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More and more, it seems like we are on the cusp of a break in the small arms “plateau”, and that major changes may be coming both in the technology and use of infantry small arms and ammunition. The biggest harbinger of this coming paradigm shift has been Picatinny’s Lightweight Small Arms Technologies (LSAT) program, now superseded by the Cased Telescoped Small Arms Systems (CTSAS) program. As CTSAS and similar programs make headway, it seems increasingly likely that some sort of next generation lightweight ammunition paradigm will force a shift in infantry small arms, and that the current fleet of metallic-cased ammunition and the weapons designed to fire it will have to be replaced by new designs.

In my comments section recently, I was asked to shed some light on the velocity penalty created by moving from 20″ long rifle barrels as in the M16 to 14.5″ long carbine barrels as in the M4 Carbine. Our readers’ wish is my command, and so here we are.

In the last installment, we talked about the trade-offs involved in increasing or decreasing the projectile’s diameter (and, thereby in convention systems, the bore’s diameter as well). One of the major pieces of the equation that we left out was how changing the projectile’s mass affects the round’s performance, and it’s this that will be the subject of today’s post.

Probably the most obvious element of ammunition design is the choice of caliber, or more specifically the choice of bore and bullet diameter. These two dimensions are of course closely linked in conventional ammunition systems (they can be decoupled with sabots, but those are outside the scope of this series), and together they relate to some of the most central trade-offs of any ammunition system design.

Previously, we talked about the word “controllability”, and what it means in relation to the recoil and ergonomic characteristics of a firearm. If you haven’t already read that article, I recommend you click the link here and do so first, as this post will assume that you have. We discussed how a rifle – due to its ergonomic design and the skill of its shooter – may seem to be “controllable”, even if it produces recoil to an extreme degree and rate. What we didn’t talk about is the effect that terrain, fatigue, and other secondary factors have on rifle controllability, and how those factors fit in to a broader calculus on controllability thresholds for military automatic individual weapons.

Yesterday, we took a close look at the AK’s operating group, to enumerate the details that make this pattern such a dependable design. Today, we’re going to be looking at some of the other elements of the AK that make it so reliable, but first I want to clear up some confusion that arose in the comments section of the previous article, regarding what the term “anti-preengagement” refers to. Hopefully the video below will help:

Today we know the Kalashnikov family of rifles as one of the most successful and reliable weapon families ever designed. Even as the rifle’s legend has begun to be peeled back, the weapon’s reputation for reliability is still largely unquestioned, and many consider it to be the most reliable individual automatic weapon ever made.

Continuing on from where we left off yesterday, in this article we’ll address the arguments that center around the Sturmgewehr’s designer – Hugo Schmeisser – and his career in Izhevsk. Let’s get on with it:

We are all familiar with the standard conspiracy theories: NASA faked the Moon landing on a Hollywood soundstage, President Kennedy was shot by another gunman who was working for the CIA/the mob, all world leaders are actually reptilian aliens from Alpha Centauri, and the others. If you’re a gun person, though, there’s one other conspiracy theory you probably know: The official history that Mikhail Kalashnikov designed the AK-47 assault rifle was a Soviet hoax, propagated by state agents as a propaganda narrative to promote the idea of Soviet exceptionalism.

We are currently living in the most exciting era in space exploration in history, one arguably even more important – and certainly more dynamic – than when the Apollo Moon landing program was ongoing in the 1960s and 1970s. Today, a commercial space industry is set to provide transport to low Earth orbit (LEO) for NASA astronauts or even commercial passengers, and just yesterday Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, gave a presentation detailing his vision not just for landing humans on Mars, but for making the human race a true interplanetary civilization by opening up access to the rest of the solar system for anyone willing to go.

We hear a lot of talk about how some firearms are “controllable”, while others are not. The word “controllable” or “manageable” is often used in gun reviews to describe the recoil characteristics of a gun, even though without additional context or clarification it tells us very little. I want to talk very briefly about what the word “controllable” means in the context of firearms, and how it actually relates to a firearm’s recoil characteristics.

In a previous post about the sometimes ambiguous meaning of the word “caliber”, we discussed how the word had mutated through the centuries, picking up different definitions and connotations along the way. In that article, I wrote:

As we ride the shockwaves outward from the epicenter of the explosion which began in 2004 with the expiry of the Assault Weapons Ban, our community of gun owners has rapidly mutated from the set that characterized our parents’ and grandparents’ generations. Many good things have come out of this, including better gun safety practices, wider acceptance of different shooting styles and disciplines, and such a ubiquitous access to reliable information that shooters even a couple decades ago would weep with envy. However, at the same time I’ve seen one change that I’d rather go without: Along with acceptance of the new and different (which is good), it seems many of today’s gun owners have also adopted an insistence on the most and the best.

Kalashnikov Concern’s newest weapon releases have received quite a lot of attention since they were first shown off at the ARMY 2016 military and technology forum in Moscow, and as the conference winds down, I want to take a more thorough pass through four of these new products from the company. Since we published announcements for three of these new weapons, Maxim Popenker, gun expert and TFB contributor, has published more detailed descriptions of the RPK-16, MA, and SVK rifles on his website, Modern Firearms. Let’s take a look at what he has to teach us about these new weapons:

We’ve discussed a lot of different rounds in this series so far, but today we’re going to discuss a round that actually has a shot of being adopted (at least in some form) by the United States military as a next-generation small arms ammunition configuration. That round is the .264 USA, developed over the past few years by the Army Marksmanship Unit (AMU).