The Firearm Blog

I saw this over at Snowflakes in Hell. An armor piercing incendiary .50 BMG round is fired from an Armalite AR-50 rifle at 18 hard drives.

The round passes through 16 and it embedded in the 17th.

Extreme Shock Ammunition are producing a .50 BMG projectile that can penetrate 1″ of meal and yet will not over penetrate soft tissue. The Fragmenting High Velocity (FHVL) round is made up of a propriety tungsten powder/flake compound.

From the press release:

Extreme Shock Ammunition, known for producing the world’s most advanced ammunition, continues to raise the bar with the redesign of their 50 BMG ammo. It is the only 50 in the world that will penetrate 1 inch of metal but will not exit a soft tissue target. Extreme Shock Ammunition continues to impress with the astounding performance and safety enhancements found in their 50 BMG.

The Fragmenting High Velocity (FHVL) Round is a lead-free replacement that offers far superior tactical capability over the lead core bullet. The FHVL has the same range and accuracy as a lead bullet of similar weight. Long range, reduced ricochet, controlled penetration, and exceptional accuracy make the FHVL the most technically advanced tactical round available today. The FHVL grants the operator enhanced tactical capability, such as controlled penetration (NO EXIT) and increased ability to eliminate threats instantly, all while eliminating ricochet and over-penetration hazards.

Impressive.

No military at this point in time is going to use expanding anti-personal expanding ammunition because it would be in breach of the Hague Convention (1899) (regardless of wether they signed it or if a 110 year old treaty is worth honoring). I cannot see civilians needing or wanting to use this ammunition and I cannot recall seeing photos of cops with .50 BMG rifles. I think this ammunition is likely being marketed to paramilitary / anti-terrorism / internal security forces such as the Mexican Army who regularly conduct internal operations and who like their .50 Barretts.

The cost is $161.14 for a box of 15 rounds.

Daniel spotted a very interesting auction at gunbroker.com. The rifle on sale was a Boys Anti- Tank rifle modified by TRW-SYSTEMS GROUP and rechambered for .50 BMG. It was intended to be used for .50 BMG flechette rounds.

Click to expand.

The auctioneer claims that it is only one of twelve built and the only other known example resides at the Ford Benning sniper school.

The .50 BMG Flechette rifle project was contacted out by DARPA in 1960’s. The projectile consisted of a saboted depleted uranium dart weighing 11.9 gram ( 183.6 grains ).

.50 BMG Flechette round cross section. © Paul Smith (Used with permission)

The sabot was fired out of a smoothbore barrel with the dart achieving 4500 feet/sec velocity. That is more than a 32 grain .204 Ruger!

Detailed Drawing © Paul Smith (my modification are in red)

I tried to work out the caliber. Given that 1 cm3 of depleted uranium weights 19.1 grams and the length of the dart is 7.81 cm (I rounded down to 6cm to take into account the spiraling and the point) and then used the formula of a volume of a cylinder:

11.9 / 19.1 = 0.62

sqr(0.62 / ( 6 x pi )) = 0.18 centimeters

[ My math skills not great these days, go easy on me in the comments ]

A caliber of .07″ is seems some what small. It is impossible to know how much titanium is in the depleted uranium alloy.

Time Magazine wrote about the project back in 1967:

TRW’s magic bullets are unimpressive at first glance. Less than 4 in. long and one-tenth of an inch thick, they resemble the steel flechettes (French for “little arrows”) used in some U.S. antipersonnel weapons in Viet Nam. What the TRW flechettes lack in size, they make up in penetration power. In recent tests, they punched completely through a 2-in.-thick armor plate that would stop most steel flechettes or heavy-caliber bullets fired at it.

Dramatic Travel. It is the uranium that gives the flechettes their impressive muscle. Cleansed of its fissionable isotopes U-235, the depleted uranium is safe to handle. Because it is one of the heaviest natural elements (a 1-ft. cube of uranium weighs 1,167 lbs.), even a tiny uranium flechette fired at high velocity from a gun has so much kinetic energy that it can penetrate a target at an angle as oblique as 60°.

At 0.10 in caliber it would have an incredible ballistic coefficient weighing in at 180 grains! In theory it should be super accurate. In reality it was quite the opposite. It shot 10 shot groups of 6 – 8 feet at 600 yards. That’s over 12 MOA!

TRW was hoping to use the flechette in a rotary gatling / mini gun type system. Daniel writes:

The rifle in the GB [gunbroker] ad looks like the one shown in a photo in Peter Senich’s “The Complete Book of U.S. Sniping”. The photo was credited to Don Stoehr, a former TRW employee.

Among his projects were the Low Maintenance Rifle (LMR) and HIVAP (High Velocity All Purpose) machinegun. The HIVAP was really wild. It was an eight-barrel .31 caliber Gatling based on the Dardick open chamber principle. Like other Dardick-derived open chamber weapons, it used ‘trounds’. The HIVAP trounds used lexan cases loaded with saboted flechette. (However, solid bullet variants intended for testing purposes can be found.) The really wild part was the cyclic rate: just shy of 30,000 rpm. Stoehr later wrote that the twin feeders could support 42,000 rpm and that a switch to electrical priming would allow them to double the existing cyclic rate.

However, I don’t know how they’d ever keep such a monster fed. The weapon pod under design only held either 3,000 or 6,000 trounds.

It is an interesting cartridge that unfortunately will probably never be further developed due to the politics and health concerns of depleted uranium. Carrying DE rounds around would likely be a health hazard to the soldier using them.

More information on the round is available at cartridgecollectors.org.

Many thanks to Daniel E. Watters for information and links and to Paul Smith for the use of his photos.

The U.S. Army and Special Operations Command are stepping up efforts to procure a lighter, modernized .50-caliber machine gun more easily transported than the standard 85-pound M2.

The goal is not to replace the M2, a combat fixture for 70 years, but to augment the inventory with a .50-caliber weapon that brings the same firepower at less than half the weight, Army officials said here at the Feb. 27-29 winter convention of the Association of the U.S. Army. Early models of the Light Weight .50-caliber (LW50) are expected to be delivered this year.

More info at Murdoc Online

This video is great! It shows a Japanese katana sword being shot at by an M2. See what .50 caliber FMJ bullets do to a steel sword!

I am very surprised it lasted even one .50 BMG round!!!

Hat Tip: Danger Room