Gun Discussion

@SubaruAnon  
I have. I used 308 in my mothers M1A

Never. Question, Zecora.
 

@ᏰᎯᎠᎻᎬᎯᏒᎿ
 
Explosive Bullets

@RhodieNite  
Legal in Texas.

 
Source

This European Arquebus is actually more powerful than its 19th century counterparts, namely muskets and single-shot rifles
 
 

 
 
The Arquebus is a successor to the antique handheld cannon known as a gonne

@Iamunknown  
Recently I have been considering a KS7–the single mag tube version, that is–as a range toy. It looks absolutely mechanically fascinating, maybe like a bullpup version of the Ithaca 37. The ones I’ve handled are lightweight, compact, and very quick and lively in the hand, very quick to come up to the shoulder, quick on target, at least at home defense distances. The great big triangular fiberoptic bead is kind of an acquired taste, I think.
 
I’d be more enthusiastic if I hadn’t heard of so many quality control problems with them. Too many people were buying them and they didn’t run out of the box. A pump shotgun is Victorian Era technology. Even if you’re putting an Ithaca 37 clone with a lightweight alloy receiver into a plastic clamshell bullpup stock, how hard can it really be to get it right the first time in the age of CNC machining? It’s not like pump shotguns haven’t been around for 130 or 140 years now. The plastic carry handle doesn’t look up to hard use and I’d feel a lot better about it if it were aluminum. If I bought one I’d probably end up putting a picatinny rail on it and putting a carry handle rear sight and fixed AR type front on it, just out of familiarity.
 
Also, when I tried a KSG with 3” mag slugs at the range, it beat me black and blue and I had green and purple marks on my shoulder for a week. The KS7 is a lot lighter and I am guessing probably kicks a lot harder. The more I held it in my hands, the narrower and sharper that buttplate looked, and the more I thought it needed something besides injection molded hard nylon plastic between me and the recoil forces, at least if I was going to use it for something more serious than punching holes in paper and had it in an application where I’d need to try for fast follow-up shots.
 

@SubaruAnon  
It’s for Fudd ranges that want to be PC, and think that it will stop the SJW neighbors from complaining and trying to get them shut down and bought out by a real estate developer who lusts to build a golf course on that land. They think that by “taking a stand” against the “gun nuts” and their “paramilitary murder guns” they can convince the crocodile to eat them last. (“Hurr durr yew doan need twenny boolits ta kill a DURR, boay! Why do you got so many boolits? Is you plannin a murder, boay?”)
 
They want to make it clear they’re all about the skeet and the sportan clays and the zeroing the durr rifles once a decade, and they want nothing to do with those creepy IPSC people who actually want to learn how to fight for their lives with a gun to protect their homes and families. “Why, don’t you know the police will always be there to protect you? It’s almost racist!” It’s cowardly and contemptible and disgusting, and it gets them absolutely nothing in the end.

@Background Pony #7A9D  
More reasons as to why I went with the DP-12 over everything else.

@NitroFury  
6.8 SPC was created to improve terminal ballistics and lethality when fired from a 14.5” M4-ish rifle, when compared to the baseline of 5.56mm and M855 green-tip ball.
 
The 6.8mm bore diameter was chosen by the Big Army solely on the basis of the good performance in ballistic gelatin of fewer than a dozen one-off toolroom prototype 0.277” diameter 115gr boattail hollowpoint Sierra MatchKings, which all yawed pretty early and fragmented explosively in the gelatin while retaining enough mass to penetrate adequately. Is someone in the Peanut Gallery saying “but wait a minute, it’s a known problem, the Big Army already knew about the fleet yaw problem with rifle bullets, it’s impossible to mass-produce a bullet that will yaw consistently at shallow depth of penetration because yaw depth is too dependent on velocity, angle of attack at the point of impact, and a dozen more imponderable variables like variations in jacket thickness.” You get a gold star. And if you say “But isn’t the lethality problem with 5.56mm solved with Mk 262 using the 77gr Speer MatchKing, or a dozen other things that the Big Army already knew about before they spent the money?” Give yourself another gold star.
 
I will state my opinion here that the 6.8mm SPC cartridge is an abortion. It’s “a horse designed by a committee.” It was a bad idea from conception to finish. Because the advantage that 5.56mm always gave American troops, supposedly, was that it was so much lighter than anything else being issued anywhere in the world–but 6.8 SPC is about as heavy as 7.62x39mm. Because another of the 5.56mm’s enormous relative strengths is low recoil and outstanding controllability in full auto fire, which, again, gets tossed out the window with 6.8 SPC. Because there was already a cartridge in commercial distribution, 6.5 Grendel, that did and does everything the 6.8 SPC does, but better, with markedly superior long range accuracy, trajectory, and striking power, due to the superior energy retention of high ballistic coefficient 6.5mm bullet designs, before the 6.8 SPC was even created. The Big Army has a long history of spending billions on Bad Ideas, and we may need another Secretary of Defense MacNamara to knock the Joint Chiefs’ heads together and stop the money hemorrhage on stupid shit like new rifle calibers and every service having its own sooper speshul digital camouflage. Give ’em all back M16A2s and make ’em all wear Woodland, I say.

@SubaruAnon  

 
Depending on what you’re shooting it in, you need to be careful. Springfield M1As, for example, have always been very, very finicky about the gas pressure curve of the ammo you shoot in them. At least in the 80s the instruction manual even said, “if you are using commercial ammo other than 7.62x51mm M80 Ball or equivalent, you must NOT try to shoot ammunition with bullets lighter than 125gr, as this may fail to have sufficient pressure at point where the bullet passes the gas port to operate the action reliably, and you must NOT try to shoot ammunition with 180 grain bullets or heavier, as the gas pressure at the point where the bullet passes the gas port is excessive and this can damage the firearm by bending the operating rod or cracking the receiver.”
 
If you reload, a lot of reloading manuals have “service rifle data” sections where it has data that has been tested in an M1A and an AR15 and similar gas operated designs. Normally the load data uses powders that are within a very narrow range of burning speeds, IMR3031 at the fastest, Hodgdon BLC2 or CFE223 at the slowest. Maximum charges for 7.62x51mm are reduced 5% from those for .308 Winchester, partially because some military cases have heavier walls and therefore reduced volume compared to commercial .308, partially because the military max pressure spec for 7.62x51 is generally around 55,000 PSI as opposed to 62,000 PSI for .308. 5.56mm actually has a slightly higher max chamber pressure than .223 but the rest all applies.

@ᏰᎯᎠᎻᎬᎯᏒᎿ  
“Don’t get your nose out of joint. I’m loading these with hollow points.  
For what lives on land or lies beneath, I hot-rod them like Elmer Keith.”

@NitroFury  
I have to ask, is that from a video game? Because it’s an anachronistic mishmash and so much about it looks so wrong. It’s got a water cooling jacket like a Maxim Gun from a hundred and twenty years ago–but with a Picatinny rail on top of it. The top cover of real world MGs always hinges at the front, never the rear, because the feed tray camming mechanism is in front and needs to be as close as possible to the hinge pin for rigidity. It’s got a holographic sight on top of the feed tray, despite the fact that someone went to the trouble to stick all that picatinny rail on top of the water jacket just in front of it, and the feed tray is normally rather loose. Yes, I know, in some units M240s get an optical sight stuck there, but it’s non-optimum for all the same reasons that you’re unlikely to get usable results by just riveting a length of picatinny to the top of an FAL’s loose and rattly dust cover. There are lengths of picatinny rail on the sides of the water jacket up front, too, which conjures images of some poor bastard kicking down doors with it in his hands, with a laser on one side and a white light on the other. Now I’m imagining the boiling water leaking out and scalding him.

(Very late reply)
 
@Background Pony #7A9D  
It’s a fictional Gun concept made by Freelance Concept Artist on Artstation, it’s not from any Video Game; I just feel like sharing it.
 
@Background Pony #7A9D  
Well, you have to considered the possibility that 6.8 SPC might fare better because it was design to feed better. While the 6.5 Grendel (if you want to be more specific) and 6.8 SPC are good for hunting/defensive purposes, the 6.5 Grendel (which is a derivative of .220 Russian, a 7.62x39 parent cartridge) would likely cause a jam if used in a Full Auto Assault Rifle. Another factor is that the casing for the 6.5 Grendel has hindered its pressure, that’s why you can compensate in potential in long barreled rifles.

@NitroFury  
ah.
 
Well, one problem with any cartridge other than 5.56mm in the AR15/M16/M4 platform is that everything from the mag well dimensions to the length and diameter of the bolt to the length of upper and lower receiver to the feed ramps in the barrel extension were designed around one and only one cartridge, the 5.56mm. Anything else is necessarily going to be a compromise, and exhibit problems the original caliber and combination of components did not.
 
When I google for “6.8 SPC feed problems” I get about twice as many hits as for “6.5 Grendel feed problems” but I can’t read all of them–it’s well into six figures for either one–and maybe 6.8 is more popular in the AR world.
 
I know nobody’s made a 6.5 Grendel or 6.8 SPC 30 round mag worth a damn that fits the AR platform, not without redesigning the mag well portion of the lower–designed over sixty years ago for a straight, non-curved 20 round box magazine, it’s a miracle it works as well as it does with the half-curved, half-straight 30s–to take a magazine that’s continuously curved and maybe a wee bit longer front to rear than the STANAG magazines that NATO standardized decades ago. This means a caliber switch is more than swapping barrels and magazines and maybe bolts, and that means money, and that means it’s not happening. The Pentagon spends money like drunken sailors but even they’re not brazen enough to try to get THAT past Congress.
 
Consider that, at platoon and company level, the infantry formation’s real teeth are its belt-fed weapons, plus, of course, its ability to call for close air support and indirect fire from higher echelons. A statistic from WWII is that in modern fire-and-movement infantry tactics, 90_{+ of the ammunition expended by any given rifle squad goes through the squad’s beltfed weapons–and this statistic has not changed significantly 80 years on. And when the riflemen do engage the enemy ranges rarely exceed 200m and are more often under 100m than over 200m. The riflemen are there to prevent the SAWs and LMG teams from being outflanked or overrun, or, on the offensive, to be the mobile reserve that assaults enemy positions with grenades and bayonets under cover of LMG fire.
 
If the Pentagon were really serious about any of these alternative calibers, they’d have tried, at some point in the last two decades, to gin up a SAW/LMG/MMG replacement using the new 6.8mm caliber. Twenty years on and they’ve done exactly jack and shit on that account. They haven’t even designed a new MG link for the 6.8mm cartridge, much less a beltfed to use it. They’re just LARPing, spending taxpayer money to boost morale for the SpecOps guys who have been since the Eisenhower administration complaining about the small arms they are issued–they’re too big, they’re too small, they’re too heavy, they’re too light, they’re too powerful, they’re not powerful enough, et ceter, et cetera. They picked up this unproductive habit from the US Army Infantry School, which during the Great Depression had the enormous brass balls to demand that Douglas MacArthur go before Congress and recommend that the Big Army switch to the intermediate .276 Pedersen cartridge for which the first toolroom prototype Garands were built. It was much lighter than .30/06, allowing infantrymen and machine gunners to carry much more ammunition. It was an excellent performer in such ballistic tests as the technology of the era permitted–ballistic gelatin hadn’t been invented, but it worked a treat killing goats, sheep, and pigs, and bullets copying the British .303 Mk VIIz’s lightweight nose filler, designed to yaw in soft tissue, made hideous wounds out of all proportion to its unimpressive velocity or kinetic energy figures, and impressed the pathologists mightily. If we had adopted it in 1933 we might still be using it today. But if MacArthur had gone to a Congress that was already allocating so little money to defense that Americans in Army Basic were drilling with broomsticks instead of rifles, and which would have asked him what the War Department planned to do with the warehouses full of .30/06 ammunition they had left over from the last World War, they’d have done more than laugh at him. They’d have cashiered him. And he knew it.
 
Anyway. If we’re talking about alternative cartridges for the M4, one that no one talks about much is the .25/45 Sharps. Some articles sneer at it and say the guys at Sharps did everything wrong. They kept overall case length the same, they didn’t change the shoulder angle, they changed the absolute minimum to get a .257” diameter bullet into the M4. Only, not “improving” the cartridge by changing shoulder angles or case neck length means the .25/45 Sharps fits in existing M16 mags with zero problems and feeds with zero problems, no magazine or barrel extension or upper receiver feed ramp changes required. Now, because of the unchanged overall case length, the Sharps cartridge doesn’t play well with heavy bullets unless they are custom designs created specifically for the cartridge, long heavy roundnose or truncated-cone softpoint bullets with cannelures far forward to keep them at magazine length. Bullets like these work pretty well in hunting, mind you. They don’t have very flat trajectories. But for whitetail deer and feral hogs inside 200m they’re plenty good enough. The tradeoff is that the 115-120gr heavy boattail spitzer bullets that would give best ballistic coefficient and long range energy retention in the .25/45 Sharps are just too long and have ogives too long to fit in the cartridge at magazine length.
 
I would also note that the main reason for the Big Army’s enthusiasm for the .277” bore diameter is the performance in ballistic gelatin of a relative handful of preproduction samples of a Sierra 115gr MatchKing boattail hollowpoint bullet supplied for testing purposes. Now that the Big Army has decided to disregard the Hague Convention entirely, and has pretty much decided that M855A1 Ball is going to expand and fragment in tissue, and any replacement for it is going to be some kind of hunting-type expanding bullet–we have completed the circle and gone back to the beginning. Look at the performance of, for example, the 62gr Trophy Bonded Bear Claw softpoint hunting bullet in 5.56mm, quantities of which were issued to USMC units and SOCOM as “Mk 318 Mod 0” ammunition. Look at the performance of the Barnes 70gr solid copper hollowpoint in .224” diameter in ballistic gelatin, some of which were issued to SOCOM as “DODIC X135” or “Brown Tip” ammunition. All of these would seem to negate the need to go to larger calibers than 5.56mm to kill bad people, unless they are very far away, in which case 6.5 Grendel is the best of a mediocre lot of cartridge designs that kinda-sorta still fit in the M4.
 
Anyone who wants to start over again with a general service rifle cartridge for NATO that is other than 7.62x51mm or 5.56x45mm is going to need a time machine, I think. Those decisions were made generations ago and none of the alternatives is so good as to justify throwing away hundreds of billions of dollars in inventory and starting over again from scratch with a new caliber and new cartridge that may or may not give some tiny advantage in performance over what they already had. In AD 2020 there is really absolutely zero capability a general issue infantry rifle really needs that an M16A1 from 1975 or an AKM from 1962 cannot fulfill, and to be entirely truthful, under 99} of circumstances neither one is much superior to one of the better mid-century stamped sheet metal pistol-caliber SMG designs, like the Finnish M35 or the Soviet PPS43.
 
That having been said, it’s amusing to imagine something like the experimental British EM2 bullpup assault rifle and its .280 Enfield intermediate cartridge. Weren’t some experimental FALs made in .280 Enfield also? I’d personally like to see PTR make the PTR32 in 6.5 Grendel–all it would need is a barrel swap and maybe a magazine with less curve because the Grendel has less taper than 7.62x39mm.

Hard to believe an arms company could be suffering in this time of record high sales, but Remington is bankrupt for the second time in two years.

@kleptomage
 
Well if they had better quality control…

@Ebalosus  
I have heard Remington has bad QC, but I don’t think it’s the only reason they’re bankrupt. For them to fail this hard tells me there is corruption on the inside.

Ah, AK47 go brrrr

@ᏰᎯᎠᎻᎬᎯᏒᎿ  
I’m greatly saddened to hear that.

@Ebalosus  
It’s not just quality control, though it’s true that Remington has had severe QC problems going back to the late 1980s. It’s a lack of innovation, a lack of vision, a lack of new products–and horrible choices in the new products they chose. Like the Remington RP9 pistol, a full size 9mm service pistol, that was two decades late to a saturated market, with severe reliability problems. Like the Remington-branded AR10 and AR15 rifles, again decades late to a saturated market, which everyone knew instantly were rebranded DPMS products at a 100% markup, with all the QC and metallurgical baggage associated with the DPMS (“Doesn’t Pass Mil Specs”) brand name.
 
They managed to screw up the 870 pump shotgun, that they’ve been making 60 years now. How do you screw up a pump shotgun? Well, big sharp burrs in the chamber caused extraction problems in the cheap “Express” model I bought a few years back, and rather than send it back to the people who thought it was good enough to ship, I had a gunsmith hone out the chamber. Since then it’s worked fine, but how did it leave the factory like that? Pump shotguns are pretty much perfected technology. We’ve been building them since the Victorian Era. When you take it out of the box it should Just Work, and if it doesn’t they should not ship it.

Gun Jesus has spoken: forward assists are useless and only exist due to US Army stubbornness.