05-09-2011, 06:43 PM
Tony Williams Wrote:8. The cartridge designs should be optimised for use in conventional military magazine-fed and belt-fed automatic weapons, so that existing gun designs can be adapted to use them.IMO, the above two requirements may be mutually exclusive. Use of a long, high-BC projectile necessarily implies a short cartridge case, a la 6.5 Grendel. However, such a short case does not seem compatible with either the M27 link or the M249 feed mechanism.
10. To achieve the weight and recoil reductions compared with 7.62mm M80 implies a lighter bullet to be fired at a lower muzzle velocity. To achieve this while matching the energy delivered by the M80 at 1,000 metres requires a bullet which loses velocity much more slowly than the M80. This requires a high ballistic coefficient which, given a lighter bullet, implies a calibre smaller than 7.62mm.
Protestations that "It's only a matter of throwing enough money at it" may be true...or they may be only wishful thinking. At this point, we don't have sufficient information to validate or refute the idea that converting belt-fed weapons to a round like 6.5 Grendel is feasible.
Before putting any effort into designing a bullet, it might be prudent to determine if appropriate metallic links can be designed and fabricated for the cartridge of choice.