technococcus
Inactive Member
Hey! I'm new to the site and was digging through what will most likely be my favorite part of the whole place, the Tech Discussion Threads, and saw this nifty little dissertation on a modular rifle design and just had to read it. Modular designs that allow one base unit to be modified for use in any number of operation types and by various groups within an infrastructure is a great idea that is very much catching on with modern armies. Adopting such a design keeps costs, mainntainance issues, and extraneous gun trials down. There are, however, a couple of issues with these weapons that I'd like to address, if I may.
First, I'd like to recommend these "attachment points" be a standard, either the old 3/8" dovetails or the more modern MIL Spec. Picatinny or a new, ultramodern equivalent standard. One potential solution would be high-powered electro-magnetic attachment, such that an accessory would be placed in it's proper slot and a switch thrown or button pressed to activate the hardpoint's magnetic properties, locking the unit in place until the hardpoint was demagnetized. This works similarly to the locking system on a high-tolerance metal plane I worked with in Machining Lab last semester, which held the work firmly in place by magnetizing when you threw one switch and released it with ease when you turned the magnetism back off. This would, of course be a less viable option if the mass-driving system used here is magnetically actuated, as the conflicting magnetic fields could give the weapon trouble. No one would want a weapon whose scope and flashlight fell off every time you fired it! :lol:
First, I gather from the final description (where ".22 cal." gave it away) that Discharge is the caliber of ammunition used in the rifle. Does 30.6 here indicate 30-06 rounds, or some other type of ammunition, like a 30.6 mm round, or something? Also, .3 seconds per round is only a 200 rpm rate of fire, which, compared to the AK-47 AKM's 600 rpm and the M16A2's 800 rpms, is really rather low for an assault/battle rifle. Also, most manufacturers today are tending towards including a "burst fire" setting on their automatic weapons. A 3 or 5 round burst setting allows a user to fire in a more controlled manner, even if they are not used to fully automatic weapons. This can also help comserve ammunition.
Speaking of ammunition, I'm not fully convinced that a 6 inch tall magazine, even double stacked, could contain 240 rounds of any caliber of ammunition. Assuming your rounds are side-by-side, and thus that your magazine isn't more than two bullet-widths wide, you would need to fit 120 rounds of amunition into a section with a rear crossectional area of 3 inches. Presuming that the magazine is only one bullet-length long and isn't somehow double-stacked forwards as well as sideways, your bullets would need to have a .05 inch diameter to fit!
A way to increase magazine capacity towards the numbers you're looking at would be to use one of the two classical ways of increasing a weapon's magazine capacity: A belt feed, or a drum magazine. A belt feed essentially increases the weapon's ammo capacity to the number of rounds a soldier can carry, but has added drawbacks of being slightly less reliable a loading method, especially for a single operative, and much more difficult to load and sustain fire with for a single operative. A drum clip increases the amount of ammunition cariable substantially, such as increasing the Thompson Sub-machinegun's capacity from 30 rounds in a box to 50 or 100 rounds in a drum. Drums for the venerable AK-47 (for a more pertinent example) were manufactured as well, increasing capacity from 30 round banana clips to 75 rounds per drum. These work well and have almost the same properties as a standard box magazine, only they take up more space laterally (most of the time... one could technically mount a drum magazine with it's axis running perpendicular to the axis of the barrel as opposed to the more usual parallel axis method, as long as one provided for a method of rotating the rounds into firing position...) and are as much bulkier as one might expect from a much higher capacity magazine.
Yet another cryptic Discharge reading, and a cyclic rate of fire reading for a semi-auto only weapon... Usually a semi-auto has the capacity to fire much more rapidly than a human operator can squeeze the trigger, which makes a good deal of sense in a case of this nature where the semi was modified from a high rate-of-fire assault rifle. The magazine capacity also looks dismally dissapointing to the soldier so equipped in comparison to the other two versions of this rifle listed, but, with the suggestions above as per the reduction of those other guns' magazine capacities, this one might look a little more well-treated.
Oh, and the subsonic round idea is a good one, and has been well implemented in the special "subsonic load" silenced rounds that have been sold for years. These rounds are standard, powder-primed ammunition that have had their load of propellant reduced to the point that the maximum velocity ever acheived by the projectile is just under the speed of sound, thus preventing the telltale sonic boom that is part of the retort of a gun. To fully silence a weapon, one must shoot a subsonic load, use a silencer to supress the noise of the detonation of the charge (or, in this case, since there is no propellant, you can skip that...), and oil and pad the mechanisms of the weapon to prevent the clicking and scraping of mechanical parts from giving away one's position.
Hope some of this was helpful, and not entirely a waste of the time of anyone who read this far into what turned out to be a far longer post than was intended...
mattlionheart86va said:
First, I'd like to recommend these "attachment points" be a standard, either the old 3/8" dovetails or the more modern MIL Spec. Picatinny or a new, ultramodern equivalent standard. One potential solution would be high-powered electro-magnetic attachment, such that an accessory would be placed in it's proper slot and a switch thrown or button pressed to activate the hardpoint's magnetic properties, locking the unit in place until the hardpoint was demagnetized. This works similarly to the locking system on a high-tolerance metal plane I worked with in Machining Lab last semester, which held the work firmly in place by magnetizing when you threw one switch and released it with ease when you turned the magnetism back off. This would, of course be a less viable option if the mass-driving system used here is magnetically actuated, as the conflicting magnetic fields could give the weapon trouble. No one would want a weapon whose scope and flashlight fell off every time you fired it! :lol:
mattlionheart86va said:
First, I gather from the final description (where ".22 cal." gave it away) that Discharge is the caliber of ammunition used in the rifle. Does 30.6 here indicate 30-06 rounds, or some other type of ammunition, like a 30.6 mm round, or something? Also, .3 seconds per round is only a 200 rpm rate of fire, which, compared to the AK-47 AKM's 600 rpm and the M16A2's 800 rpms, is really rather low for an assault/battle rifle. Also, most manufacturers today are tending towards including a "burst fire" setting on their automatic weapons. A 3 or 5 round burst setting allows a user to fire in a more controlled manner, even if they are not used to fully automatic weapons. This can also help comserve ammunition.
Speaking of ammunition, I'm not fully convinced that a 6 inch tall magazine, even double stacked, could contain 240 rounds of any caliber of ammunition. Assuming your rounds are side-by-side, and thus that your magazine isn't more than two bullet-widths wide, you would need to fit 120 rounds of amunition into a section with a rear crossectional area of 3 inches. Presuming that the magazine is only one bullet-length long and isn't somehow double-stacked forwards as well as sideways, your bullets would need to have a .05 inch diameter to fit!
A way to increase magazine capacity towards the numbers you're looking at would be to use one of the two classical ways of increasing a weapon's magazine capacity: A belt feed, or a drum magazine. A belt feed essentially increases the weapon's ammo capacity to the number of rounds a soldier can carry, but has added drawbacks of being slightly less reliable a loading method, especially for a single operative, and much more difficult to load and sustain fire with for a single operative. A drum clip increases the amount of ammunition cariable substantially, such as increasing the Thompson Sub-machinegun's capacity from 30 rounds in a box to 50 or 100 rounds in a drum. Drums for the venerable AK-47 (for a more pertinent example) were manufactured as well, increasing capacity from 30 round banana clips to 75 rounds per drum. These work well and have almost the same properties as a standard box magazine, only they take up more space laterally (most of the time... one could technically mount a drum magazine with it's axis running perpendicular to the axis of the barrel as opposed to the more usual parallel axis method, as long as one provided for a method of rotating the rounds into firing position...) and are as much bulkier as one might expect from a much higher capacity magazine.
mattlionheart86va said:
Yet another cryptic Discharge reading, and a cyclic rate of fire reading for a semi-auto only weapon... Usually a semi-auto has the capacity to fire much more rapidly than a human operator can squeeze the trigger, which makes a good deal of sense in a case of this nature where the semi was modified from a high rate-of-fire assault rifle. The magazine capacity also looks dismally dissapointing to the soldier so equipped in comparison to the other two versions of this rifle listed, but, with the suggestions above as per the reduction of those other guns' magazine capacities, this one might look a little more well-treated.
Oh, and the subsonic round idea is a good one, and has been well implemented in the special "subsonic load" silenced rounds that have been sold for years. These rounds are standard, powder-primed ammunition that have had their load of propellant reduced to the point that the maximum velocity ever acheived by the projectile is just under the speed of sound, thus preventing the telltale sonic boom that is part of the retort of a gun. To fully silence a weapon, one must shoot a subsonic load, use a silencer to supress the noise of the detonation of the charge (or, in this case, since there is no propellant, you can skip that...), and oil and pad the mechanisms of the weapon to prevent the clicking and scraping of mechanical parts from giving away one's position.
Hope some of this was helpful, and not entirely a waste of the time of anyone who read this far into what turned out to be a far longer post than was intended...
