What happened to caseless ammunition?

[Speedo66]

Bah, all ammo is old school, you just have to watch any sic-fi movie to know that. Think pulse, laser, etc.

You can even set them to stun. lol

Seriously, surprised they haven't come up with something new so their marketing people can tell us how obsolete our current stuff is and how things will refuse to die unless shot with the latest and greatest.

 

[Merle1]

Bah, all ammo is old school, you just have to watch any sic-fi movie to know that. Think pulse, laser, etc.

You can even set them to stun. lol

Seriously, surprised they haven't come up with something new so their marketing people can tell us how obsolete our current stuff is and how things will refuse to die unless shot with the latest and greatest.

But a lot of us LIKE obsolete stuff - consider how popular muzzle loaders are....

 

[Slamfire]

Darwinian selection has occurred with firearms and ammunition, and it has been so long, the shooting community has forgotten all the failed concepts. I heard something to the effect, that any good firearm idea that ever existed, was patented prior to 1900!. There are firearms patents given out today, primarily due to material advancements. The big ideas have been out there for more than a century.

Anyone can download AMCP phamphlets from the early 1960's, all sorts of topics on ammunition, rockets, artillery. Caseless ammunition, liquid propellant, etc, it all has been looked at before, and all failed in small detail and did not survive. There are ideas that were too early for the technology. Such as mechanical calculators. Charles Babbage's mechanical calculator was a great idea, but too advanced for the technology.





Now I have a semi conductor based device, cost a dollar, which adds, subtracts, multiplies and divides. My old slide rule, multiplication and division, and then only to three digits max.

 

[NIGHTLORD40K]

Bah, all ammo is old school, you just have to watch any sic-fi movie to know that. Think pulse, laser, etc.

You can even set them to stun. lol

Seriously, surprised they haven't come up with something new so their marketing people can tell us how obsolete our current stuff is and how things will refuse to die unless shot with the latest and greatest.

Remington and Daisey (yes Daisey) tried to make a go of commercial electric primers for a bit, but it never caught on. Of course, many military ordnance systems use electric priming successfully.

 

[lwolford]

I may be out in left field here, but what about using something other than nitrocellulose as a propellant? Would a high explosive work if used in a minuscule amount? If it could achieve the same pressures with less volume, then the case could be much smaller and weight from both brass and propellant reduced.

 

[NIGHTLORD40K]

I may be out in left field here, but what about using something other than nitrocellulose as a propellant? Would a high explosive work if used in a minuscule amount? If it could achieve the same pressures with less volume, then the case could be much smaller and weight from both brass and propellant reduced.

The problem is burn rate. You might be able to achieve the same max pressure, but it drops off too rapidly, not giving the rifling time to stabilize the projectile. Also, there would be severe problems with reliable cycling due to insufficient dwell time.

 

[Deus Machina]

But a lot of us LIKE obsolete stuff - consider how popular muzzle loaders are....

Yup. For cars, I love stuff between 1960 and 1975, and before 1950. For guns, revolvers still make me giggle. For paintball, I like 'guns' made of brass tubes soldered together.
But for the everyday stuff, I enjoy my efficient AC, power windows, and automatic transmission.
Not to mention that my Versa weighs half as much, gets four times the fuel mileage, and (surprisingly as heck) has as much power as anything made in 1950.

Nothing's really new, it's just more refined and takes advantage of mechanical, metallurgic, and material advancements.

 

[theotherwaldo]

Yeah, the '50s were fine but I learned to drive on a 1918 Dodge Brothers touring car. It had a surprising turn of speed, was very maneuverable and got around 40 miles per gallon at cruising speed (35 MPH). Excellent as an off-roader, although the brakes sucked. (The hand brake is the foot brake and watch your revs!)
Of course it weighed less than eight hundred pounds!
-And that's what we're talking about here - dropping a few standard assumptions in exchange for a few other possible advantages.
A weapon with caseless ammunition may not fill every niche but I still think that it has a place.

 

[CapnMac]

One of the problems the needle guns had was that the needles had a number of problems. One of those was in metallurgy of the day, and other was in the corrosive nature of combusting powder. Those are slightly better today. But, the problem of mechanical reliability of a very long and slender needle firing pin in a hot gas environment remains.

The fact that you have a needle projecting out of the (presumably) rear of the chamber brings us back to obturation issues. Desn't mean it can't work. Just would probably need a bunch of steps. Like moulding a hole through the propellant to guide the needle. Probably a teflon-coated titanium needle, too (not sure that would have enough reliable mass for a 60-75mm stroke, though).

And, it's entirely true that a primer need not be centered. Other than, it's significantly easier to mass produce items that are co-centric, particularly when you are planing on making said item in tens or hundreds of thousands. There's a different issue in that needing to align eccentric items that are round gets complicated quickly.

It's a fascinating engineering exercise, and really, the more out of the box, the better. I was gabbing with a cohort the other day and a musing occurred--why not a ring primer? What we worked out was that this would probably be best with a gyrojet-style loading cycle, where you slam the round backwards into a closed chamber. Which would get to regulatory issues, as that's really an open bolt.

All sorts of ideas out there.

 

[theotherwaldo]

I was working on one design for a close-in self-defence category of weapons that cut discs from a lubricating plastic-pure lead-propellant-primer laminated sticks that would look like a slightly thicker popsicle stick and fire that disc through a Gerlich-type tapered barrel.
A .40 inch flat disc could be tapered down to a .30 bullet, probably through a smooth bore.
So a stick could be used with multiple calibers or operating systems, electrical, recoil/spring, manual, etc.

 

[CapnMac]

probably through a smooth bore

Other than the machining complexity, I wonder if a tapered polygonal bore might work?

r, for that matter, if having a "straight" bit only at the muzzle that was rifled, to simplify machining. Full-length rifling is not actually necessary for spin stabilization (or rifles choke tubes would not work). The issue is that the machining of continuous rifling is easier as an industrial process than trying to fuss with the tapering needed in high-pressure barrels. (Also for not having the Industrial Engineers and Machinists get into a meleé over using additive versus subtractive rifling.)