The Stagnation Of Small Arms Development

[Cosmoline]

Lots of interesting ideas in the thread. I didn't know about that federal law.

Probably the most recent advancement has been is accuracy. Even a cheap bolt action rifle bought over the counter from Walmart will have amazing accuracy.

Well even that cruddy old Lebel, properly loaded, can shoot a good 2 MOA. And other 19th century rifles such as the Mosin 91 and Mauser 98 can nail tighter groups than that.

the technology is pretty mature.

It is somewhat similar to the sate of things in the early 19th century. The flintlocks had been tweaked and improved to be about as good as they could be. It took broader changes in industrial technology to make the
next phase of innovations possible.

I don't have the answer to the impasse, or I'd be really rich. But I think it's important to realize where we're truly at as a starting point. The assumption that technology is proceeding on its own, by magic, and that we'll all have those plasma rifles soon, isn't working. Not for me anyway ;-)

If we take the 19th century as an example, the answer is that it will take people shooting at you, or potentially shooting at you, to spur real innovation. The developments were driven by fear of getting overrun by enemy troops.

 

[Sam1911]

I didn't know about that federal law

Well, sure you did, you just didn't know it by number. That's the NFA'34, as amended by the "Hughes Amendment" of the '86 FOPA that makes it illegal to sell a newly manufactured machine gun to anyone except the goverment or other dealers. That basically said that major R&D into automatic weapons by private companies or individuals would nearly cease as there would be now only one (rather indecisive, slow, picky, cheap) customer in the whole world for anything you might sink hundreds of thousands of dollars into developing.

Of course, the other stumbling block is ITAR which vastly limits the foreign sales you might land as well. So making a better modern military gun becomes a bit of a no-win situation -- unless the military itself finally, someday, decades too late, gets off it's duff and puts out a call for new designs. But the qualifications and money required to even TRY to enter that race mean no Maxim or Browning or Gatling would even have a prayer.

 

[jungle]

The real advance in small arms has come from better sighting systems, and this has had a huge effect on ability to target and hit, day or night.

The leading edge of development has been in cannon and artillery munitions and targeting systems, the systems can range, target, communicate with the projectile just prior to firing and operate in conditions that make unaided human visibility of the target impossible.

Thermal imaging/ranging has even made its way down to small arms.

 

[JohnBiltz]

To me there has been 6 real ammo related innovations in the past. Match lock, flint lock, percussion caps, minnie ball, brass cartridges smokeless ammo. Each of those spurred the changes we see for their ages. The interesting thing about them was it was not really a logical progression. You could have had flintlocks before matchlocks. Minnie balls could have been developed before flintlocks and certainly before percussion. It was just no one thought of it. Smokeless brass cartridges allowed a lot of new innovation like recoil operation and gas operation and machine guns but while they certainly improved guns greatly none of that has really made the impact that the ammo related changes have made. For real fundamental change I think its always going to be about the ammo.

 

[JohnBiltz]

I don't see what the big deal about caseless ammo and electronic ignition is... what is an assault rifle with these features going to do significantly better than what an M16 does today?

With a computer chip in there running the gun you can potentially get not only more reliable ignition but more even ignition. You could even have it attempt to ignite more than once and at multiple points on the round. You can also control rate of fire instead of relying on springs to do it. You could use it to set a burst length.

As far as case less goes, it save a lot of weight and space per round. Think 200 or 300 round magazines in every rifle.

Combine the two and the mechanics inside the rifle all change and you can see a rate of fire fast enough that a 3 round burst gets out of the gun before the first round recoil impulse happens.

 

[Swing]

One area we have seen a lot of improvement in the last few decades is suppressor designs.

That be the truth. I my lifetime, they've come a long, long way.

 

[barnbwt]

I think the biggest hurdle to innovation is the scale at which new ideas are forced to compete. Corporations the size of nation-states don't even need to compete with new concepts. They are simply stamped out in their nascent phase by the overbearing market at large (think the Chiappa Rhino's reception; all the 'Ol 'Gunnies were just waiting for an excuse to condemn the company the instant they made a PR flub, when beloved Colt and S&W are guilty of far worse), or co-opted (legally or illegally) by more-established players.

For example, I have a near-finished design concept for a break-top semi-auto revolver, which could safely fire .357mag (according to my stress calculations, at least). However, I have no idea how such a product could be marketed successfully. Among the deal-killers are;

-It's far too "out there" for any firearms manufacturer focused on cost and efficiency to waste R&D on (meaningless incremental changes are always cheaper)
-There's currently no market for such a product (we used to call that "untapped potential" in our more ambitious days)
-I'd need several fortunes to build and develop a prototype, let alone a production offering (and pay for lots of red tape to do it legally)
-It's far too technical for me to develop myself (making an airtight patent(s))
-My idea would simply be taken from me legally through patent law (and I'd go broke getting it back) if I try to sell it to big players
-My idea would simply be taken from me illegally through patent infringement (and I'd go broke getting it back) if I went into business myself

Put those factors together, and it's really hard for hare-brained ideas to get footing anymore, and very hard to justify pursuing them in the first place. I think in the Olden Days, people were more naiive with investments, and threw money at less-plausible ideas (usually fruitlessly) than they do now. I also think it's rather coincidental that the most innovation occurred at a time that patent enforcement was, shall we say, "lacking." I hope to make a working concept of the action I've designed, but a functioning prototype will probably be forever beyond my means.

TCB

FWIW, I think the biggest innovation of late has been in materials and manufacturing. Unless plastics or ceramics are able to be used for barrels and the like, that road is nearly dead-ended. CNC has pretty much made machining as cheap as it can get. MIM I think shows promise, if used correctly, to put an end to much (all?) of the fine machining currently needed to produce any gun parts, similar to how polymers revolutionized frame design. We'll hate them, but those guns would be really cheap, and work just fine if designed properly. Who knows, though, maybe someone will figure out how to make a gun that's totally self-cleaning and change our lives forever

 

[2DREZQ]

I'm thinking you miniaturize the gyro-stabilzation system currently in use on MBT's to the size of an AR-10. Two triggers, or a single trigger with two distinct stages. Stage one is tripped when you put the cross-hairs on the target you want-the rifle Lases(?sp) the target to determine range and lateral velocity. Pull the trigger past stage two and the stabilzed barrel rifle launches the projectile at the proper trajectory and with the proper lead compensation done. An ultra-sonic echo device of some sort might be able to "dope" the wind and that could be compensated for prior to the projectile exiting the muzzle. A stabilized barrel might allow 3-round bursts to be fired accurately like a spread of torpedos to allow for windage as well.

How about coupling the face-recognition software of a cheap digital camera with design similar to the sentry weapons from the 2nd Aliens movie for use in "free-fire" zones?

Royalty checks for this design may be sent directly to my home address.

 

[Fremmer]

The next significant advancement will get us away from the primative smokeless powder gas pushing system.

 

[Hypnogator]

The next significant advancement will get us away from the primative smokeless powder gas pushing system.

My thoughts on the matter exactly.

For some 10,000 years now, we've been killing things by sticking pointy objects into them. First, sharpened sticks, then we learned to throw them, and make them more effective by attaching stone, then metal points to them. We learned to launch them further and faster by means of a bow, and finally to propel (OK, round) objects by means of gunpowder confined in a tube. Still, the object was to penetrate the target's skin and damage vital organs, bringing about the target's demise. From musket balls, we progressed to paper, and then metallic cartridges, then magazine rifles, to the current state of the art, the semi-automatic (or fully automatic) rifle.

But in all those 10,000 years, the killing mechanism is the same: Vital organ damage caused by an object delivered with enough force to penetrate the skin and underlying tissue and organs. Even the rail guns now under development are merely a more advanced way to launch a pointy object.

The Holy Grail of weapons development, I suppose, is to develop a "disintegrator" which will cause the bond holding atoms together to dissolve, or a "disruptor" which will terminate life force without damaging tissue. I, for one, am not particularly anxious to see either happen.

 

[beatledog7]

In the very late 19th century the first horseless carriages hit the roads, and for the most part they had four wheels and some kind of internal combustion engine running on a petroleum derivative.

What do you drive today?

 

[Greenmachin3]

I very strongly believe the next generation of firearms will still be projectile weapons, but will use electromagnetic energy rather than chemical energy to fire the projectile. The US Navy is well into their EM gun testing and some creative tinkers have made some promising, if underdeveloped, prototypes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LjnhhtHojM

 

[CornCod]

Back in the 80's and 90's the West Germans came real close to adopting a caseless ammo rifle, but they decided not to take the plunge. Since then there has been little real innovation. Probably the most reactionary gun industry has been in the US. The only company that has done any real innovating here in the last 20 years has been Kel-Tec and in the grand scheme of things they are pretty marginal.

 

[Billy Shears]

Yes, modern firearms have reached a sort of plateau, but this really shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. Every technology has its limits, why should firearms be any exception? Back at the end of WWII, they reached the practical limits of piston engined, propeller driven planes. They got to a point where even increasing engine power by almost fifty percent would net you only a slight increase in speed -- ten or fifteen miles an hour or so -- because they were getting close to the absolute limits of propeller efficiency and aerodynamic efficiency and so on. It's the same with firearms. Given the need to fling a projectile at an enemy with enough force to produce lethal wounds, you can decrease projectile mass and increase its velocity, or you can increase its mass or decrease its velocity, but try to do both, and you'll soon wind up with too much recoil because for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction -- an absolute law of physics. And of course, there's the need to take into account factors like ammo weight, magazine capacity, ergonomics, controllability (especially on full auto), etc. Given the laws of physics, the limitations of materials, the limitations of the human shooter, etc., we're reaching the limits of what we can do with conventional firearms.

Caseless ammo may offer a slight improvement, especially in the area of reducing the mass of the ammo itself, but that has it's own problems (elimination cook-offs, for example). The next really big advance is likely to be some type of man-portable rail gun or gauss rifle that fires projectiles at velocities we can only dream about right now. (Of course, in the current climate, the likelihood of civilians ever being able to own such weapons, when they get devloped, is essentially nil.)

And two points in the discussion I want to comment on:

1) True, the current law, that restricts civilians ownership of certain classes of weapons, has an effect on what designers will pay to develop, but don't make too much of it. I don't think Hiram Maxim ever sold that many of his machine guns to private individuals, and John T. Thompson's submachine gun was not a roaring success on the market until WWII -- it took two decades for Auto Ordnance to sell of the initial production that they contracted from Colt in the 1920s, remember. Then as now, most shooters didn't have much need for a machine gun, and weren't willing to pay for one.

2) It was said that artillery became the dominant killing arm around WWI. Not true, at least not quite. It did become exponentially more effective around that time, but it had always been dominant killing arm, even back into the days of Gustavus Adolphus and the Thirty Years War. They called it "the king of battle" for a good reason.

 

[Fremmer]

I'm waiting for my ghostbusters rifle!

 

[allaroundhunter]

Advancement? Here ya go:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zdp9llrBLnA

Raytheon Phalanx Sea Defense system



It isn't small arms per se, but if you consider where the Gatling gun began, yes, advancements are present. Technology just has to be there, as Sam said, to take humans out of the equation.

 

[Mike OTDP]

Actually, there have been some dramatic advances lately. Not in the basic firearm, but in the sights. Thirty years ago, the idea of fitting an optical sight to any military arm other than a sniping rifle was absurd. Today, it's standard. The current frontier is pistol-mounted mini-red dot sights - and those are commercially available. It's the integration that needs work - and that will come quickly now that the basic technology is established.

 

[olafhardtB]

If you had a valved cylinder full of compressed air, shot some hydrogen into it, sparked it, popped the cylinder valves, let the hot gas hit the bullet base the bullet would go flying down the bore. The hot gasses could operate a air compressor, valves and bullet feed. Since hydrogen burns with a colorless flame there would be very little if any flash. I have no problem thinking up possible drawbacks or ideas to deal with them.

 

[Fremmer]

Can't I have a phaser instead?

 

[floorit76]

When I was young, I had a gun magazine with an article on "Things to come". It described a bullpup "Assult" weapon that used caseless ammo (weighs less, carry more), Electric ignition (Battery included in the magazine, new battery with each mag change), near frictionless barrel (used magnets, achieved super high velocities). It relied on hydrostatic shock from the super high velocity rounds to disable the target. I'm still waiting...

 

[Hacker15E]

Advancement? Here ya go:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zdp9llrBLnA

Raytheon Phalanx Sea Defense system

What's new about Phalanx? It's been around since the late 1970s, and uses a gun and cartridge that's been around 20 years longer than that.

 

[GEM]

And GE developed the Gatling system into the Vulcan guns by hooking up a motor to an old 45-70 Gatling and getting 3000 round a minute to test the concept, IIRC.

I think the newest out there concept is the Japanese babble gun that sends back your own speech with a delay that interfers with your ability to talk. Disrupts riots and riot leaders.

Or I'm waiting for American Guns or Son of Guns to invent it. Oops - sorry.

It's energy weapons or guided small arms that is the next breakthrough. Look through your Eotech reticle and the round goes there even if you move to the next target - uses AI.

 

[HoosierQ]

At the heart of it, guns are pretty simple mechanisms. Bolt action and, ironically self loading, are some of the simplest. They've got the physics down. There have been two world wars and countless smaller ones during which to refine them. And there is a thriving sporting market in the USA and to a lesser extent in Europe and Africa where sporting arms are being used.

I think probably optics is the last bastion of opportunity for dramatic innovation. We've seen a very dramatic uptick in the use of optics in the US Armed Forces since 2003.

As far as guns them selves go (and ammo too), it is simply matter of refining, ergonomics, and quality improvements. Bottom line, with the AK, the AR, the 1911, the Glock extant, there isn't a lot more you're gonna be able to do.

 

[Skribs]

Other advantages to caseless ammo/electronic ignition that were not mentioned yet:
1) No need for extraction, barring MF or clearing the weapon.
2) The trigger is essentially a button - I would assume that tuning it would be a lot easier than tuning it when it is tripping the sear.
3) You could actually get rid of a lot of the mechanical parts by simply using an electronic ignition, which saves space and weight.

It would allow for a smaller gun...if it could be made to work.

 

[Auf Grosser Fahrt]

I'm guessing there could be some advances in powder. Softer report, less flash. It would be nice to be able to fire the average weapon without going (temporarily?) deaf and, if nighttime, blind, as well.

Think .223 or 7.62x39 with a report like a .22 Short...or less.

In lieu of that, I'll take a simple Blaster from vintage SciFi.