Testing, testing...

[JASmith]

Didn't Tony post a few weeks ago that the LSAT people had been directed to stop work on 5.56 CL/CT ammo?

The plastic-cased 5.56 would not be an LSAT, but one compatible with existing weapons.

As for the 12ga idea, have you ever tried to hit a man-size target at 200-400 yards with a conventional slug? It's difficult enough with a regular shotgun, but likely near impossible with that underbarrel thing they have now.

Absolutely correct. Slugs from rifled shotgun barrels, however, can get closer to 1 moa.

Further, we're talking about a bursting round with an effects radius of at least 2-3 meters -- the effective target then becomes a tad larger than the standard silhouette.

The Army's SOP was and is one bullet weight for both mag-fed and belt-fed weapons, so any proposal for two different weight Ball projectiles is pretty much a non-starter, doomed to fail.

We currently have two different weights in 5.56 used in both rifles and machine guns. The 7.62 AP type is a heavier bullet than the M80 round.

The single bullet weight is generally driven by a desire to map trajectories into each other. That would not apply when differentiating by weapon type.

Regardless of what one calls it, bursting rounds reaching out to a km are almost certainly near-term implementable. That will change the requirement and drive the infantry round to a smaller caliber than 7mm and possibly mandate retention of the 5.56.

We need to see what cartridge would fare well in that environment. The same holds true for Tony's vision of replacing both with a single cartridge -- which seems to suggest a 6.5 - 7 mm cartridge somewhat longer than the 5.56.

Bottom line -- The more forcefully we argue for a particular solution at this point, the more we appear to have intuited the best choice and are building our analyses and testing to "prove" the correctness of our intuition. We are all more or less guilty of that tendency, so have to be especially careful to start with broad assumptions and see where the sticks fall.