PercyShelley
Member
- Joined
- Feb 15, 2007
- Messages
- 1,075
I'm fairly sure that most of us know what caseless ammunition is; but just in case I'll recap.
Caseless ammunition are rounds that lack a brass jacket around the propellant. The propellant itself is held together with a binding agent, which gives it adequate stiffness to feed into the action. Imagine gluing a musket ball to a bib blob of powder, and then doing the same thing with modern materials.
http://www.caselessammunition.com/
The company above claims that they can manufacture caseless ammunition with very similar ballistic performance to NATO standard ammunition at half the cost. Obviously it won't function in the same rifles, but once you get the new rifle, you ought to start seeing the savings right?
Centerfire plinking would no longer be dependant upon surplus quantities of ammunition, and since a caseless round has fewer ingredients than a cased round, price might remain more stable. A fluctuation in the availibility of brass alloys or primer compounds, for example, wouldn't affect ammo pricing.
On the other hand, I forsee potential problems.
Caseless ammunition technology has been around a while, and it hasn't caught on yet. The firearms need to be manufactured to tighter tolerances, since there's no brass case to prevent gas leaks. There also needs to be some mechanism to prevent ammo cookoff, since the ejecting brass is a very good way to dump heat.
These are not insurmountable engineering problems, but engineers don't work for free. Ammo savings might be offset by the increased price of the guns.
There is also the issue that introducing a caseless gun would necessarily involve introducing a new type of ammo. As we all know, new chamberings don't always catch on.
There's the political angle.
Back when Voere introduced a caseless rifle on a very limited basis, the VPC went ape, claiming it would allow assasins to kill without leaving behind any brass to trace them with. Why assasins don't just pick up their brass is a secret known only to the VPC. The fact that gun control groups have opposed caseless guns in the past, however, shows that their future introduction might not go unopposed.
Handloading would probably still exist; making a home setup for compressing propellant grains and bullets together isn't that technically daunting. Handloading probably wouldn't be cheaper than factory loads, however, as one would no longer be re-using old components, and a home hand-loader would probably not be able to compete with the economy of scale factories can offer. If the ammo remained half the price of the equivalent cased rounds, this probably wouldn't be a huge drawback.
So, when it comes down to it, the central question is whether half-priced ammo that (hopefully) doesn't get more expensive over time is worth getting new rifles.
So, would it be worth it?
Other thoughts?
Caseless ammunition are rounds that lack a brass jacket around the propellant. The propellant itself is held together with a binding agent, which gives it adequate stiffness to feed into the action. Imagine gluing a musket ball to a bib blob of powder, and then doing the same thing with modern materials.
http://www.caselessammunition.com/
The company above claims that they can manufacture caseless ammunition with very similar ballistic performance to NATO standard ammunition at half the cost. Obviously it won't function in the same rifles, but once you get the new rifle, you ought to start seeing the savings right?
Centerfire plinking would no longer be dependant upon surplus quantities of ammunition, and since a caseless round has fewer ingredients than a cased round, price might remain more stable. A fluctuation in the availibility of brass alloys or primer compounds, for example, wouldn't affect ammo pricing.
On the other hand, I forsee potential problems.
Caseless ammunition technology has been around a while, and it hasn't caught on yet. The firearms need to be manufactured to tighter tolerances, since there's no brass case to prevent gas leaks. There also needs to be some mechanism to prevent ammo cookoff, since the ejecting brass is a very good way to dump heat.
These are not insurmountable engineering problems, but engineers don't work for free. Ammo savings might be offset by the increased price of the guns.
There is also the issue that introducing a caseless gun would necessarily involve introducing a new type of ammo. As we all know, new chamberings don't always catch on.
There's the political angle.
Back when Voere introduced a caseless rifle on a very limited basis, the VPC went ape, claiming it would allow assasins to kill without leaving behind any brass to trace them with. Why assasins don't just pick up their brass is a secret known only to the VPC. The fact that gun control groups have opposed caseless guns in the past, however, shows that their future introduction might not go unopposed.
Handloading would probably still exist; making a home setup for compressing propellant grains and bullets together isn't that technically daunting. Handloading probably wouldn't be cheaper than factory loads, however, as one would no longer be re-using old components, and a home hand-loader would probably not be able to compete with the economy of scale factories can offer. If the ammo remained half the price of the equivalent cased rounds, this probably wouldn't be a huge drawback.
So, when it comes down to it, the central question is whether half-priced ammo that (hopefully) doesn't get more expensive over time is worth getting new rifles.
So, would it be worth it?
Other thoughts?
