique when all those who fought in it are gone forever? I suspect it won't. Maybe it will be some other war that "ended innocence forever".

This is not to say or imply, of course, that nothing changed after World War I. That would be absurd.

As to autistic man children, I see that as a consequence of atomisation of culture due to more modern mass media, combined with an existing cultural focus on rights over duties and the conception of rights as inherent ideals rather than negotiated compromises. A pox on both your houses, basically.

It's easy to blame this on mass media. Yet, mass media didn't break up the extended home, and it didn't break up the nuclear family. Something else did.

I personally feel like a clean sheet redesign for a considerable number of things would be a seriously good idea to give people a goal to migrate towards with an end in mind rather than adding new components in a situation where the effects on the whole can't properly be measured. Our systems have been evolving rather than being designed, and evolution is the basest form of "design". However, that leaves the question of what you base your design on, and that's where the experiences of the past are utterly vital. The things that work should be considered on that virtue as well as on the virtue of not requiring serious pain to implement since they're already in place.

You need a designer to do that; a good one. We just have agitators.

I think the real thing was that WWI lasted a lot longer. The Franco-Prussian war was hideous, but after the French raised a few units of draftees and they got mulched, the war was basically over without widespread demographic damage. I don't really think it's an accident that the US was pretty keen on staying out of WWI, the ACW was an ugly slugfest in recent memory. The Napoleonic wars were nasty but they predated mass media so I don't think they'd be able to cement the horrors of war. Before that it's the 30 years' war and that's its own special brand of awful. WWI however, cost the British their empire and left France in terrible shape and they were the putative victors, and did this in a time of daily newspapers, and I think that's what gave it a disproportionate effect.

 

We've got the power to break things trivially, I feel the values we need are more the wisdom to know when and where to use that force because it's like pruning a tree with napalm.

You're speaking about this organism of government as if it were some sort of higher-order primate. It's more like a slime mold.

My wife, in her capacity as a veterinary nurse, endorses this comment. But also adds a disclaimer that 'alpha training' (where you dominate the animal physically, roll it and so on) is also bullshit.

 

The thing with dogs is that you need to provide them with consistent feedback, consistent behaviour and a secure place in the hierarchy. Getting mad and punishing the animal is wrong, just as rewarding it without reason is.

 

Another part of the problem with long leashes (besides their pathetic design and construction) is that by allowing your dog to roam you remove him from your sphere of control and thus remove your ability to correct his behaviour.

 

Finally, the real sign of the end times isn't the leash, it's the proliferation of Dachshunds, Pugs and other useless 'purebred' animals. Using 19th-century (in)breeding practices to make an animal conform to an arbitrary list of breed standards is evil, yo.

I could see how some subhuman troglodytes people might hear the word "Alpha" and confuse that for "be a shit owner", but that's really not what I meant.

I cannot agree hard enough with the bolded section. Pug breeders in particular are... Jesus, no other word for it - they're evil! Future historians will crucify us for that (though hardly that alone).

We've talked about this before, but I find it interesting where traditionalists draw the line at what constitutes a valid tradition. Some of our ancestors totally ate afterbirth, just as some of our more recent ones fully supported separate-but-equal. Picking a particular tradition over another is, in itself, an act of revisionism.

For the record, traditionalists =/= me.

Don't mistake the fact that I scowl and spit at the confusion of renovation and demolition for me being a "traditionalist". Societies should of course be constantly evolving, with old traditions dying off (maladaptive traditions hopefully dying off sooner - and it's right and true to help them along, of course) and new traditions being formed. That's the magnificence of culture, and I would have to be truly braindead to oppose it.

However, in our age of obfuscation it has become something of a recreational activity among latter-day dissenters to tear down everything they see, indiscriminately. This is anarchic, and I am nothing if not an anti-anarchist.

As to glory and honor, it wasn't women who scoured those from the face of the earth. It was empire and four years of industrialised slaughter at the beginning of the 20th century. The first world war killed these traditional values with the same ruthless efficiency that it killed the boys who held them.

I don't recall saying it was women.

I tend to disagree. I don't like this idea that somehow World War I was terrible like no other war before. C'mon, mate, give the past some credit - they had awful inglorious wars where men died by the cartload, too! Hell, any war - and all wars before the thirties were so - where more men die of disease than from (presumably glorious) combat is a pretty inglorious war. World War I was terrible, but it doesn't have a monopoly on being shitty.

So nope, don't buy it that World War I ended man's innocence about war. What innocence? Man has been fighting wars since we had tails.

I will grant that WWI surely did end the innocence about war for those who were aged 15-30 from 1914-1918, however.

Glory and honor still persisted though. Indeed, those two things can only persist if men (or women) are routinely expected to do terrible, awful things like fight wars. At some point, though, there was lost in educated circles an understanding that men had to do these terrible things for the perpetuance of society against its odds (and should attain glory and honor in doing so), and now we're reaping that harvest.

I don't mean to over-romaticize things... I talk about "glory" and "honor" and it's probably pushing everybody's buttons so hard it looks like I'm standing in a forest of lighted Christmas trees (sorry - Winter Holiday trees). But these are tools - virtual rewards for the socially-plugged-in monkey brains we all have, and they make sure that men keep doing what we need men to do.

Now, in the US, we're rapidly throwing our tools away ("we don't need them!" insist the thong-biters). And our teenage girls are running away crying at the sight of self-diagnosed "autistic" manchildren who like ponies. Unrelated, I'm sure.

I am frustrated. I have mentioned something about tradition and its inherent worth; not a popular idea these days, now that everyone's carrying out of the house as much of value as they can hold. This is related to women in combat roles, but it doesn't say anything about their suitability or unsuitability to this role, as individual fighters.

Clearly, this doesn't really matter. Women may be less physically capable than men, but armies have done without before and still come out on top. That's irrelevant, though, if the argument you're making is that tradition is worth preserving.

And I'm not making that argument. The time for that sort of thing is behind us.

I'm not equating what you said with that sort of adventurism so much as saying that emphasizing the virtues that might lead to strong manly men who make tough, hardy infantry is not a position that has historically held up well in combat past the middle of the 1800s and certainly hasn't since the days of modern industrial warfare, and that if anything the traditional values are not particularly consistent with a powerful modern military and most certainly are not consistent with a powerful military for the expressed goals of the US military and their overall strategic posture.

 

We live in a very different world from when those values were codified. We've seen huge economic gains by making women part of the workforce, which has significantly increased our per-capita productivity and doubled the number of people whose minds we can potentially put into jobs that require smart, well educated people, but that requires a different social dynamic. The society that has a highly trained and capable combined arms team with the best technology may not be the society with the toughest and most inured to hardship infantry, but in wars between superpowers, the former is far more likely to matter.

 

Were you to have had the argument along the lines you mentioned, I'd say the cultural shakedown has already happened, and the proposed benefit of traditional values are in the section of the military least useful to the battles we should be fighting, where dollars and trade policy are the first and most potent weapon, and trillions of dollars of machines would be the go to in case we had to choose between losing and losing badly.

I did not say anything about infantry. You're making a Wellsian argument reminiscent of The Land Ironclads. This is entirely orthogonal to what I am saying.

Or what I would be saying, were there anything to say it about. We can agree that we're well past the point of any sort of traditional structure being around that is worth preserving.

Gravity is a true abomination.

Oh, and this is not a license for other members of the forum to pile on X. I've told him what I think of his post, and that's that.

Last I checked the world isn't gallant knights engaging in honorable combat anymore. It's multitrillion dollar systems of thousands of people squaring off and killing each other no matter how dirty or nasty the means. Glory and Honor died riddled with bullets and splinters somewhere in France a hundred years ago.

 

Militaries reflect the societies they spring from, and a highly technical society has to use the mental gifts of all its members to maintain a technological lead, and that technological lead wins the wars that are worth fighting. As time goes on, more and more highly educated specialists are going to be needed, and frankly it's much more worthwhile wondering about how we're going to produce the people to make the absolute most out of things like a combined force of Air Force and Navy assets projecting force. The strategic goals of the US or even the entire world aren't served by us being a little bit better at having our infantry shooting the people we're notionally trying to help, when the fact that we're doing that is just causing more problems than it ever solved in the first place, and to get them there we're sacrificing our ability to hang over local disputes like the sword of damocles and keep the world playing by the rules we choose. It doesn't make sense from a bleeding-heart perspective and it doesn't make sense from a steely eyed imperialist perspective. If you brought Disraeli here and told him that we sacrificed our two-power criteria to pour blood and money into a godforsaken sandbox just to break things even more he'd know for certain the future's gone irrevocably mad.

 

The way of the future is a society where the intellectual capabilities of as many members as possible are used to create as sophisticated an economy as possible, and use that strength to provide a powerful military. I mean unless you for some reason think the Imperial Japanese military is something to aspire to. Focusing on the aptitude of the individual soldier to combat rather than the fitness of the overall military machine is the thinking of failed racist states like Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany and the Confederacy trying to pretend that being on the back end of serious technological development is okay, because they're totally going to kick the butts of those effete pluralistic weaklings because of the strength of their traditional values.

I do not really like this post. I think it has a significant fallacious element (e.g., you seem to be equating what I said with some kind of Republican, Bush-era, adventurism), and it doesn't betray any evidence that you actually read what I wrote.

So I am going to encourage you to re-write it, if you would, for clarity and conciseness.

Behind the joke, there is actually a note of seriousness here. These leashes are the leading cause of dog misbehavior behind their idiotic owners. These leashes undermine everything about good dog training.

When walking a dog, it's proper to gather up the leash in the hands, such that the dog has a short lead and cannot walk far in front of you. This tells the dog that you're driving the train, and the dog will not only behave much better during his walk, but also will come to see you as his Alpha and will respect you much more in other areas of life, as well.

These extendable leashes undermine all that, all while indulging their tremendously lazy owners (really, the above advice is trivially easy to put into practice, if you don't you either do not know how to train dogs, are too stupid to understand it, or are too lazy to give even the tiniest of shits). Every time I go for a walk I see exasperated owners being pulled along by their dogs - inevitably attached by these demonic contraptions.

And really, a society that keeps dogs but can't train them is what sort of society?

No offense but you worded it kind of poorly, anyway, I got this asking around on Tiexue.

 

 

Left to right: Steel cored 7.62x54mm, Steel cored 7.62x39mm, DVP-95 (corrected, at least according to the post on it), and almost certainly DVP-88 (notice how far the core protrudes up the nose, and how, despite being seated so deeply in the case It's still actually longer then DVP-87, also the case has an incorrect primer pocket for what the DBP-10 case uses.

Yes, that's DBP-88. Note that it is not the same as the cartridge I listed as DBP-10, which has a gilding metal jacket, Berdan priming, and copper washed steel case, all of which are consistent with one variant of DBP-10. The thing that's confusing me is that the bullet of the cartridge I have listed as DBP-10 looks like it should be heavier than that of the cartridge I think is DBP-88. This shouldn't be the case; DBP-88 has a 5g bullet and DBP-10 has a 4.6g bullet. I do not know why this is, the cartridge I list as DBP-10 is consistent with the description of DBP-10 that I have heard. If it is in fact DBP-88, it is a variant of DBP-88 I have never even heard of before (no DBP-88 to my knowledge has a GM jacket nor a CWS case).