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Recently I had a disagreement with someone in here on the NGSW program and the SIG rifle it's based on. For the uninitiated, this is the Army's newest multibillion dollar boondoggle, rich with corruption and marketing lies. I've been bagging on this system since it was announced years ago, and it has progressed through military testing despite really withering criticism. Many people better qualified than I have articulated the problems with the system both conceptually and in practice. I want to focus on one simple thing that might be easier for non-military/gun people to understand. Weight.
Weight is incredibly important, which is why when I saw that the bare, unloaded weight of the gun was 9.8 lb, I knew it wasn't going to be a general issue weapon. We now know that the whole system in standard configuration weighs about 13.5lb unloaded and somewhere between fifteen and sixteen loaded, depending on ammo. This is with the fancy scope and suppressor, but crucially, not with a flashlight or IR laser device, both of which are standard for line infantry. With all that, we're pushing twenty pounds.
Forget all that extra weight, and just focus on the advertised 9.8 lb a moment. For comparison, the M4 variants most commonly issued now are about 6.5 lb. With sights, lights and lasers, about ten pounds. The old full-length M-16s that they dropped for those M4s weigh 7.5 lb. The gigantic, heavy M1 Garand from ww2 was 9.5, and didn't need any more weight to make it work. The 1903 Springfield, named for the year of its adoption, was 8.6. The last generally issued service weapon to weigh more than the bare NGSW was the french muskets they sent us in the Revolutionary war, and that's only because they were heavier than the British models. The Brown Bess musket from the eighteenth century weighed less than the bare SIG.
Roughly eight to ten pounds is what almost all standard-issue firearms weigh in practice. Any lighter and you add capability, any heavier and the average troop can't lug it.
If we count the actual loaded, serviceable weight of the gun, the last generally issued service weapon to be even close to that heavy was the Macedonian Sarissa pike, at 12-14lb.
If adopted generally, the NGSW would be by a substantial margin the heaviest weapon ever carried by the line in human history. The last infantry to have more weight in their hands were the Roman legions, if we're counting that big-ass shield. On weight alone, this gun is DOA for general issue.
It feels like the firearms industry is in a boring place of a lack of incentives to drive innovation. From that perspective SIG winning out the NGSW trials was very disappointing.
Nah, it's just that gunpowder is a mature technology, and has been for a century. There has been nothing new in firearms or ammunition in a hundred years. Frankly, I don't think there's much room to go anywhere significantly better until we get energy weapons. You can make the guns lighter, faster, bigger mags, more sighting capabilities, but the fundamental gun and cartridge haven't changed and probably won't much, ever.
I agree with all of these. But my principle issue with the M7, for example, is that all of those things you mention as possible improvements, are being done... wrong. The gun is heavy, smaller magazine capacity, heavier ammo, and questionable sighting capabilities if you are fighting anything other than third world technology.
To the extent that improvements can be made to already heavily optimized gunpowder small arms, they would have been much better represented by something like the RM277. Longer barrel, lighter ammo, less recoil. Sure, it's not an AR. But that would be my point regarding incentives. The fact that something is not a brass fed AR is practically an automatic disqualifier.
The day a brass-fed AR isn't the best choice, I've no doubt there will be someone ready to sell whatever is. AR killers are like Glock killers. There's fifty a year and none in ten. Everyone just makes slightly different Glocks and ARs because what we're optimizing for is peripherals, and popularity determines compatibility.
It's not that Glocks and ARs are the best things ever. But they are optimized for value and reliability, and there's so many of them that the industry innovation has been immense within those platforms. In many ways, standardizing on two weapon platforms let the civilian market go nuts with ways to modify and improve all the bits.
There was always going to be an inflection point where the idea of what a gun is stabilized around some reasonable approximation of the mature state of the art. You can see this as a lack of innovation, or a shift of innovation to the areas where serious progress is still possible, such as optics, lasers, weight etc.
The only part of the NGSW I think is conceptually sound is the optic, which in my view if it works, they should strap to full length accurized ARs in 5.56 or 7.62 and give to squad designated marksmen only.
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"I just want to say one word to you. Just one word... Bullpup."
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Unless you count the StG-44 as 'generally issued' (by either Germany or Yugoslavia, take your pick), which despite its looks weighs just over 10 pounds (unloaded).
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Seems like the DoD should also start a GMO program to produce soldiers which can actually use these weapons effectively.
The funny thing is that 40k bolters are recoilless guns, if I remember correctly.
They're not. There's an initial charge that kicks the bolt out of the gun, after which the rocket propulsion comes online and brings it up to max speed. Just the initial stage is supposed to have an enormous amount of recoil, if it's an Astartes bolter, it breaks the arm of human Mk. 1s. Fans have been confused by this for a while, as the energies involved don't really warrant this, AFAIK.
If you want to deliver a lot of energy on the target, the energies involved in recoil would absolutely warrant it.
Bolters look to be something like a 1" caliber if not more, meaning it'd kick like a mofo even if it were kinda slow.
Here's a huge guy firing a 4 bore rifle.
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The lore is wildly inconsistent on that topic.
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At 80,000 psi for the hottest cartridge, I wonder how much of that weight is intended to paper over the round's recoil.
Even at 13 lbs, I'm calculating free recoil numbers in the vicinity of 13 ft/bs, with a pretty snappy impulse to boot. If the rifle weighed as much as an m4, it'd kick like a .300 win mag.
From the reports I've seen of guys who have shot the real hot stuff, the recoil is stupid without the suppressor. The can is basically necessary to make the gun comfortable to shoot, and that's another pound and a half of steel hanging off the front of the gun. Absurdly front-heavy.
There's no free lunch in physics.
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6.8x51 is functionally identical to 7x57 Mauser, it just only needs 13" of barrel instead of 26" to match it. (Out of longer barrels, it performs like a magnum version of 7x57; Europeans have 7x64, Americans have .270 Winchester[1]).
Really, though, why the fuck is it so heavy? I get that SIG is fucking incompetent because lol P320 (also bendy handguard), but even the early AR-10s don't weigh that much and 80,000 PSI doesn't require that much more barrel. Maybe they're doing the M16A4 thing where they think they need bull barrels because "muh sustained fire and Camp Perry scores" even though that has shit fuck all to do with actual combat? Even the Soviets' Dragunov was lighter than this thing.
I think the obsession with "being an AR-15" holds the MCX (and by extension the Spear) back. AR-15s (and AR-10s) are excellent rifles, and I get that they're kind of outdated now from a manufacturing standpoint because you can't just take your upper receiver straight from the aluminum extruder (SCAR, Bren, QBZ-191?) or plastic mould (ARX-160, G36, Tavor), but if that was the goal then why the fuck are they doing a shitty retrofit? Though, of course, that's SIG's MO (as 'shitty retrofit' is what the P320 is)- don't need to pay for tooling and testing when you can just reuse what you have. Kind of speaks to the politics of the entire Western world in general that they'd select a solution like that.
And I'm not going to pretend that rifle ammunition hasn't been in need of a revolution, and has been overdue for one ever since Dardick invented the Tround. Packing more power into a smaller package is a legitimately useful thing and it's nice that we're doing it now, but I don't think the full-power rifle is where that innovation actually belongs. A hybrid-case 5.7x30mm cartridge that performs like 5.56 with magazines half the size would be transformative: a P90 that performs like an M4, with 60 rounds in the gun? Who wouldn't want that?
[1] Yes, I know that 7x64 isn't just a magnum version of 7x57 and .270, while it ultimately descends from 8 Mauser like 7 Mauser does, uses a slightly different projectile diameter. The comparison still holds.
Apparently it does. There's a reason no one else is running pressure like this, it's bonkers and for little reason. Any tiny improvements in ballistics are swallowed by the increase in weight. Beyond the pressure, the heat is also cranked way up, which the suppressor also serves as a sort of radiator. I'm guessing those barrels turn into noodles in half a mag if they're any lighter.
The MCX (and not the 6.8x51 one, which one would expect to be slightly beefed up; added system weight is what, half a pound?) is already a heavy rifle to begin with and the ballistic improvements are in fact quite significant... or at least, they are when considering the companion machine gun that is arguably far more important than the rifle ever will be.
The other big thing with the round is that it lets you have a rifle that, with the suppressor, is only as long as the M16 is without sacrificing performance. Without the suppressor, it's as short as the M4. That's not something any other round really lets you get away with, since if you do that with .308 you just get really loud 7.62x39.
Actually, all the military AR-10s (and the Bren 2) are about this same weight- 9 1/4 pounds. Of course, those aren't being issued with the assumption you'll be using a suppressor (though indeed, some are) and every single one of them appears intended for a specialty role, not door-kicking.
It's not like you can't make a very lightweight full-power rifle; FN managed to do it in a mass-issue rifle (the SCAR-H is under 8 pounds, even), and a few other AR-10s that are even lighter exist (though perhaps not something you want in military service).
No, I think SIG just sucks when they're not making clean-sheet designs, and the MCX is held back by virtue of having to fit the AR-15/AR-10 footprint rather than just being its own thing. I get that the Army is conservative about drifting away from the AR-15 footprint for training reasons, which is why the MCX has two charging handles, but in this case perhaps they shouldn't be.
I think you're still drinking the marketing kool-aid. The ballistics are not that much better than conventional modern cartridges (6 ARC etc.), so the high pressures aren't getting you much more for all those trade-offs. The length doesn't matter much when the gun weighs 15-20 lb. Drop the suppressor to make it "as short as an M4" and the recoil is unmanageable (according to testers). The muzzle blast also gets much higher without the can, and you're envisioning shortening it to clear buildings? Guys' heads are going to pop trying to shoot these indoors with no can and no hearing protection.
I mean, if you're not going to be at all serious about the comparison I'm not sure why I should continue. While I agree that yes, the US would get some mileage out of switching to an intermediate cartridge that's actually well-designed (and 5.56 is really not), we're also not discussing intermediate cartridges.
The high pressures serve one purpose: to get better performance from a shorter barrel.
.308 simply cannot sling 140 grains as fast as 6.8x51 can when both are being fired from 13" barrels. .308 can do that if it has a much longer barrel, sure, but we don't want a long barrel, we want a short barrel (so that we retain the same overall length of the system if we stick a suppressor onto it). In theory, this is an excellent idea; in practice, the rifle is a boat anchor that says SIG on the side.
As far as noise goes... yeah, cutting a .308 gun down to 13" is going to be blasty as fuck too. For recoil, full-power rifle gonna full-power rifle; not sure what they're expecting there (especially if you're running the hottest ammunition where the recoil actually does exceeds what .308 does- I wouldn't want something in .270 Win or .300 Win Mag as my service rifle either, lol).
Enlighten me on the massive performance boost we're getting with this hybrid-case blasty cartridge. You seem to be saying it's basically .308 from a shorter barrel.
Which, fine, but the line doesn't carry .308s. And they're not going to carry something twice as heavy as a 5.56 gun just so they can have .308 performance in a short gun, because soldiers don't need .308 performance in a short gun, we have it in big fuck-off machine guns, DMRs and sniper rifles. You don't WANT .308 performance clearing houses. You don't WANT power and range and penetration when your own guys are clearing the next apartment separated by third-world drywall. You also don't want something the length of an M-16, which turns itself into a flashbang grenade every time you shoot it in the short configuration.
Getting big-boy long range ballistics from a short barrel is not that hard. Thompson/Center was doing it in the seventies. The question is what trade-offs you're getting for that performance, and whether line troops can even use big-boy long range ballistics. All the tech and cartridges and range-finding scopes aren't going to fix bad marksmanship, you still have to be an excellent shot, and the average soldier is never going to be that.
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A lot of it is, frankly, this.
Marksmanship scores are easy to measure, which makes them an attractive KPI.
I don't think this is the answer. Sustained fire is a more basic explanation, and a more important one.
How capable is the rifle at maintaining sustained fire? I haven't looked into it much, but it seems like the relatively narrow bore and fast powders combined with intense pressures would play merry hell on the components.
Are they using exotic materials for the chamber and barrel? Or am I simply overestimating the stresses in play?
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I'm sympathetic to an American army that spent 20 years fighting in the high desert without an appropriate long-range rifle, and want something to fight at very close range in mud huts before coming out of that village and getting lit up by PKMs from the hillside.
Maybe fighting in a milieu where precision marksmanship could (and usually did, if someone had an ACOG) make a difference allowed that stupid "one shot one kill" meme to re-establish its historic hold over American military doctrine? In all honestly putting an LVPO on the M4s would probably make more difference, which is probably why second-rate Western militaries are doing exactly that. They don't have (or given that this is Western militaries we're talking about, are unwilling to grant) money to spend on a new platform that would be optimal, and that this is the next best thing is, I feel, telling.
Russians have a 12 lb light machinegun.... Supposedly developed after battlefield input as a desirable weapon.
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Is this weight the same across all the platforms they're trying to replace? As much as this is heavier then the M4 I'd be as shocked if not more so getting the weight of an M240 replacements to less than fifteen pounds.
I was never a fan of the F-35 for similar reasons, but the maintenance and supply chain differences for aircraft are large. It doesn't seem even close when dealing with 3 firearm platforms?
The M250 is the replacement for the M240, and it does weigh just under 15 pounds, with the suppressor. Which is kind of downright miraculous when you think about it, considering the weight of the companion rifle. That's far lighter than any other MMG system on the market, competitive or beating nearly every LMG (assuming the M250's suppressor is detached), lighter than even the M60E6 is, and is only a couple pounds heavier than the full-size Knights Armament LAMG is.
The M7 makes more sense in a context where it's merely the companion "because we had to" to the M250- and the M7 is so incredibly heavy that there's only a couple of pounds between it and the machine gun. It's the same calculus the Stoner 63 suffered from: if the machine gun and the rifle are basically the same weight, why would you ever take the rifle?
It's also worth noting that there haven't really been any reported issues with the M250, but then again, the M250 also seems to be a clean-sheet design where the M7 is wearing literal pounds of legacy baggage. There's zero reason that gun needs to match an AR-10's footprint outside of "muh training"- it makes it more expensive to manufacture, and it turns it into a worse rifle (the forend on the M7 is absolute garbage) than it should by all rights be.
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I feel obligated to draw your attention to the Billion-Dollar Boondoggle Act.
It was reported out of committee a month ago, so it actually has a chance of becoming law.
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