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Sturgeon's House

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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On 20.03.2018 at 6:09 PM, LoooSeR said:

Unknown, Komrade Kalashizm doesn't tell.

 

Next gun he will do post about:

 

could it be that the trials for the Pakistani Army? because they are holding a competition for replacing the type 56 AKM and the G3

and all the rifles you mentioned are those which are part of the trial

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14 minutes ago, Stimpy75 said:

could it be that the trials for the Pakistani Army? because they are holding a competition for replacing the type 56 AKM and the G3

and all the rifles you mentioned are those which are part of the trial

Maybe. Photos he posted showed something i see in Mid. East, and from description i belive that this place was futher than Syria or Iraq.

iEPeS3w_yRQ.jpg

 

Twx-3j_W61s.jpg

 

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On 3/11/2018 at 12:21 PM, Ramlaen said:

Regarding the apparent ~$13 unit cost of XM1158.

 

I was going through past year editions of Army Mantech's annual brochure, and the FY15 one mentioned a new start of "7.62mm Advanced AP Penetrator & Assembly Cost Reduction", the following three issues have had a 'tungsten carbide penetrator & assembly cost reduction' section.

 

FY16

FY17

The current FY18 brochure specifically mentions XM1158.

 

I also found an army.mil article that talks a little bit about it and has better pictures.

 

 

 

 

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I don't follow small arms news very much, but there seems to be trend of ditching belt fed machine guns in favor of automatic rifles at the squad level  (USMC, UK army).  Does this make sense, and if so, do we need to start a "John Browning was right" movement?  All meetings will be held at the local BAR?

 

Oh wait, I just googled BAR looking for an image to attach to this post and ran across this monstrosity.  Never mind.

 

HCAR-3.jpg

 

 

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Keep in mind a lot of outdoor ranges or private places like farms will get bitchy if they see you using tracers due to the fire hazard risk. (yes, tracers do, infact, burn hot and long enough to ignite certain materials.)

 

I have on at least one occasion started a brush fire unwittingly firing off a mag of tracers during the winter, was a dumb thing to do that I didn't take into account.

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2 minutes ago, Khand-e said:

Keep in mind a lot of outdoor ranges or private places like farms will get bitchy if they see you using tracers due to the fire hazard risk. (yes, tracers do, infact, burn hot and long enough to ignite certain materials.)

 

I have on at least one occasion started a brush fire unwittingly firing off a mag of tracers during the winter, was a dumb thing to do that I didn't take into account.

And that's the one thing stopping me from just stocking up right now, I've not got a place off the top of my head that I can think of to shoot it off, I know the range I go to doesn't like them

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7 hours ago, Sturgeon said:

 

I wrote extensively about this.

The answer I have in abbreviated form is that the SAW is a crime against God and never should have been.

Thanks for the link, good article.  I didn't realize that the SAW was issued to each four-man fire-team in the US Army and USMC.  I had always assumed that since it's called the "Squad Automatic Weapon" that it was issued on the squad level, not the fire-team level.  But then, I really don't know much about infantry tactics and weapons beyond WWII.  

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The original doctrine for the use of the SAW is pretty unusual.  Also, it isn't really used as the original doctrine recommended, which probably explains why it hasn't exactly been a world-beater.

The SAW differs from the GPMG first and foremost in that it's supposed to be way more numerous than GPMG.  Thus, as you say, it's issued at fireteam level and not squad level.

This is all an elaboration/evolution of the old GPMG-centric squad organization that the Germans pioneered, and most copied, in WWII.  A lot of ideas on how to fight the red hordes during WWIII were taken from German experience in WWII.

 

One of the problems with the GPMG concept is that the majority of the squad's firepower comes from one weapon.  In the 1940s this was even more pronounced, since the rest of the squad would have been armed with bolt-action rifles.

This means that the GPMG needs to be set up in such a way that it has maximum field of fire in order for the squad to control an area during a defensive engagement (fighting the Warsaw Pact, I guess NATO expected a lot of defensive engagements).  But that also means that it's very vulnerable, not just to return fire from rifles and machine guns, but also to artillery.  It also means that there is no redundancy within the squad.  If their GPMG gets knocked out, they're much, much less effective.

The Germans were actually well aware of this, and one of the things that was very interesting to them with the STG-44 was the question of whether the STG-44 allowed the concentrated firepower of the GPMG to be spread out across the squad, possibly allowing the GPMG to be dispensed with.

The SAW is sort of a compromise.  Instead of one GPMG per squad you have two SAWs.  Defensive fire positions can be set up with mutually supportive, but narrower, overlapping fields of fire.  Each SAW is much harder to knock out than the GPMG would have been for the same field of fire, and there is some degree of redundancy now that there are two guns instead of one.

This is probably a sound idea if you actually use these guns in the intended role of fighting off enormous hordes of Soviet infantry.  But there have been exactly zero instances of the SAW being used in that role, and relatively few of it being used in a role that even approximates that.

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13 hours ago, Walter_Sobchak said:

I don't follow small arms news very much, but there seems to be trend of ditching belt fed machine guns in favor of automatic rifles at the squad level  (USMC, UK army).  Does this make sense, and if so, do we need to start a "John Browning was right" movement?  All meetings will be held at the local BAR?

 

Oh wait, I just googled BAR looking for an image to attach to this post and ran across this monstrosity.  Never mind.

 

HCAR-3.jpg

 

 

So.. Someone re-invented the Colt Monitor.

 

Okay then.

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