#Bullet

Federal Premium has released a video explaining the AccuChannel Groove technology seen on the bullets of their Edge TLR ammunition. Based on the conducted tests, they’ve found out that if placed in a specific location, a single groove on the projectile will have the advantages of multiple grooves. They also have a different groove geometry which according to Federal Premium reduces the pressure on the groove as well as decreases the drag of the bullet thus improving its performance.

What do you get when you take the venerable speedster 7.62 Tokarev, and load it with a muzzleloader-style sabot and 50gr .22 cal projectile? You get one of the most interesting pistol, submachine gun, and personal defense weapon ammunition concepts there is!

It has been a little while since we visited the subject of modern personal defense weapon calibers, so to start it off again we’ll be taking a look at a new high velocity round that is only a few years old: Armscor’s .22 TCM. This round was reportedly developed by Fred Craig as a high velocity caliber for the 1911 platform, and picked up by Philippine company Armscor. Originally called the “.22 Mini Mag”, the .22 TCM (Tuason-Craig Magnum, after Craig and Armscor’s president) is designed to fit inside the magazine well of a 1911 and function from .38 Super 1911 magazines. Although a pistol round, the .22 TCM is based off the .223 Remington case, shortened by about three quarters of an inch. Thanks to the thick web of its parent case, the .22 TCM is capable of handling high pressures of 40,000 PSI. A version with a shortened projectile, the .22 TCM 9R, is compatible with shorter 9mm magazines for weapons like the Glock 17.

In the rush to augment the infantry’s firepower with new advanced small arms technologies, we may be on the precipice of crippling their ability to fight wars. The push to equip the infantryman with more powerful rifles and machine guns risks reducing his mobility to critical levels, and “locking out” his capacity to carry powerful supporting arms. Although more potent basic infantry weapons are undeniably desirable, current attitudes towards their purpose – exemplified by the concept of “overmatch” – may compound problems that already have reached crisis levels.

In three previous articles, we briefly discussed some of the tradeoffs involved in the bullpup concept, and some of the challenges they face in the field of military procurement specifically.  Today, we’re going to continue this deep-dive into the bullpup concept by examining how the selection of either a bullpup or conventional layout affects concurrent development of a new ammunition system. In other words, we are going to address the question: Given the same performance requirements, how does having a longer or shorter barrel affect the characteristics of a new type of ammunition?

Good news for everyone’s favorite Dakotan ammunition company, Black Hills has just won the contract to provide subsonic .300 Blackout ammunition for the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Hostage Rescue Team, according to a listing at FedBizOpps. The contract, which sources tell TFB is for 39,000 rounds and a value of $106,080, marks the Hostage Rescue Team’s first move towards the increasingly popular .300 Blackout caliber.

Oh yes, it’s that time. The 10mm Automatic, what hasn’t been said about it? Well, a decently sourced article about its history*, maybe, but that’s for another time. Right now, we’re considering the 10mm Auto (or 10mm Norma as it’s more prim and properly called) as a personal defense weapon and submachine gun caliber. The 10mm was designed in 1980 by Swedish company FFV Norma AB with input from Jeff Cooper as the most powerful and capable automatic handgun round of its day, but will that extra power pay off when pushed beyond its design limits into the 50-300m range, at least according to the JBM Ballistics calculator?

Lehigh has a well-deserved reputation for making gimmick ammunition. Their Controlled Fracturing Hollow Point pistol ammunition does perform as advertised insofar as it fractures, but fragmentation in a pistol round is not a desirable feature. Fragmentation can be useful in rifle rounds because the impact velocity is fast enough that it pushes tissue apart so quickly that the size of the temporary wound cavity exceeds the elastic limit of tissue and it begins to tear. Fragments improve this tearing, causing more permanent extensive damage than rifle rounds at similar velocity that do not fragment. Pistol bullets lack the speed necessary for temporary stretch cavity to contribute to wounding so fragments that are produced by pistol bullets just result in relatively small wounds that don’t cause as much bleeding as a larger, wider main track.

The issue of ammunition standardization between the United States Army and the Marine Corps has come to a head: Congress has delivered an ultimatum in the final version of the FY 2017 National Defense Appropriations Act for the two services to kiss and make up. Military.com reports:

Warner Tool Company (WTC) is specialized in manufacturing of precision long range shooting products. They produce precision rifle sights, complete rifles, reloading dies, shooting accessories and a line of bullets called Flat Line Projectiles.

Lehigh Defense announced a new 176 grain bullet in its Controlled Fracturing line of projectiles. The new bullet is designed for subsonic use in 300 BLK, 300 Whisper and .308 Winchester cartridges.

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.

Since we’ve covered the two most prominent PDW rounds of today, I want to take a quick detour and look at an interesting – but obscure – personal defense weapon/assault rifle round from history. After World War II, the apparati of the German war machine were being dismantled, and anything of value claimed by the Allies as spoils. While the Americans got Germany’s most prominent rocket scientists, the French claimed Germany’s tank designers, and many of her small arms engineers. As France was looking to replace their motley and outdated collection of small arms (a suite which developed more organically than by design, thanks to two devastating World Wars), they put these German engineers to work, including one Dr. Heinrich Vollmer, who before and during the war worked at Mauser. Vollmer had been involved in development of – among various other projects – the StG-45 assault rifle, which possessed a unique roller-retarded blowback action that promised an inexpensive and reliable, yet lightweight weapon. This rifle would eventually lead to the G3, but during Vollmer’s stay in France, the French government set him to work making a smaller version of it, in variants chambered for .30 Carbine as well as a new round: The 7.65x35mm MAS.

If the 5.7x28mm FN is the first successful modern PDW round, then the 4.6x30mm HK is the second, and its biggest rival. German firm Heckler and developed the microcaliber 4.6mm in the 1990s as a response to a NATO solicitation for a Personal Defense Weapon, to which they submitted their new HK PDW (later MP7) chambered for the new round.

At this point, we’ve talked about 25 different intermediate and full power calibers as part of a series comparing different types of modern small arms ammunition. However, one subject not yet thoroughly covered is rounds for personal defense weapons (PDWs). These weapons are designed to be smaller and less obtrusive than full size rifles, while being more capable than pistols or submachine guns, particularly with respect to armor penetration.