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Subject: Caseless Ammunition - What are the benefits/drawbacks and why was it not adopted?
Roman    8/25/2004 9:22:18 PM
The title says it all!
 
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bomber    RE:Caseless Ammunition - What are the benefits/drawbacks and why was it not adopted?    2/1/2005 9:08:54 PM
Caseless ammunition was so expensive because it was essentially in use with the G11 and it's support weapon during the US ACR (advanced combat rifle) and German trials during the 80's. The Bhundeswher did adopt the G11 in limited quantities but as we all know no-one ever adopted it. The ammunistion manufacturer, Dynamit Nobel pretty much overcame all the issues with the ammunition such as: 1) Binding the propellant, primer, booster charge, projectile and end cap together. 2) Through the use of denatured HMX they solved the problem of cookoff and called the propellant HITP (High Ignition Temperature Propellant). The ammunition was no more sensitive to shock, damage, temperature or the environment than normal cased ammunition and the main techinical issues stemmed from selaing the breech during the firing cycle. Normal cased ammunition when fired expands the case very slightly and completely seals the chamber form any high pressure gas backflow around the case. When you lose the case, this seal isn't there and therefore the designers had to come up with a way to seal it. This was where the rotating cylinder block came in. Unfortunately the forward end of the cylinder had a wear problem with the rear end of the barrel and had a life of around 6000 rounds. It wasn't that the caseless concept in the G11 was bad or flawed it essentially bolied down to whether the G11 and the three other ACR candidate weapons dramatically exceeded the 'Hit Probability' performance of the M16A1. The cost outlay to switch from the M16 to the G11 would have been huge and since the performace wasn't significantly greater in terms of increasing the 'HPPTP' Hit Probability Per Trigger Pull of the M16 it was deemed better to upgrade the M16.
 
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