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Mrs. Peel

Military Rifle of the Future?

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A guy in Colorado has invented a new rifle that's generated interest from the US Army. Called the "ribbon gun", it features (4) 6mm bores cut into one steel barrel, enabling the gun to shoot up to 4 bullets at once... and theoretically, up to 250 rounds per second. Yowza! … and developed in the guy's garage, no less. A good read!

https://gazette.com/military/army-might-have-found-its-new-rifle-in-colorado-springs/article_96cd214c-c290-11e8-9d41-27b5a0e767a4.html

 

 

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I could see something like this being adapted for use as a weapon mounted to vehicles like humvees, helicopters and gun boats.  I think it's too complex and way too expensive to mass produce and distribute this as the standard battle rifle for every ground-pounder out there.  What is the advantage of this?  He explains the differences between this and traditional firearms, he doesn't say how it's better.   

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There are several issues I wonder about with this gun.  Firing 250 rds a second ammo is going through fast and the gun would get hot quick. I've seen M60s fired fast enough to get the barrel to droop.  The 7.62 minigun used in helicopters usually has 1000-1500 rds usually in a continuous belt.  You'd have to have a few ammo bearers to keep this gun fed. 

The cyclic rate of a M60, M240, and M249 range from 600-1000 rounds a minute. They can be controlled hand held but it isn't easy.  At a cyclic rate of over 14,000 rds a minute I'd think this hard to control.

The gun is innovative but I'm still trying to think of a use for it.

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9 hours ago, GRIZ said:

There are several issues I wonder about with this gun.  Firing 250 rds a second ammo is going through fast and the gun would get hot quick. I've seen M60s fired fast enough to get the barrel to droop.  The 7.62 minigun used in helicopters usually has 1000-1500 rds usually in a continuous belt.  You'd have to have a few ammo bearers to keep this gun fed. 

The cyclic rate of a M60, M240, and M249 range from 600-1000 rounds a minute. They can be controlled hand held but it isn't easy.  At a cyclic rate of over 14,000 rds a minute I'd think this hard to control.

The gun is innovative but I'm still trying to think of a use for it.

Exactly. When I was in Iraq during OIF, each man carried 6 to 8 30 round mags outside the wire, sometimes more, depending on the mission.  That's a lot of ammo and can last all day in a fire fight.  I don't see a practical point in having capability to blow through that in a second and carrying more gets heavy fast.  That's one of the reason why most issued rifles now days are 3 round burst instead of full auto; to help conserve ammo.  The amount of ammo this thing could use seems beyond pointless as a handheld weapon and the fact that its electronic seems like it would best be suited in a vehicle.  I've seen too much electronic shit fail in my career to want to be in the field relying on an electronic rifle.  

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6 minutes ago, Regular Guy said:

Exactly. When I was in Iraq during OIF, each man carried 6 to 8 30 round mags outside the wire, sometimes more, depending on the mission.  That's a lot of ammo and can last all day in a fire fight.  I don't see a practical point in having capability to blow through that in a second and carrying more gets heavy fast.  That's one of the reason why most issued rifles now days are 3 round burst instead of full auto; to help conserve ammo.  The amount of ammo this thing could use seems beyond pointless as a handheld weapon and the fact that its electronic seems like it would best be suited in a vehicle.  I've seen too much electronic shit fail in my career to want to be in the field relying on an electronic rifle.  

It was also easier to limit the M16/M4 to 3 round burst than teach the trigger discipline for a full auto trigger.  Due to the system used to make the 3 Rd burst work the trigger on a full auto M16/M4 is better in the semi mode.

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This is just a gimped version of metalstorm, which was also stupid. 

Much like metalstorm, the only place this has anything approaching a reasonable application is area of denial weapons. Even then I'm not sure. Ina rotating barrel weapon, if you have 4 barrels, and you mess up one of them, you throw away one barrel and had to manufacture 5 total. For this if you screw up one bore, you throw away 4 and have to manufacture four more. 

Not to mention POI/POA issues depending on which barrel is firing, etc. 

 I don't think infantry has the need of a rate of fire 3x that of a phalanx gun. 

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