Today we’ll be looking at a round with one of the strangest-looking projectiles ever designed for a military weapon: The joint Heckler & Koch-CETME 4.6x36mm round designed for the HK36 en-bloc clip fed assault rifle. The rifle was, as the name suggests, [Read More…]
Information on this round and the weapons designed to fire it is scarce, so the details in this article may be at times incorrect. Just letting you know. -NF Before the SIG SG 550 was adopted by the Swiss Army as the Stgw. 90, there was another series of rifles, called [Read More…]
In a previous post about the sometimes ambiguous meaning of the word “caliber”, we discussed how the word had mutated through the centuries, picking up different definitions and connotations along the way. In that article, I wrote: So “caliber” has gone [Read More…]
How can one balance the trade-offs inherent in ammunition design to create a true one-caliber infantry weapon system that is both effective and lightweight? This is a question I’ve been exploring for close to a decade, and writing about for over four years. The [Read More…]
We’ve discussed a lot of different rounds in this series so far, but today we’re going to discuss a round that actually has a shot of being adopted (at least in some form) by the United States military as a next-generation small arms ammunition [Read More…]
Previously, we discussed the benefits of and challenges facing saboted projectile ammunition, including the advantages of decoupling the diameters of the bore and the projectile, and the problems of accuracy during sabot discarding. One concept that could possibly [Read More…]
After World War II, US Army analysts determined that the effectiveness of the infantryman was not as closely related to their marksmanship discipline as had been previously thought. It seemed that instead, the random environmental circumstances and effects, plus the [Read More…]
One of the problems of small arms ammunition is that of swept volume. That is, the most ballistically efficient projectiles are the longest and thinnest ones, which cut through the air more easily than squatter, fatter projectiles. Yet, the best projectiles from a [Read More…]
It’s not just the Yanks that are getting improved ammunition: Our friends across the pond have developed their own firepower upgrade for 5.56mm and 7.62mm weapons alike. Jane’s has a modest article on the subject, while The Register provides a quite good [Read More…]
After World War II, the nations of the world retired to lick their wounds and rebuild, but their arms engineers also began thinking about the next war. The war have brought forth a storm of new technologies and inventions, and one of the most significant in the field of [Read More…]
What happens when you take the two concepts of a traditional, full-power rifle and machine gun round, and a small-caliber, high-velocity round, and smash them together? You get one of the most extreme military small arms calibers ever developed, and one of the last [Read More…]
In the mid-1950s, the People’s Republic of China followed the Soviet Union’s example and adopted the intermediate 7.62x39mm round. This decision substantially helped to promote that cartridge’s ubiquity throughout the world, as millions of cheap [Read More…]
Shouldn’t “Modern Full Power Calibers” be its own series? No, because then there would only be two episodes! So instead, we’re rolling today’s two most popular full power .30 cal rounds into the series on intermediates, primarily as [Read More…]
On Saturday we looked at one British “contender” which could have in some alternate reality become the NATO standard round, and today we’re going to look at another: The 4.85x49mm. After the United States adopted the .223 Remington round as the [Read More…]
Among the interesting concepts that were tested in the mid-late 20th Century is that of an extremely light for caliber, very long bullet made in part of a lightweight material like aluminum and plastic. The 7.92×40 CETME, which if I can find a specimen I will cover [Read More…]
In this installment, we’ll be looking at a very unique round. The 6mm SAW was probably the first small arms round ever designed using computer-calculated parametric analysis, and it was also probably the first American rifle round designed from the outset for [Read More…]
The 6x35mm TSWG, also commonly called the 6x35mm KAC, is a round shrouded in mystery. Apparently designed by Knight’s Armament Company for the interagency counterterrorist program cryptically named the “Technical Support Working Group” alongside the [Read More…]
In the late 1950s, after the first public demonstrations of the AR-15 and its new small caliber, high velocity cartridge, the Soviet Union took notice of the radical developments in military .22 caliber rounds in the United States. By 1959, four years before the [Read More…]
Like the .300 AAC Blackout that we discussed earlier, the 7.62×40 Wilson Tactical was intended to be a medium-performance .30 caliber cartridge that would function in standard AR-15 type rifles with minimal modifications, such as a barrel change. Also like the .300 [Read More…]
What if there was a caliber that was suitable for everything from coyote to brown bear, kicked less than your whitetail gun, fit in a micro-length (2.25″/58mm) action, and cost a quarter a round to shoot? That would be a pretty awesome caliber, wouldn’t [Read More…]
Previously, we looked at the incredible damage and penetration caused by the US Army’s new M855A1 Enhanced Performance Round (EPR), thanks to a video published by William of the Wound Channel. What happens, though, when that kind of performance is scaled up to .30 [Read More…]
In the second installment of Ballistics 101, we took a look at the concept of a “ballistic coefficient”, or a drag model based on an empirically tested projectile, against which other projectiles can be measured and compared. Mentioned in that post – [Read More…]
A trend towards ever more powerful and longer-ranged ammunition was cut short by the realities of the First World War: Technologies not previously invented or accounted for, such as the man-reaping machine gun and the portable infantry mortar, made the existing infantry [Read More…]
On my recent article “Ballistics 101: What Is Ballistic Coefficient?”, commenter Anthony asked for clarification on some points: Thanks for the info, but I don’t feel I know what ballistic coefficient is after reading the article. You state, “A [Read More…]
Thanks to John C. for sending us this our way via Facebook. This was from a Sig MPX that I had been shooting suppressed. I had been using white lithium grease in the can and the back pressure had forced that back into the barrel. After removing the suppressor and firing [Read More…]
“Caliber”. It can mean a lot of different things, but when we use it, what does it really mean, and what’s its significance? Title image: From left to right are the 7.65 Parabellum, 7.63 Mauser, .300 Blackout, 7.62×45 Czech, .30 Remington, 7.62 [Read More…]
I don’t consider myself more than a hobbyist when it comes to ammunition – I reload a little, play around in SolidWorks a bit, and read dry, dusty tomes full of other people’s hard work collating every minute detail about ammunition. I’m, [Read More…]
A TFB reader recently 3D Printed 9mm caliber bullets and loaded them 9mm Luger/Parabellum cases with subsonic and supersonic loads. The bullets were printed with PLA, a bio-plastic made from corn starch in the USA or sugar cane elsewhere in the world. PLA is commonly [Read More…]
Tony Faulkner posted his creation in a local firearm group on Facebook. It is an exploded representation of a bullet’s components. This one is made from a Winchester 30-06. Hey all. I’m selling some hand made ammo displays featuring Winchester 30-06 [Read More…]
I am not sure what to call this type of malfunction. Yesterday, I went to the range with a co-worker. He brought along his Browning Hi-Power. On the last round, of a shooting string, this happened. He said he felt a pop and then mushy trigger. He looked at the chamber [Read More…]
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