Two Interviews With The Designer Of The AR-15, L. James Sullivan
InRange has an excellent interview (and range video!) with Jim Sullivan, a designer of the AR-15, Ultimax 100, Mini-14, and other firearms. In it, they get to fire Sullivan’s improved M4, which is more tolerant of sustained fire and employs the “constant recoil” principle used in Sullivan’s Ultimax 100 machine gun. I’ve fired the latter weapon, and I can say without a doubt that Sullivan means what he says when talking about its performance and soft-shooting characteristics. To help illustrate this, here’s a video of my friend Arthur firing the Ultimax 100 taken by a high speed camera at about 1,000 frames per second (due to the lighting conditions that evening, the quality is not as high as I would like, but the effect of the constant recoil mechanism is very evident):
Nathaniel is a history enthusiast and firearms hobbyist whose primary interest lies in military small arms technological developments beginning with the smokeless powder era. He can be reached via email at nathaniel.f@staff.thefirearmblog.com.
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Excellent video. I believe that full auto is not dead. The American mantra of single shots may be somewhat behind the curve. An accurate full auto gun in quantity changes the equation. The Russians are still employing burst fire as an effective and standard infantry practice. I was always skeptical of this until I a) shot some full auto ak74 and RPKs, and b) whatched a fire and manuever platoon drill by a Ukrainian Marine unit. The volume of accurate fire was several orders of magnitude higher than what one expect from a US infantry unit of the same size. Moreover the fire was accurate enough and effective. Given the paramount task of achieving fire superiority early in a fight, and preventing manuever by the enemy, I have to say I am not sure we are entirely correct in our philosophy especially at close to medium contact distance 0-300 yards. We will not know until we come face to face with a real army that utilizes these techniques. We havent ever. This doctrine does not work with the 47 as recoil is unmanageable. This system might be onto something provided the magazines are reliable and loads of amuition are increased.
Great video, but i got a quick question hoping someone can clear up. Is it more controllable because of Sullivan new system or because of the increased weight causing lower cyclic rate? wouldn't the same thing be achieved by H buffer with a heavier carrier? Or is that basically what Sullivan did?