Use code “FORGOTTENWEAPONS10” for 10% off Kyrö Distillery spirits at their web store:
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Personal questions
03:07 – How is Ian doing?
04:38 – Family firearms background
05:47 – Favorite Finnish firearm
08:22 – Am I still learning French? How about Finnish?
09:58 – Plans for 2026 for Forgotten Weapons and Headstamp Publishing
12:14 – Is my wife involved in my work?
13:49 – Access to collections as a published author?
Gun questions
0:15:30 – Guns mounted to hands/arms
0:18:12 – Why no NATO standard assault rifle?
0:24:20 – Diversity of grenade launchers
0:27:27 – MTL-30 and XM26 grenade launchers
0:32:52 – Gyrojet vs Dardick: Which is less worse?
0:34:29 – Is .30 carbine a pistol or intermediate cartridge?
0:38:16 – Elbonia and the 6.8x51mm M7 rifle
0:41:48 – Squad automatic weapons – caliber and feed system?
0:44:17 – Portugal replacing G3 with SCAR
0:46:56 – What if US didn’t adopt the M16 / 5.56mm?
0:48:28 – Good books to start a gun library
0:51:05 – Good books to start a cartridge reference library
0:52:09 – The term “spring tension”
0:53:55 – FRTs and the market for 9mm PCCs
0:57:19 – Will Metal Storm ever be used?
0:59:20 – Alternative pistol locking systems
1:00:34 – S&W No.3 Schofield and the .45 Colt cartridge
1:03:24 – First time match DQ
1:04:40 – Most durable transferrable machine gun?
1:07:46 – Will Russia ever replace 7.62x54R?
1:10:16 – Dedicated anti-drone rifle?
1:12:31 – Value of full auto in submachine guns?
1:14:01 – Australian replacement of the High Power MkIII
1:18:28 – Cleaning and restoration of collectible guns
1:20:20 – Elbonian version of the M14TP sniper
1:23:21 – is the Vickers-Berthier LMG so controllable?
1:25:50 – Lighting Round: Will I do a video on…
“(…)MTL-30(…)grenade launcher(…)”
Meanwhile Northrop Grumman is developing 25 mm grenade launcher https://www.northropgrumman.com/what-we-do/advanced-weapons/guided-projectiles-and-precision-weapons/precision-grenadier-system which could fire grenades with proximity fuse, so to my understanding not requiring programming. I wonder about how effective such grenade is and how much it would cost?
The accurate air burst idea, is probably a good one; smaller grenade but all or most of the shrapnel hits the target as oppose a tree or some mud etc “Think they have tried a few designs” Iraqi’s in houses, firing out of windows; idea being the grenade goes through the window “Well space for a window previously” and airbursts, just behind it – Instead of against the back wall, or it hits the outer wall. Could probably do something cheaper with a Fliegerfaust type design, niti fuse perhaps I.e. You unscrew/screw the warhead up/down for a rang – The niti wire then has to rotate the warhead more/less with heat, which in turn lengthens/shortens a fuse via unwinding/winding. No electronics, mind you… You’d have to have it accurate enough to well not hit the wall around the window, if you could, might work… Dial range fairly short increments (Based on the time of 1/4 1/2 3/4 rotation of a full turn which would correspond to 12″ approx diffences in “BANGS!!!” Laser range finder 85m target thus 85.25 85.50
85.75 86m fires four barrels thus, you’d think if you managed to get 4 through said window gap, that would probably do the job if the back wall was say 88m your giving a fair air burst there. Have to be accurate like if the cheapness was to have any point I.e. For it to work. If it did well I mean; one fancy one northop, and a few boxes of say 50rnds somebody has to carry or ten launchers loaded with 9 each at 6.5kg ten folk have for less cost. Once somebody ranged it, you could probably work out 85.50 was best and so one. You’d probably have to make one, then “zero” the design in from barn door to window. Must be the future though in away, these accurate round things – Each “bullet” shrapnel piece, does the job, as oppose wasting rounds. Although, wasting has proved… Well I mean, folk have managed the cost… Before, sooo… Suppose it depends on the effect; is it more effective, er – A window shooter outer of, previously managed 3 mags at you before they got hit; now 1 or less etc.
“(…)Dedicated anti-drone rifle?(…)”
Rather than rifle itself developing utensils seems more viable see for example https://interestingengineering.com/military/us-army-rolls-smart-rifle-scopes
If you’re trying to play skeet shooter, you’re doing it wrong.
The most sensible solution is hitting it with an EMP to fry its innards. And an EMP emitter for this is little more than a slightly higher-powered version of a handheld police radar gun, something we’ve had for over half a century.
Shielding a drone’s electronics from a focused microwave EMP pulse would add enough mass that it probably would have to sacrifice ordnance, sensors, and etc. or be built larger and heavier, either way essentially rendering it incapable of doing its mission. The TANSTAAFL rule applies to engineering as it does with everything else.
We need to stop thinking inside the “we have to put a bullet through it” box as the answer to everything on the battlefield.
The airedales don’t think that way. Look up “zorch”.
Sometimes soft k*11 works better than hard k*11.
clear ether
eon
I think we’re several steps away from anything even remotely effective in terms of man-portable EMP weapons suitable for anti-drone work.
I also think that the countermeasures for that are going to be a lot more effective a lot more quickly than anyone is really thinking possible. The fact that they’ve gone from easily jammed radio signals to fiber-optic cable kilometers in length ought to be a clear “tell” for anyone paying serious attention.
What’s going to have to happen is that there’s going to have to be serious practical pressure applied across the board, just the way aviation was force-pressed to develop so rapidly during WWI. As with that period, we really cannot predict what form the measure/counter-measure/counter-counter-measure duel is going to take. I did not foresee fiber-optic cables happening the way they have; there are no doubt other aspects here that nobody has really conceived of, but which desperate practitioners will come up with when necessity becomes the mother of invention.
I would suggest highly, were I responsible for any of this, that what they need to do is develop man-portable all-aspect sensors and some form of small-caliber CIWS such as for ships. These systems will need to be deployed on platforms like Big Dog, and will have to be able to operate semi-autonomously while the human ground combatant specialists do their things.
I’ve said for years that the “Big Armor” combat mode wasn’t viable should certain specific circumstances eventuate, and some of those have. We’re seeing the results in Ukraine, where a former major imperial power is being stopped dead in its tracks by a more agile and adaptable neighbor forced into a technical innovation cycle that the “Big Imperial” dumbasses simply cannot match.
Small and nimble is something that periodically has its moment of glory, compared to lethargic and massive; were we still fighting with WWII tech, then the Ukrainian forces would have already evaporated like an egg under a sledgehammer. As it is, the worm has turned, and this time “big and stupid” isn’t winning.
Russia may come out of this war with a chunk of Ukraine; what it won’t come out of this war with is a set of “winning conditions” for everything else. I fear that Putin has led them down the garden path, and that the inevitable outcome is going to be a death of little cuts as the demographic effects of killing all these young Russians become clear, not to mention the sheer waste of resources involved. The other problem they have going is “Who is going to invest in Russia…?”, because there’s going to be justifiable reluctance going forward to risk money in that country, which is going to play merry hell with resource extraction.
Which, when you get down to it, is about all they have going.
The Soviets really screwed up the development of Russia; had they not done what they did, odds are quite excellent that Russia would have developed naturally, and would have the underpinnings necessary for a true industrial economy. As it is, they went for “Fast”, and screwed themselves. When you look into it, it is really astounding just how much Soviet-era industrial infrastructure was built by either European or American experts; they never developed their own base of people or the culture to do it for themselves. The Soviets had to import Italian know-how to build cars and trucks; they were unable to build their own Kamaz factory, for example. Just like the big steel mills at Mariupol, which were built by American industrialists and payed for by foodstuffs stolen from Ukrainian peasants and then exported to whoever would buy them…
I don’t think the Russians have the depth or the motivation to really win a definitive victory, and that this war they’ve fought in Ukraine is going to be seen in coming decades as an exercise in futility that signified a high-water mark for the post-Soviet Russian world. Everything from here is downhill to becoming a Chinese satrapy, assuming China retains any position to be such a thing in the face of their own demographic and economic problems.
I’m reminded of the Katyusha battlefield rocket system. Built mainly on Lend-Lease Studebaker US6 6×6 trucks, with rockets mostly manufactured in Tennessee according to Willy Ley, who was in a position to know back then.
The Russian Army had two entire “tank armies” equipped with M4 Shermans, about 6,000 altogether out of 40,000 built 1942-45.
Ironically, in Korea five years later the Sherman with the M2 76.2mm gun retrofitted to original 75mm-gun Shermans (that were the first in-country because they’d been mothballed on Okinawa since 1946) proved to be entirely capable of taking out the vaunted T34/85 at reasonable ranges.
The T34’s reputation is, shall we say, a bit exaggerated.
cheers
eon
I just caught your mention of the Katyusha re-reading this.
Interesting first-hand account I got, while talking to a Wehrmacht veteran years ago; he told me that the biggest effect that the Katyusha and Nebelwerfer had was on the morale of newly-assigned troops who were intimidated by the noise and flash effects, while the veterans were pretty much non-plussed by both systems.
I could never quite get out of him whether that was due to the lack of actual effect, or just resignation to the fact that if you were under the footprint of either, you were probably dead.
I’ve always been suspicious of the efficacy of the unguided rocket artillery systems; I have been under fire from MLRS thanks to incompetence on the part of Fort Sill Range Control personnel, and I have to tell you that I wasn’t anywhere near as impressed by them as I was the 8-inch howitzers the Artillery bubbas pulled up and fired directly at our worksite out in the impact area.
Which could have been due to the fact that the MLRS rockets fired were not the later variants with all the submunitions. I remember being distinctly unimpressed by the whole thing, as we drove out of the impact area like bats out of hell…
Of course, at age 19 and the rank of PFC, there wasn’t a lot that did impress me, so… Yeah. There was that.
Trying to answer again and not get bumped by the censor. (Seriously, WTF?)
The German and Russian rocket systems were originally intended for laying smokescreens. (In fact, “Nebelwerfer” means “smoke thrower” in German.)
The first ones to come up with the idea of a rocket-based barrage system was, well, us. The 4.5in rocket we used all through the war was that size because there was already a factory turning out fire extinguisher casings that, turned “upside down”, made great solid-fuel rocket motor casings. The first run of Russian “Katyushas” actually used our 4.5in solid motors.
As far as noise goes, GIs in the ETO called the T34 Calliope launcher on top of the Sherman tank the “Screaming Mimi” because of the racket it made when firing all 110 tubes in ripple.
https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/ab38edad-2f46-46a1-a4b6-ad2b3c4c9cfb.fc4f56d9d3ae2c1612d3262838bcb55a.jpeg?odnHeight=768&odnWidth=768&odnBg=FFFFFF
The Germans had an eight-shot one mounted on a halftrack. Their crews called it the “Bellowing Cow”.
Then as now, a MLRS crew’s SOP was set up, launch, then beat it. Before counterbattery fire arrived.
A “debate” between the German version and ours was probably pretty short and wholly one-sided.
Eight on their side, one hundred and ten on ours.
Math always wins.
cheers
eon
@ Kirk
There’s surely a bit of survivor’s bias.
When the sound of the rockets became a constant background noise, the veterans were surely unfadeed as long as they were not directly hit.
But, for sure, unguided rocket artillery is scarcely logistical efficient.
Even now, it needs a truck to carry a single load for a Grad launcher.
The same truck can carry six times the artillery shells with the same explosive load.
“(…)Value of full auto in submachine guns?(…)”
Note that if sub-machine gun is full auto only, this made in simpler (and faster) to make which explains such choice in M3A1 and PPS.
“(…) What if US didn’t adopt the M16 / 5.56mm?(…)”
There was another, more traditional in appearance, competitor https://www.americanrifleman.org/content/the-contender-winchester-s-224-light-rifle/
In an interesting twist, one of the designers of the Winchester prototype later moved to Ruger. Yes, the Ruger Mini-14 is essentially a perfected version of the .224 Lightweight Rifle.
cheers
eon
“Perfected”?
To quote a famous character in a lovely movie, one Inigo Montoya: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
If the Mini-14 is the perfected form, I don’t want to see what the original performed like.
It lost out to the Armalite for that exact reason. The first chapter of The World’s Assault Rifles has the whole gory story.
https://dokumen.pub/the-worlds-assault-rifles-2nbsped-0935554009.html
Let’s just say Winchester’s acumen for cartridge design did a full face-plant on that one. And they flatly refused to use the Remington cartridge.
IMHO, the .223 Remington round is the only reason the Mini-14 works at all.
cheers
eon
It lost to the Armalite mostly because Winchester thought it was not worth to iron-out the few problems found for what they thought would have been, at best, a contract for few thousands rifles.
Otherwise, to me, it would have had good chances. Most military decisors surely liked it’s classic layout more than the innovative AR15, and it was lighter and made of fewer pieces.
Improved, maybe. Perfected? Scarcely. The Mini-14 is like one’s bi-polar girlfriend from college: exciting as all hell when she’s in the groove; a Pandora’s box when she’s not. Some great experiences, but not what one wants long term.
Is .30 carbine a pistol or intermediate cartridge?
I would also ask the same question about 7.62×25.
My feeling, and it’s something that I admittedly cannot quantify, is that the .30 Carbine sits right there on the cusp in between “pistol” and “intermediate rifle cartridge”.
It’s neither fish, nor fowl, nor good red meat…
My take on it is that if you were trying to design a PDW-class weapon in the late 1930s, and didn’t have much time, then the .30 Carbine was an acceptable solution.
However, I’d be grading your stupid ass down for having left all that to the last minute, and having failed to recognize or think through the implications of the last war’s actual combat conditions.
The US military should have fielded something a lot closer to the AK or SKS in lieu of the .30 Carbine. That it did not is a pointer to the essential dysfunction of the whole Ordnance system; you look at the actual combat reports and memoirs coming out of WWI, and it’s pretty bloody clear that the sort of rifle they were specifying, namely the M1903A3 and the Garand, were weapons that had no business being procured in the post-WWI era. They needed something a lot closer to one of the Winchester or Remington semi-autos with their .30-30 power-range cartridges, and it should have looked a lot like either the SKS or the AK. The fact that they were still going on about things with something on the scale of the Garand, firing the .30-06? Dear God, the stupid, the stupid…
They also needed much better machineguns, but that’s a rant for another day.
They could have done the same thing that the HWA did in developing 7.9 x 33mm. “Hey, what happens if we cut a .30-06 case back to an inch and three-eighths length, and use a 125-grain bullet and a smaller powder charge?”
Two decades later, Dan Dwyer did it out of academic interest. And it worked.
https://looserounds.com/carbine-wildcat/
It even fit in a modified M1 Carbine.
But according to Ordnance in ’42, that would have resulted in an eight-pound rifle, and they wanted weight kept under six.
It also would probably have mandated selective fire, and no matter how much Ordnance denies it to this day, they were adamantly opposed to giving “cooks and truck drivers” rock-n-roll capability.
There were a lot of red faces around Ord when they had to give them first M1A1 Thompsons and then M3 Grease Guns (both full-auto only) because there weren’t enough “safely semi-auto only” Carbines to go around before about mid-1944. And the Marines demanded first call on what there were, because the Carbine was perceived rightly or wrongly as a better weapon for the island-hopping campaign.
(I believe it was the first time in the Corps’ history that they got first dibs on something new, as opposed to being given something nobody else wanted.)
Ord “wanted” the Carbine, but they only wanted it on their terms. The infantry and etc. be damned.
I guess we’re just lucky that the end product is a decent as it is. Once you understand its limitations.
Great little police weapon. Reasonable CQB arm, outperforming SMGs across the boards. Handy hunting weapon for wildlife too big to pester with a .22 rimfire but not big enough to need a .308 for.
Very handy and effective home-defense arm.
It’s not a “rifle”, and only an idiot or the uninformed would attempt to use it as such.
Maybe my half-century of experience with it has colored my judgements, but other than the AR, it’s about the only self-loading “long arm” that has never f**ked up on me.
The same can’t be said for the M14 or Mini-14. And even the AK hiccups now and then.
cheers
eon
@eon,
I think it has to be framed as an issue of ossified rigidity in the organizational structure behind the M1 Carbine program, as well as the Garand.
First and foremost, as you point out, the guys at Ordnance were “adamantly opposed” to what they were being asked for by their putative “clients” in the other branches and Marine Corps.
Stop right there: WHO THE F*CK ARE THEY TO BE OPPOSED TO ANYTHING?
Ordnance doesn’t do the fighting; Ordnance has no front-line combat experience in its ranks. Why is Ordnance dictating what is going to be procured?
This is the fundamental problem with much of the US Army: Institutionalized mediocrity and stovepiping based on “That’s how we’ve always done it…” BS.
The proper way to have had this happen would have been an open-minded approach to the question of “How did we actually fight in WWI?”, including such sub-questions as “How did our vaunted weapons actually do, at assisting the actual combatant soldier?”
The right way to do this is the same way one of my old martial arts mentors approached things with a new student or a new school of martial art: “Instruct me”, followed by clear-eyed observation and response to what the observation told him.
He absolutely did not template anything, or have any expectations: All he saw was what was before him, and he viewed that with a frightening clarity of mind and purpose, often understanding better what was going on than the guy coming at him.
That’s the same sort of approach that should have been taken by the powers-that-were who decided on the small arms questions of the post-WWI era: “Instruct me”, and an open-eyed inquiry into what had actually gone on and how the existing weapons fleet had functioned and been used.
They did not do that.
This issue goes on to this day; NGSW was the result of a bunch of cockamamie idjits looking at what they thought was going on in Afghanistan based on their delusional preconceptions, and they let all of that flow into their decision-making, resulting in the incredibly flawed M7/M250. For which, I might add with anguish, they’re still issuing the same farkin’ basic tripod design that we sat under the M1919…
This is a cultural problem, something baked in from the beginning. I cannot believe that the maneuver commanders are letting Ordnance dictate what they need; all Ordnance ought to be doing is issuing the contracts for whatever the Infantry branch decides on, and making sure that the necessaries are there to make it work. Instead, we have the spectacle of Renee Studler and his successors sitting there and telling the actual combat soldiers what they need and what they’ll get.
On top of which, you have a bunch of prancing primadonna idjits that don’t know how modern combat works, and who don’t understand how to get the necessary out of their existing weapons.
Swear to God, when you’ve got Infantry battalion commanders who’re telling young lieutenants that they should leave their tripods and binoculars in the FOB because “weight”…? Yeah; I spoke with a guy who that happened to, and he only had the vaguest understanding of what the tripod and bino combination could do for him.
What we have here is a combination of things, not the least of which is a culture of incurious and ignorant practitioners who never seem to ask the questions of “How did we used to do this…?” and “How did our enemies do this, down the years…?”
Both of which would have provided highly illuminating insights into what was causing that whole “overmatch” fantasy issue. Only problem is, the people running the show are functionally morons whose actual knowledge of their profession is minimal.
What’s even worse is that you can go have a look at the so-called “Army Center for Lessons Learned”, and find copious resources on and about the German WWII Alpine troop experience. Resources that nobody seems to do more than glance at and talk glibly about, yet never really understand or implement…
As my old acquaintance said, a British Army exchange NCO of Warrant Officer rank, “You lot shouldn’t call that the “Center for Army Lessons Learned”, you ought to be calling it the “Center for Army Lessons Identified and then Bloody-well Ignored”…”
That’s pretty much what happened at the Infantry School after WW2. In the process, they found out that (1) most soldiers weren’t even trying to shoot at anybody or anything more than 100 yards away and (2) the few who did try weren’t hitting for shite.
They also determined that full-auto fire, and a friggin’ lot of it, was the key to eliminating the Threat at all ranges. “Don’t dazzle ’em with footwork, riddle ’em with bullets.”
No, the enemy Does.Not.Care. if you are performing a brilliant flanking maneuver like Napoleon at Marengo (which almost lost him the battle and nearly ended his existence, BTW); all he cares about is that you’ve just shown him a huge target-rich profile on your flank. That he can light up to his heart’s content while you’re Being Brilliantly Napoleonic (TM).
Ord is all-in on Being Brilliantly Napoleonic (TM). The fact that it hasn’t worked since the Mexican War (1846-48) still hasn’t gotten up their memo chain.
Since Ord wasn’t about to do the smart thing (develop MGs and doctrines based on how the Germans had been arse-reaming us from Torch onward) the result was CONARC’s SCHV rifle concept, developed completely outside Ord’s happy little treehouse. Which Ord predictably fought tooth and nail against. Better a “cannon shell that misses than a ‘mouse gun’ that hits” was their mantra.
(Warning;”There I was” story inbound.)
Or as one guy put it to me when commenting on a standoff with a “motorcycle club” in which I was manning a bipod-mounted BAR with a bucket of water, three towels and a couple of dozen 20-round mags, vs. my “assistant gunner” armed with an M16 (We were tasked with the rooftop of the SO, objective; keep them from breaking out one of theirs held on an OOS murder warrant), guy says “at least you had a man’s gun“.
It being in public at an IPMS National, I didn’t tell him that I was tasked with keeping them at least 400 yards away by if necessary busting up their “rides”. AP was the tasking for the deputies with the “mouse guns”.
Fortunately, the bikers saw what they were up against and decided their “bro” wasn’t worth their arses.
But in that exchange I heard an echo of every project and RfP from Ord going back to Talcott. “We don’t care what the data says, that has nothing to do with How A Real Man Fights.”
They always forget that on that subject, as with every other one in military (and police) doctrine, the Other Guy gets a vote, too.
clear ether
eon
I could never quite wrap my head around the whole “Recoil=Manly” thing.
I mean, yeah, I like authoritative cartridges in things like machineguns, but in individual weapons that are better likened to skeet shotguns vs. goose guns…?
The problem with “manly” individual weapons is that they’re more an artifact of why we adopted firearms in the first place, back when bows and arrows were still far more effective: Morale.
Which is something that matters, but also shouldn’t necessarily be prioritized to numero uno, either. Big bangs going downrange are good for morale, ‘cos it looks like you’re doing something really effective, but when big bangs aren’t actually hitting anything…?
The entire premise falls into question.
It is, again, a question and issue of “clarity of vision”: What the hell are you actually doing with your individual weapon? Are you just making noise, to feel better about being slaughtered by the enemy who has no such illusions…? Or, are you actually going to pay attention to that which produces actual downrange effects?
The root of a lot of these problems is that people simply refuse to look at objective reality, and prefer to go with their preconceived fantasies about “how things work”.
I guarantee you this much: If they ever bother to actually do the real-world research into what actually goes on during a low-level infantry engagement, there are going to be a lot of heavily egged faces having to explain an awful lot of “anomalous data” that doesn’t match what they’ve been telling us for decades.
If I learned one thing at the National Training Center, it would be that 90% of what you think is going on in combat simply isn’t so; the reality is obscured by your narrow view-slice of the battle, and warped by your own inadequate senses and impressions of what is actually going on around you.
Even when you’re set apart from it all, as an Observer/Controller, the actuality of events can escape you. I lost track of the number of times where I thought I was on top of what was going on, and when the Tactical Analysis Facility sent down their products and timelines, I was left going “Hey… Wait a minute… I thought… No, that’s not… Wow. Was I wrong, or what…?”
They ever bother to do that in the real world, we’re gonna be seeing a bunch of shocked people trying to explain why they’ve been getting all this crap wrong for so long. It’s impossible that they could, given the utter lack of real-world research into what goes on.
Bare minimum, what they’ve done at Little Big Horn to try and understand that engagement ought to be the standard. In today’s heavily instrumented and monitored battlefield, it should be relatively easy to get the data, but they’re just not willing to go do the work.
Which is how BS like NGSW happens.
To me, the most simple solution would have been to do what the French did with the 8mm Ribeyrolles.
Take the 351 Winchester self loading, and make it a bottleneck cartrige, necking it down to .30 / 7.62mm, to use some of the commercial spitzer .30 readily available in the US.
Base diameter of the .351 SL is the same of the .30 Carbine (so the length of the magazine is exactly the same and, with the same pressure, also the recoil impulse is practically the same). The .351 case would have had a little more capacity (2mm longer, and shouldered) to increase muzzle performances. The better ballistic coefficient, penetration and terminal effectiveness of the spitzer bullet would have done the rest.
“(…)still going on about things with something on the scale of the Garand, firing the .30-06?(…)stupid(…)stupid”
Keep calm, they almost put into standard US Springfield T3E2 which used .276 cartridge https://www.nramuseum.org/guns/the-galleries/world-war-i-and-firearms-innovation/case-36-great-inventors/us-springfield-t3e2-semi-automatic-rifle.aspx
Garand adapted his design to work with the new round, and in 1929, this design was the winner in Army acceptance trials. Instead of entering production, Garand’s rifle faced yet another obstacle, as Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur insisted that the .30-06 be retained. Once again, Garand returned to his workshop and changed the design for use with the heavier cartridge.
If I had to offer an opinion, the .276 Pedersen was a 1930s iteration of the NGSW cartridge, and is similarly flawed. Too much velocity, too much recoil.
It was better than .30-06 in those aspects, but still “too much of a muchness”. I think it’d have been a much better cartridge if they’d reduced the case length to around 43-45mm, and reduced the powder charge enough to get just enough velocity out of it to be lethal out to around 400-500m.
That’s just me; your mileage may vary.
I suspect that if the .276 Pedersen had been adopted, then it would have still been supplanted sometime after WWII, and would be seen as a mistake. If the idjits had tried doing support MG work with it, then they’d have likely gone for “bigger booolet” solutions, and then discovered that the 5.56mm SCHV solution set was superior anyway…
The whole thing is an artifact of the idjit class being unable to either make unbiased observations of reality, or respond effectively and rationally to those observations.
It’s a peculiar weakness of the US military system; the entrenched interests are not at all flexible, and only respond to change when it is forced on them. We were telling them all about the IED threat back during the early 1990s; zero response until Iraq in 2003-04, and we had to react due to the piling up of dead bodies. Some of whom were guys I knew and trained, so if you’re wondering why the hell I’m so critical of it all, there’s your explanation.
“(…).276 Pedersen was a 1930s iteration of the NGSW cartridge, and is similarly flawed. Too much velocity, too much recoil.”
It might be, in that it required peculiar production process of dipping it into special coating, but in terms of recoil https://www.forgottenweapons.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/pedersenhandbook.pdf furnish following data in metric
8·10 g bullet launched at 823 m/s using 2·04 g of powder from 61 cm barrel
for comparison Czechoslovak 7,62 x 45 vz. 52 https://naboje.org/node/45
8.35 g bullet launched at 770 m/s using ? of powder from I presume https://modernfirearms.net/en/military-rifles/self-loading-rifles/czech-republic-self-loading-rifles/vz-52-i-vz-5257-eng/ barrel of 520 mm
From above we can derive
.276 momentum is 6.6663, vz. 52 momentum is 6.4295, difference is less 5% and would be even smaller whilst using barrels of same length.
Alternatively you might observe that .276 powder charge is very near typical powder charge of .30-30 Winchester cartridge.
For what the job of an infantry rifle really was, the .30 Remington, to me, would have been a better choice. Smaller base diameter, shorter, lighter (so the magazine could keep more rounds, and the soldier carry more), reduced pressure and recoil, yet still perfectly effective.
The .30-06 should have been kept in use for belt-fed MGs.
“(…)ask the same question about 7.62×25.”
7.62 pattern 1930 cartridge is pistol one, as 1st production fire-arm to use was adjective(Tula) Tokarev, which is automatic pistol.
It is not intermediate as Workers-Peasants’ Red Army did not intend to implement any other cartridge with lesser reach than said cartridge.
Given that it was designed for the M1 carbine and given how uncomfortable the flash and report of the few handguns chambered for it are, I’d say the question answers itself.
.30 USC was developed more-or-less directly from .32 Winchester Self-Loading, a sporting cartridge developed for the original Winchester Model 1907 self-loading rifle. the major difference between the two is that .30 USC (7.62 x 33mm) is a true rimless cartridge, while .32 WSL (8.2 x31SRmm) is semi-rimmed with a slightly-greater diameter (.321in vs .308in).
The Army wanted a .30 caliber cartridge so that standard .30-06 type barrel tooling could be used. Winchester’s design team under Edwin Pugsley saw no reason to start from scratch on such a cartridge when a slightly-redesigned .32 WSL would suffice.
It has been commented that .30 USC probably owes as much to .30 Pedersen for the WW1 Pedersen Device. This is certainly possible, as the Pedersen Device was also developed at Winchester in 1918, so they obviously had all the specifications.
The Russians adopted first the 7.62 x 38Rmm Nagant revolver round, then the 7.63 x 25mm Mauser M1896 pistol round, and finally the 7.62 x 25mm Tokarev M1933, for the same reason; all could be made with the barrel-making tooling of the Mosin-Nagant 7.62 x 54Rmm bolt-action rifle, followed by all their self-loading rifles, machine guns, and of course submachine guns.
Ultimately, in each case, it was question of manufacturing logistics.
In terms of terminal effectiveness, it has never made much difference to the recipient. 700+ FPE of kinetic energy, the delivered energy of .30 USC at 200 meters, is the same irrespective of the diameter of the chunk of metal doing the delivery.
clear ether
eon
@eon, who said:
“In terms of terminal effectiveness, it has never made much difference to the recipient. 700+ FPE of kinetic energy, the delivered energy of .30 USC at 200 meters, is the same irrespective of the diameter of the chunk of metal doing the delivery.”
I’m going to have to differ with you on this point, in that I think the diameter and composition of the projectile does matter.
Compare the effect of a flat-point truncated .30 caliber cone impacting somewhere on the upper torso, and then consider the likely difference if instead of that projectile, you’re hit instead with something a lot narrower and a lot longer, which then destabilizes and tumbles through the body.
As opposed to “makes hole; leaves”.
The one punches through, deposits some energy, and the other dumps all of it into the body in the course of things. Which does more damage, and which is a better “stopping round”?
.30 Carbine in FMJ is a notoriously bad choice for hunting, around here. .30 Carbine with a good expanding bullet is considered marginal, and nowhere near as popular as something like .30-30 Winchester. If you were to posit something akin to the 5.45X39 Soviet projectile that was so infamous for tumbling, then that same weight of projectile and velocity from the .30 Carbine load would be a lot more effective.
Hell, a sabot .30 Carbine firing some kind of flechette projectile of the same projectile weight?
It’s more than “mass X velocity”, in my opinion. Projectile design influences an awful lot.
For sure. But for military use we’re stuck with FMJ.
You can hunt all sorts of surprising game with .223 with expanding bullets. As I pointed out years ago, anything you can use to reliably bring down a whitetail deer is equally effective on obstreperous bipeds, and vice versa.
The Hague committee had fits when they realized the .223 55-grain FMJ literally “blew up” inside the target. Something varmint hunters with everything from .22-250 to .220 Swift had known about “super-speed” .22 centerfires for thirty years at that point. Another example of rules being made and enforced by people basking in the reflected glory of their morally superior ignorance of physics.
One of the points of the Belgian 109 bullet design that sort-of-kind-of became M855 was to reduce the tendency for the bullet to go “pop” (which it generally does). Of course, it was also supposed to improve accuracy to allow the 5.56 x 45mm family of SAWs to do the job of the 7.62 x 51mm family of GPMGs out to 1,000 meters (which it absolutely does not).
BTW, Chapter 2 of The World’s Assault Rifles is mostly about the .280 Enfield/7.62 NATO debacle’.
Any way you cut it, “One Round To Rule Them All” just doesn’t work. But as long as everybody in Planning is OCD about “Taking Back The Infantry Half-Kilometer”, we’re probably stuck with it.
cheers
eon
RE: The question at 0:41:48…
I think Ian has the answer perfectly, in that it depends on the doctrine. If your intent is to move fast, dance through the hail of enemy fire as if it were rain, and all that jazz, then belt-fed squad support weapons are probably not your thing. The Marines are going down this path, and if they can make it work, that’s all well and good.
The caveat, and you know that there is one, is that the Marines are going to have to be “fought” by their higher tactical and operational commanders in such a fashion that the tactical tradeoffs they’re relying on actually, y’know… Work.
Me? I think it’s going to go a lot along the lines of what happened to the First Special Service Force in Italy/Southern France. Conventionally-minded commanders placed over the Marines (likely including a bunch of other Marines, BTW…) are going to take those light’nfast little units and try to use them the way that the conventional idjit types did 1st SSF, and they’ll wind up burning them out in very short order. Reliance on highly-trained light infantry being “highly trained” means you’d damn sure better work out how to keep them “highly trained” and with a pipeline of similarly “highly-trained” replacements backing them up. Burn out that high-speed, low-drag mob you start with, and you’re going to find out that your choice of equipage for them no longer works anywhere near as effectively.
For examples of this, see the Japanese Imperial Navy’s fighter force in WWII, or any of the other similar sorts of affairs going back to the ancient Greeks. You predicate winning your wars on the backs of your Spartans, wellllll… You’d damn sure better plan on making a lot of Spartans so as you don’t run out of them.
This is where you want to start doing some forethought; the Marines may be the ideal highly-trained intervention force, and you may want to equip them for such activities. However, huge ‘effing comma, you’d also better plan on what you’re going to do if you ever get into a major slugging match that is either entirely inappropriate for them, or you run out of them. At which point, the idea of handing a bunch of hastily-trained conscripts the weapons set that you gave the Marines is likely gonna be a huge mistake. Mostly because they won’t know how to use them effectively, and they’ll die in job lots trying to.
What I’m trying to communicate here is that you have to have horses for courses; you can make light’nfast work very well, but you can also burn through all your enablers for that, and then will need to transition to something a bit more on the heavy-duty side of things.
Of course, there are equally places, times, and opponents where “heavy duty” ain’t going to cut it. Examples of this abound, in the American experience: See “Vietnam”, “Afghanistan”, or any of our other counter-insurgency campaigns from the Indian Wars forward.
You can make a lot of things work, but you also have to be aware of how hard that is, what it takes to do, and when you absolutely need to stop trying to make it work. This is something that the US has been rather bad at, historically speaking.
The issue of “squad support weapon” is highly contentious. Myself, I do not believe very much in the idea embodied in the M249 or the RPD: You absolutely need the “punch” of a full-on MG team when you need one, and frankly, if you’re trying to drown the enemy in fires from something like the M249 or RPD already, you’d almost certainly be better off using a full-power MG. The individual-weapon caliber MG systems just won’t get through cover and concealment the way the bigger ones will, and if you’re gonna be hauling all that mass around with your squads, then by God, you’d better be able to make it count when you need to.
You also absolutely have to be able to go from “800m bipod-fired mode” to “1800m tripod with full fire direction” as appropriate, and at the drop of a hat. The lack of attention to the tripod and fire control systems with modern MG systems just makes my head and my heart hurt, because they’re leaving so much of an open bleeding flank there for the enemy to exploit that it’s not even funny; it’s tragic.
Honestly, the whole “fix” for what they jimmied up the NGSW program for could have and should have been a package of tripod, better accessories, and improved training. There’s no reason you can’t counter distant PKM fires with an M240, except that you’re an idiot trying to do that off of PFC Snuffy’s shoulder and a bipod. I can guarantee you that the least proficient MG34/42 team that the German Alpine troops took into the Pamirs would have made short work of the majority of the “distant ambushes” I’ve had described to me from the Taliban in Afghanistan, mostly because those guys were basically taught from the get-go that their organic weapons, the MG sections and mortar sections, were it, when it came to supporting fire. They were like I was, as an Engineer: Zero access to the fires nets, then you had to rely on yourself, which meant “Get good fast on the MG”. Too many US infantry outfits are overly reliant on their copious hot’ncold running fire support; when the ROE gods taketh away, you’d best be ready to fill that gap.
Either that, or die. One of the two.
We’re on the same page here.
I would add that as far as praying into the radio for CAS, Arty or etc., that sort of presupposes your enemy isn’t jamming you for all he’s worth.
WiFi’d computer is even worse in that respect; if it’s accessible to you and yours, it’s accessible to the other guy’s hacker dudes, too.
Sending in the tanks first in JFC Fuller style may no longer be a viable option. They might end up like Wile E. Coyote;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4xy2W6cefk
In future, those “lightnin’-fast light units” will have to look after themselves on a battlefield that will probably look more like something out of David Drake than Warhammer 40K.
And no, Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers” is probably not the answer.
PKD’s “Second Variety”, OTOH, just might be.
clear ether
eon
@eon,
I’ve been thinking about that whole “Where this is going…” thing, and I have to be honest with you: I don’t think it’s going to go anywhere precisely along the preconceived ideas of the SF writers.
“Second Variety” is seemingly prescient, but you have to remember that it was based on “natural selection” happening in automated and mostly autonomous factories. The actual technology for such things isn’t yet here, and may well never be.
I think the writers have created pointers, seeing the potentials for things, but at the same time, the track record for their work as futurists isn’t exactly stellar… Or, I’d be climbing into my flying car tomorrow to go do my shopping.
I think that the whole drone combat deal is going to prove to be something of a dry hole, inasmuch as it really has an effect on war. Right now, it looks really amazing, but let us remember here that the combatants are Russians and former Russians, not exactly the most brilliant soldiers of recorded history. This is the 21st Century’s version of the Russo-Japanese War, but fought by a bunch of amateurs. I mean, the Ukrainians are some brave, dedicated bastards, and I’ll give them props for standing up to the Russians all damn day, but… Let us be honest: In a lot of ways, they’re organizationally really ‘effing inept. They only recently started doing tactical wire obstacles on any large scale, their field discipline is lacking, and they’ve done really bad jobs of preparing for likely tactical actions by the Russians. There are a lot of things they could have been doing that they just haven’t, like targeting all the switching yards for the mostly electric Russian rail network, along with the transformer stations. Given all the observed stuff they’ve been doing, I’m kind of shocked by the lack of effort going after things like transformers and railway depots. In terms of lost opportunities, it’s about like the post-WWII American BDA assessment that realized “Hey, y’know… We should have been blowing up the electrical system instead of the ball-bearing plants…”
Which was apparently predicated on the fact that few in the Allied targeting business really appreciated just how thoroughly the Germans had electrified their industrial plant.
Of course, given that their descendants are apparently advising the Ukrainians, I’m entirely unsurprised that they’ve failed to really grok the Russian’s vulnerabilities and are going after things that would bother us, not them.
If I were to advise anyone thinking of making allies of us, the Americans, the very first thing I’d tell them is “Take nothing for granted, and trust nothing they tell you… Some Americans are brilliant, but there are an awful lot of idjits working in their government/military…”
As the USAAF/AF colonel who mentored me lo these many decades ago said, the whole ball-bearing plant thing was Hap Arnold & Co. wanting to maximize the survival of their bomber crews by reducing the number of fighter groups the Luftwaffe could throw at the bomber boxes. No ball bearings, no Daimler-Benz DB601 engines (ball-bearing “big ends”, don’t you know), no Bf109Fs.
As a P-47D and later P-51D jock tasked with escorting those bombers, he was of the opinion that AAA was a bigger threat to the average B-17 than a Bf-109, even if somebody like Oskar-Heinz Heinrich “Pritzl” Bär was flying the damn thing.
(He met Bär a couple of times, once over Regensburg at 25,000 and once at a conference regarding the new Federal German Luftwaffe in Bonn in 1954. At the latter, over beer they agreed that the friggin’ 88s and 105s on the ground were the biggest threat to everybody.)
And SHAEF/SHAPE sort-of-kind-of grokked that the German industrial superstructure was pretty much all electric. But they made the mistake of thinking that the legendary Dams Raid by 617 (Lancaster) Squadron (Operation Chastise, 16/17 May 1943) had taken out a respectable chunk of the electric generation capability. In fact, something like three-fourths of it was coal/peat generated.
Yes, there were some red faces around RAF Bomber Command when they found that out after V-E Day. Bombing railway junctions in the coal-mining country would have accomplished more. But it would have taken more time, more aggravation, and stretched the bomber forces even closer to the limit than they already were.
And of course, doing it that way, we would never have had the legend of the Dam Busters. “Coal Busters” just doesn’t have that “ring” to it.
cheers
eon
Just an observation but there appears to be a piece of what looks very much like WW1 trench art on the mantlepiece near your whiskey bottle.
Bob Forkers book Ammo and Ballistics is a valuable cartridge resource for factory loads in use today.
Cost might sort of rear it’s head again though, if actual WW type fighting… Hope not, really. But I mean even the U.S went grease gun, it must start to add up these £’s on weapons – Take fighting China, loads of them, if the Northrop thing was effective, so much so they did it as well, everyone would probably want cheaper ones “Fliegerfaust” eh, nora… Hoped the war would be over by Christmas, Germans and on time trains.
Re. Canadian production of Fabrique Natinale FAL rifles …. Ian. Your brain is too full of trivia. A while back you did a podcast on Canadian FNC1 rifles and told us that it was the Canadian Army that was the first to convert FN rifle production to Imperial measurements. Then Canada gave the Imperial design package to Great Britain to start SLR production.
As an aside, I have only seen original Canadian-built FNC1s in three locations: CFB Long Point museum (Island of Montreal), the Danish Ordinance Museum in Copenhagen and the Canadian Army Airborne School back when it was still in Edmonton. The jump-school’s FNC1s were pretty banged up, missing pistol grips, etc.
Back when I was a young soldier, we jumped with rucksack, rifle (FNC1A1) and snowshoes.
As for the Gyro Jet pistol, my impression is that it was adopted because the USAF was already using large numbers of A/PS25S-5A flare guns …. and the USAF used those flare guns for many years.