Popular Mechanics: Is This the Future of Military Small Arms?
Textron's LSAT system reduces ammunition weight, making the soldier's load easier to carry.
A new kind of ammunition could reduce by up to 40 percent the weight that the average soldier or marine carries in combat, which can easily exceed 100 pounds in combat. This "cased telescoped" ammo replaces brass bullet casings with polymer ones to achieve considerable weight savings, making U.S. troops deadlier in the process.
For nearly two hundred years, rifles and pistols have essentially used the same technology: a bullet and gunpowder pushed into a brass shell casing. The technique is simple, cheap, and reliable, which is why it has lasted so long. The downside: while an individual cartridge is relatively light, the weight of brass adds up. Brass casing technology has remained essentially the same since at least World War I, patently refusing to adopt modern materials.
Now that may be about to change. The cased telescope technology developed by Textron Systems, promises to bring small arms ammunition into the 21st Century.
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WNU Editor: Wow.
4 comments:
Hopefully a polymer cased cartridge/chamber designed from the ground up for this puprose works better than recent attempts at developing polymer cased ammo. https://youtu.be/mCjNkbxHkEE
If successful that IS a big weight savings.
I'll take a wait and see, this has been the Holy Grail for Small Arms for some time,HK put a lot of money and effort in this back in the 80's with the HK 11 it was close but it just didn't cut it. It's been awhile since there has been anything really new in small arms, I do think though that we are on the cusp of major changes in small arms. Caseless ammunition and bullets that can be guided into the target are not far off, all mounted on an Autonomous Robot of some type.
Theoretically it should be easy with the rifle chamber itself handling the high psi's of firing and since few people would stop to set up their reloading benches, worrying about the spent brass shouldn't be an issue. If the round can survive magazine and belt feeding the weight issue would be wonderful to those guys packing this stuff around.
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