Suicidesoldier#1
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- Posted: Mon, 23 Apr 2012 08:08:10 +0000
The United States is still using it's out dated M16 and M4 carbine. The weapon designed was designed in the 1950's by Eugine stoner and the initial design was rejected, primarily in favor of the M14 which was based off the M1 Garand. Then about 10 years later it was fielded in Vietnam, except it was a much worse version and used the much weaker .223.
Some early problems plaguing the weapon were- low cartridge power, frequent rusting, frequent jams, weak magazines (you could only load 18-19 rounds instead of 20 sense 20 would make it reliably jam) extremely weak plastic, frequent required cleaning, jamming when a little bit of dust or sand got in it, and over-all being fairly unreliable- it was said that more M16's killed troops than enemy soldiers, due to their tendency to jam.
The M16A2 had some significant improvements. It could be fitted with an underbarrel grenade luancher, which improved it's lethality, as well as some other accessories. It used a much larger receiver, about a pound heavier, or around 30% larger, so that the gases filtered directly on to the weapon could be diffused easier, a chrome lined barrel, plastic that was over 10 times stronger, a more reliable and larger magazine (30 rounds), some improved features to make it more ergonomic, a manual assist so when the weapon experienced a common type of malfunction it could be cleared easily, and came with cleaning instructions instead of proclaiming it was "self cleaning". They never changed the round, even though it was in large part the problem (was super dirty) but due to the enlarged other features it had decent reliability with the dirtier but more powerful round, so some could say it's more powerful.
Simplifying the issue, the primary problem with the weapon is that it was chopped up and practically stolen by colt which the U.S. no longer does business with (1995 they started using FN to make their guns, sense colt had "unsavory business practices" ). Eugine stoner originally designed it but he was put off by the 5.56mm, especially sense his gun was designed to fire much larger cartridges, such as the 7.62mm x 51mm NATO, over twice as powerful, and used cleaner gunpowder. Ironically, it's the modern M16, firing a much weaker round, is the same size as a previous Ar-10 at 7.5 lb, primarily becuase such a large receiver is needed to buffer out the gases.
There were 2 options available- use the smaller, weaker 7mm but bullpup and 20 round magazine design of the British, controllable under fire but using a weaker round (that had the same ballistic trajectory of the .30-06 and was said to be more accurate, reminiscent of the 6.5mm grendel compared to the 7.62mm x 51mm NATO) or the AR-10, longer (and therefore more unwieldy and difficult to use in close quarters combat) and heavier, but with roughly the same recoil using a 7.62mm x 51mm NATO round that was much more powerful and could be controlled with full auto, also with considerable accuracy (some production models had 1 MOA). Sadly, the U.S. went with the M14, a good weapon, but very heavy (4-5 pounds heavier than even the AR-10, at 10-11 pounds instead of 7.25) based off of the M1 Garand, which while good was relativley uncontrollable in fully automatic fire and was very heavy and large, making it unwieldy.
In response, rather than choosing the other two weapons they determined that the 7.62mm (a weaker version of the .30-06 previously praised and then condemned in a similar manner) was uncontrollable in fire unless by a super heavy weapon (despite an Ar-10 with a huge muzzle break being totally controllable and having similar recoil to a .223). So, instead of going with the smaller 7mm round, vehemently pushed by sublimate denied after several unreasonable complaints (mostly that it was weak and could never live up to the .30-06's power) that was super accurate but had comparable power to the 6.8mm remington and 6.5mm grendel that look promising today and are fielded by a lot of special forces units, they went with an EVEN SMALLER ROUND. Even worse, they used this small round in the "large but low recoil platform". The thing is, it was a waste, sense the 5.56mm does not need a low recoil design and the weapon was huge.
Even worse, colt stole the design and only got away with half the patents. Essentially butchering the highly sensitive weapon design (it's called "direct impingement", as in it lacks a piston, which would be like pouring gasoline on an engine and saying "go" and then expecting it to actually work- that type of design is similar to a rocket, which totally has a reputation for being reliable. rolleyes ), and running Eugine Stoner out of business, they took over with their super crappy but in trials highly praised (even though it was considered crap by Eugine stoner who adamantly refused to legitimately use the 5.56mm round and was intent on showing the military, once they accepted his design, what it could really do, like we see in the SR-25 with it's amazing accuracy, low recoil and high durability) and basically screwed over the entire U.S. military.
EVEN WORSE, Eugine stoner designed two guns, the M69W (you can flip the name upside down and get the same thing) which was highly praised by navy seals until it was designed to fire tracers that even the M16 couldn't fire, wrecking the reliability of the weapon (which was mostly due to political reasons, I.E. colt paying off people to make it so they would kill the M69W) and the clearly superior AR-18. The AR-18 was 2 inches shorter, used an 18 inch barrel, was a full pound lighter, several times reliable, super easy to clean, had a folding stock (functionally impossible on an M16 sense the stock is used as a gas buffer tube) had 990 m/s instead of 940 (better barrel design), had a 40 round magazine instead of 20 at the time, (now 30), and was cheaper and easier to make made of stamped steel and so easily made in factories (this was in large part due to the receiver being much smaller, so it could be made from lighter and thinner aluminum steel which could be machined easier instead of having to be cut from a single block like the M16- with plastic it may have been even lighter). It has gone on to serve as the basis for the G36, Hk416, FN SCAR, British SA80, and many other short stroke gas piston designs, which are simply considered superior to the direct impingement design in practically every way. Despite being cheaper and practically better in every way (also far more reliable with the same ammunition, which was incredible for the time) the military rejected it, mostly due to political reasons.
After this Eugine Stoner left for South America, creating their weapons where patents did not apply and designing or help designing practically all other weapons in European countries of the 20th century. The basis for his design has been used in a lot of weapons and is still used to this date. The SR-25, with unparallelled .5 MOA (4 times better than a standard bolt action sniper rifle) with 20 round detachable box magazine at the same weight and size as the M16 with roughly the same recoil (mainly due to the recoil buffer) was directly designed by him. He also created several other light machine gun designs.
He died in 97 at about 75. He was considered in league with John Browning and John Garand in terms of weapon design.
More or less, some other flaws of the weapon are not fixed. It uses picanty rails which are universal accessory attachment, in other words any scope from any gun can theoretically be attached relativley easily, along with lasers, foregrips, grenade launchers and flashlights, but this is not enough. The weapon is still using direct impingement despite the obvious cheaper and stronger nature of the short stroke gas piston design. It uses and unnecessarily long magazine well which is said to be responsible for approximately half of the jams of the weapon. The best design have the rounds in the chamber before the round is even technically loaded in, which seems like a no brainer sense you want the round in the gun and to travel hardly any distance as to not create a region where complications could occur, and there's no real reason not to do this (even though the long magazine well is what NATO and all other Europeans and U.S. use). The weapon, with it's direct impingement, needs a much larger receiver, about a pound heavier than what it originally was and the AR-18 (6.6 pounds compared to 7.5 with the current M16) which is incredibly hard to machine- actually, it's milled. The same type of reliability and accuracy can be made with a much easier to machine design, and it would be significantly lighter weight and reliable too.
With very simple changes, in theory it should be possible to even take an M16 design and use a piston in it's direct impingement design, simply by placing a piston in the gas tube with springs that are calibrated correctly- with mass engineering this would be relativley cheap to implement, as a spring and a steel rod are not very expensive.
In the 90's the XM8 was designed. It had significant improvements over the M16. For one, the Stanag magazine was dropped- a much more reliable and effective magazine was developed, that sported translucent polymers (to see how many bullets were left), somewhat stronger than steel in that it could be bent more and was less likely to scratch, and was designed to be more ergonomic in loading and removing *Videosz! 1:01 for magazine operation (it had a little trigger to remove the magazine that kept it in firmly, so it wasn't super tight but was still hard to remove unless this holder was slightly moved). The weapon was shown to be able to fire over 400 rounds from 4 100 round drum magazines (the BETA-C is crap, but this magazine loading design was much better and due to this magazine design did not stress the magazine well). It did not need cleaning for over 15,000 rounds (although it was expected to be cleaned very often), and had double the life of an M16 (at 10,000 rounds, 5,000 rounds replacement for barrel) with a much longer barrel life in regards to the M16 at over 4 times this amount primarily due to it's polygonal rifling and hammer forged design. The weapon also sported various variants, such as sniperized and SAW versions, that were considered relativley applicable for the time. With it's reliability and performance it may have actually been okay as a multi-role weapon. Straight up dope, In a dust test it was 7.44 times more reliable than the M4 carbine, with 116 stoppages instead of 863
The only designs issues were it's crappy 1990's era stuff. No picanty rails with crappy hanguards (that could easily be replaced with modern plastic) a desire to integrate a scope (like in the G36, instead of using picanty rails...) which made it heavier and bulkier, and a very bad stock that was WAY longer than it needed to be (33 inches long with a 12.5 inch barrel, in the same way an M4 carbine could have been 231 inches longer, 2 inches shorter, meaning that the XM8 just had a stupidly long stock that should have been shortened). The XM8 also was not STANAG compatible, which complicated the issue, but the STANAG magazines are crap.
Considering at the time that the M16 and things didn't have picanty rails today these issues could be fixed and would have been shortly. What was the issue? Well, colt desired to compete with these new weapons, even though it wasn't an open competition just a weapon replacement- congressional pressures made this a reality. As well, the weapon almost twice as expensive as the M16, which was considered an issue.
Ignoring colt's Assholey-ness, the cost should not have been an issue. First of all, the weapon is twice as durable- this means that the m16 at a 10,000 round life needs to be replaced twice as often than the XM8 at a 20,000 round life; as well, an M16 comes with an extra 500 dollar barrel to replace the barrel every 5,000 rounds, while the XM8 barrel can be used up to 20,000 rounds and in theory, 10,000 in accordance with the barrel only having half the life of the m16- even if we excluded the extra costs the M16 would go from 1000 to 1500 dollars, compared to 2000 dollars for an XM8 with a scope and two magazines.
As well, the weapon is NOT that expensive. At 2000 dollars it would cost around 20 billion dollars to completely field 10 million soldiers with the weapon- out of the 800 billion dollar budget, our main weapon that our main units use (I.E. people) would only cost about 1/40th of the budget. Thing is, we only have 3 million- so that's only 6.6 billion dollars. Thing is, we only have 1.5 million troops who use the weapon on a regular basis, as they are actively infantry; so 1/2 of 1/3, or 3.3 billion dollars.. Thing is, we only sent in 300,000 troops in Iraq and whatnot and that was out largest troopscape- only about 100,000 are still there. This would only be about a billion dollars, or 1/800th of the militaries budget.
THING IS, due to the barrel being replaced 1/4th the amount and the weapon having twice the durability this weapon would actually be cheaper. 1 to 1 in terms of weapon replacement cost (1000 compared to 2000, but you need twice as many M16's), but sense you don't need barrel replacements but every 20,000 rounds instead of 5,000, the M16 becomes twice as expensive. This is due to a price of projected durability losses, not unit replacement losses- obviously, we don't lose very many M16's and many go on to be used for their full intended service length. Even so it would only only be about 500 dollars more for an Xm8 that had 7.5 times more reliability, was more ergonomic, in theory lighter weight (the scope being about 1 pound in the 7.5 pound rifle, which should be able to be removed), be able to withstand much more abuse including artic and dirt/dust heavy environment, being capable of firing while under water AND use a large magazine (like a 100 round drum magazine) with little to no reliability issues, practically never having to be cleaned and being more ergonomic.
With better rounds even the weakness of the crap .223 could be compensated what with the better rifling twists we know of the and M855A1 better armor piercing copper rounds or the super accurate Mk. 262 5 gram boat tail hollow point round (still technically viable in the geneva convention).
EVEN CRAZIER, what with the ease of polygonal barrel designs due to flow forming design techniques and their increased strength with a cobalt chrome design, it seems almost a no brainer to switch over to this. "Engineering team members met all of their proof-of-concept test objectives when they fired more than 24,000 rounds and achieved an 1,100 degrees barrel temperature. Normal steel barrels would have failed under this kind of treatment". Other pieces, if possible, should be replaced by this.
Ironically, the 7.62mm was deemed to have too much recoil under automatic fire BUT THE FULLY AUTOMATIC BUTTON was REMOVED from M16's and many M4 carbines and the weapon cannot fire this way due to the fact that the gas tube will overheat and disallow a gas of similar temperatures to go down the gas tube once it overheats (gas goes from high to low pressure I.E. warm to cold) to cycle the weapon. And the M16 is supposed to be fired in semi-auto, and the 7.62mm is fine in this function.
SO WHY AREN'T WE DOING THIS?
Tl;DR clearly the M4 Carbine and M16 design are out dated after 42 years of use (48 years of use, really, invented long before that with it's use in Vietnam ) and basically are inferior to still cheap and reliable weapons. Even at twice the price due to the durability of the weapons they would last twice as long (the barrels 4 times as long, making the weapon in theory half the price of the M16 design) and with some simple changes (such as adding picanty rails, adding in a typical m4 type shortened stock even on use on the M249), and the fact that we spend a tiny amount of money on guns each year, the smallest amount, despite it being the main weapon fielded by idk, people, why haven't we replaced it?
Some basic questions:
1. Are politicians and businessmen just really that corrupt they'd let people die over this?
2. Can we not get out of that system even though colt does not supply weapons to us anymore after we refused their business?
3. Are people so stupid that they can't come up with good gun designs, or is money and political pressures too much?
4. Do you think that a bull-pup version of the XM8 with a cobalt chrome polygonal barrel would be a good idea?
5. What are your opinions on the subject?
Some early problems plaguing the weapon were- low cartridge power, frequent rusting, frequent jams, weak magazines (you could only load 18-19 rounds instead of 20 sense 20 would make it reliably jam) extremely weak plastic, frequent required cleaning, jamming when a little bit of dust or sand got in it, and over-all being fairly unreliable- it was said that more M16's killed troops than enemy soldiers, due to their tendency to jam.
The M16A2 had some significant improvements. It could be fitted with an underbarrel grenade luancher, which improved it's lethality, as well as some other accessories. It used a much larger receiver, about a pound heavier, or around 30% larger, so that the gases filtered directly on to the weapon could be diffused easier, a chrome lined barrel, plastic that was over 10 times stronger, a more reliable and larger magazine (30 rounds), some improved features to make it more ergonomic, a manual assist so when the weapon experienced a common type of malfunction it could be cleared easily, and came with cleaning instructions instead of proclaiming it was "self cleaning". They never changed the round, even though it was in large part the problem (was super dirty) but due to the enlarged other features it had decent reliability with the dirtier but more powerful round, so some could say it's more powerful.
Simplifying the issue, the primary problem with the weapon is that it was chopped up and practically stolen by colt which the U.S. no longer does business with (1995 they started using FN to make their guns, sense colt had "unsavory business practices" ). Eugine stoner originally designed it but he was put off by the 5.56mm, especially sense his gun was designed to fire much larger cartridges, such as the 7.62mm x 51mm NATO, over twice as powerful, and used cleaner gunpowder. Ironically, it's the modern M16, firing a much weaker round, is the same size as a previous Ar-10 at 7.5 lb, primarily becuase such a large receiver is needed to buffer out the gases.
There were 2 options available- use the smaller, weaker 7mm but bullpup and 20 round magazine design of the British, controllable under fire but using a weaker round (that had the same ballistic trajectory of the .30-06 and was said to be more accurate, reminiscent of the 6.5mm grendel compared to the 7.62mm x 51mm NATO) or the AR-10, longer (and therefore more unwieldy and difficult to use in close quarters combat) and heavier, but with roughly the same recoil using a 7.62mm x 51mm NATO round that was much more powerful and could be controlled with full auto, also with considerable accuracy (some production models had 1 MOA). Sadly, the U.S. went with the M14, a good weapon, but very heavy (4-5 pounds heavier than even the AR-10, at 10-11 pounds instead of 7.25) based off of the M1 Garand, which while good was relativley uncontrollable in fully automatic fire and was very heavy and large, making it unwieldy.
In response, rather than choosing the other two weapons they determined that the 7.62mm (a weaker version of the .30-06 previously praised and then condemned in a similar manner) was uncontrollable in fire unless by a super heavy weapon (despite an Ar-10 with a huge muzzle break being totally controllable and having similar recoil to a .223). So, instead of going with the smaller 7mm round, vehemently pushed by sublimate denied after several unreasonable complaints (mostly that it was weak and could never live up to the .30-06's power) that was super accurate but had comparable power to the 6.8mm remington and 6.5mm grendel that look promising today and are fielded by a lot of special forces units, they went with an EVEN SMALLER ROUND. Even worse, they used this small round in the "large but low recoil platform". The thing is, it was a waste, sense the 5.56mm does not need a low recoil design and the weapon was huge.
Even worse, colt stole the design and only got away with half the patents. Essentially butchering the highly sensitive weapon design (it's called "direct impingement", as in it lacks a piston, which would be like pouring gasoline on an engine and saying "go" and then expecting it to actually work- that type of design is similar to a rocket, which totally has a reputation for being reliable. rolleyes ), and running Eugine Stoner out of business, they took over with their super crappy but in trials highly praised (even though it was considered crap by Eugine stoner who adamantly refused to legitimately use the 5.56mm round and was intent on showing the military, once they accepted his design, what it could really do, like we see in the SR-25 with it's amazing accuracy, low recoil and high durability) and basically screwed over the entire U.S. military.
EVEN WORSE, Eugine stoner designed two guns, the M69W (you can flip the name upside down and get the same thing) which was highly praised by navy seals until it was designed to fire tracers that even the M16 couldn't fire, wrecking the reliability of the weapon (which was mostly due to political reasons, I.E. colt paying off people to make it so they would kill the M69W) and the clearly superior AR-18. The AR-18 was 2 inches shorter, used an 18 inch barrel, was a full pound lighter, several times reliable, super easy to clean, had a folding stock (functionally impossible on an M16 sense the stock is used as a gas buffer tube) had 990 m/s instead of 940 (better barrel design), had a 40 round magazine instead of 20 at the time, (now 30), and was cheaper and easier to make made of stamped steel and so easily made in factories (this was in large part due to the receiver being much smaller, so it could be made from lighter and thinner aluminum steel which could be machined easier instead of having to be cut from a single block like the M16- with plastic it may have been even lighter). It has gone on to serve as the basis for the G36, Hk416, FN SCAR, British SA80, and many other short stroke gas piston designs, which are simply considered superior to the direct impingement design in practically every way. Despite being cheaper and practically better in every way (also far more reliable with the same ammunition, which was incredible for the time) the military rejected it, mostly due to political reasons.
After this Eugine Stoner left for South America, creating their weapons where patents did not apply and designing or help designing practically all other weapons in European countries of the 20th century. The basis for his design has been used in a lot of weapons and is still used to this date. The SR-25, with unparallelled .5 MOA (4 times better than a standard bolt action sniper rifle) with 20 round detachable box magazine at the same weight and size as the M16 with roughly the same recoil (mainly due to the recoil buffer) was directly designed by him. He also created several other light machine gun designs.
He died in 97 at about 75. He was considered in league with John Browning and John Garand in terms of weapon design.
More or less, some other flaws of the weapon are not fixed. It uses picanty rails which are universal accessory attachment, in other words any scope from any gun can theoretically be attached relativley easily, along with lasers, foregrips, grenade launchers and flashlights, but this is not enough. The weapon is still using direct impingement despite the obvious cheaper and stronger nature of the short stroke gas piston design. It uses and unnecessarily long magazine well which is said to be responsible for approximately half of the jams of the weapon. The best design have the rounds in the chamber before the round is even technically loaded in, which seems like a no brainer sense you want the round in the gun and to travel hardly any distance as to not create a region where complications could occur, and there's no real reason not to do this (even though the long magazine well is what NATO and all other Europeans and U.S. use). The weapon, with it's direct impingement, needs a much larger receiver, about a pound heavier than what it originally was and the AR-18 (6.6 pounds compared to 7.5 with the current M16) which is incredibly hard to machine- actually, it's milled. The same type of reliability and accuracy can be made with a much easier to machine design, and it would be significantly lighter weight and reliable too.
With very simple changes, in theory it should be possible to even take an M16 design and use a piston in it's direct impingement design, simply by placing a piston in the gas tube with springs that are calibrated correctly- with mass engineering this would be relativley cheap to implement, as a spring and a steel rod are not very expensive.
In the 90's the XM8 was designed. It had significant improvements over the M16. For one, the Stanag magazine was dropped- a much more reliable and effective magazine was developed, that sported translucent polymers (to see how many bullets were left), somewhat stronger than steel in that it could be bent more and was less likely to scratch, and was designed to be more ergonomic in loading and removing *Videosz! 1:01 for magazine operation (it had a little trigger to remove the magazine that kept it in firmly, so it wasn't super tight but was still hard to remove unless this holder was slightly moved). The weapon was shown to be able to fire over 400 rounds from 4 100 round drum magazines (the BETA-C is crap, but this magazine loading design was much better and due to this magazine design did not stress the magazine well). It did not need cleaning for over 15,000 rounds (although it was expected to be cleaned very often), and had double the life of an M16 (at 10,000 rounds, 5,000 rounds replacement for barrel) with a much longer barrel life in regards to the M16 at over 4 times this amount primarily due to it's polygonal rifling and hammer forged design. The weapon also sported various variants, such as sniperized and SAW versions, that were considered relativley applicable for the time. With it's reliability and performance it may have actually been okay as a multi-role weapon. Straight up dope, In a dust test it was 7.44 times more reliable than the M4 carbine, with 116 stoppages instead of 863
The only designs issues were it's crappy 1990's era stuff. No picanty rails with crappy hanguards (that could easily be replaced with modern plastic) a desire to integrate a scope (like in the G36, instead of using picanty rails...) which made it heavier and bulkier, and a very bad stock that was WAY longer than it needed to be (33 inches long with a 12.5 inch barrel, in the same way an M4 carbine could have been 231 inches longer, 2 inches shorter, meaning that the XM8 just had a stupidly long stock that should have been shortened). The XM8 also was not STANAG compatible, which complicated the issue, but the STANAG magazines are crap.
Considering at the time that the M16 and things didn't have picanty rails today these issues could be fixed and would have been shortly. What was the issue? Well, colt desired to compete with these new weapons, even though it wasn't an open competition just a weapon replacement- congressional pressures made this a reality. As well, the weapon almost twice as expensive as the M16, which was considered an issue.
Ignoring colt's Assholey-ness, the cost should not have been an issue. First of all, the weapon is twice as durable- this means that the m16 at a 10,000 round life needs to be replaced twice as often than the XM8 at a 20,000 round life; as well, an M16 comes with an extra 500 dollar barrel to replace the barrel every 5,000 rounds, while the XM8 barrel can be used up to 20,000 rounds and in theory, 10,000 in accordance with the barrel only having half the life of the m16- even if we excluded the extra costs the M16 would go from 1000 to 1500 dollars, compared to 2000 dollars for an XM8 with a scope and two magazines.
As well, the weapon is NOT that expensive. At 2000 dollars it would cost around 20 billion dollars to completely field 10 million soldiers with the weapon- out of the 800 billion dollar budget, our main weapon that our main units use (I.E. people) would only cost about 1/40th of the budget. Thing is, we only have 3 million- so that's only 6.6 billion dollars. Thing is, we only have 1.5 million troops who use the weapon on a regular basis, as they are actively infantry; so 1/2 of 1/3, or 3.3 billion dollars.. Thing is, we only sent in 300,000 troops in Iraq and whatnot and that was out largest troopscape- only about 100,000 are still there. This would only be about a billion dollars, or 1/800th of the militaries budget.
THING IS, due to the barrel being replaced 1/4th the amount and the weapon having twice the durability this weapon would actually be cheaper. 1 to 1 in terms of weapon replacement cost (1000 compared to 2000, but you need twice as many M16's), but sense you don't need barrel replacements but every 20,000 rounds instead of 5,000, the M16 becomes twice as expensive. This is due to a price of projected durability losses, not unit replacement losses- obviously, we don't lose very many M16's and many go on to be used for their full intended service length. Even so it would only only be about 500 dollars more for an Xm8 that had 7.5 times more reliability, was more ergonomic, in theory lighter weight (the scope being about 1 pound in the 7.5 pound rifle, which should be able to be removed), be able to withstand much more abuse including artic and dirt/dust heavy environment, being capable of firing while under water AND use a large magazine (like a 100 round drum magazine) with little to no reliability issues, practically never having to be cleaned and being more ergonomic.
With better rounds even the weakness of the crap .223 could be compensated what with the better rifling twists we know of the and M855A1 better armor piercing copper rounds or the super accurate Mk. 262 5 gram boat tail hollow point round (still technically viable in the geneva convention).
EVEN CRAZIER, what with the ease of polygonal barrel designs due to flow forming design techniques and their increased strength with a cobalt chrome design, it seems almost a no brainer to switch over to this. "Engineering team members met all of their proof-of-concept test objectives when they fired more than 24,000 rounds and achieved an 1,100 degrees barrel temperature. Normal steel barrels would have failed under this kind of treatment". Other pieces, if possible, should be replaced by this.
Ironically, the 7.62mm was deemed to have too much recoil under automatic fire BUT THE FULLY AUTOMATIC BUTTON was REMOVED from M16's and many M4 carbines and the weapon cannot fire this way due to the fact that the gas tube will overheat and disallow a gas of similar temperatures to go down the gas tube once it overheats (gas goes from high to low pressure I.E. warm to cold) to cycle the weapon. And the M16 is supposed to be fired in semi-auto, and the 7.62mm is fine in this function.
SO WHY AREN'T WE DOING THIS?
Tl;DR clearly the M4 Carbine and M16 design are out dated after 42 years of use (48 years of use, really, invented long before that with it's use in Vietnam ) and basically are inferior to still cheap and reliable weapons. Even at twice the price due to the durability of the weapons they would last twice as long (the barrels 4 times as long, making the weapon in theory half the price of the M16 design) and with some simple changes (such as adding picanty rails, adding in a typical m4 type shortened stock even on use on the M249), and the fact that we spend a tiny amount of money on guns each year, the smallest amount, despite it being the main weapon fielded by idk, people, why haven't we replaced it?
Some basic questions:
1. Are politicians and businessmen just really that corrupt they'd let people die over this?
2. Can we not get out of that system even though colt does not supply weapons to us anymore after we refused their business?
3. Are people so stupid that they can't come up with good gun designs, or is money and political pressures too much?
4. Do you think that a bull-pup version of the XM8 with a cobalt chrome polygonal barrel would be a good idea?
5. What are your opinions on the subject?
