#Afv

Looking for a new car? Want something… Different? How about, say, an armored car? Well among their catalog of AK clones, AR-15s, pistols and other assorted firearms, Atlantic has recently listed for sale a Fox armored reconnaissance vehicle. Of course, nothing good in life is free, and if you want this Fox to be yours it’ll be nearly $50,000 – which, by armored vehicle standards, is not that bad. Still, try telling the wife that you’re not getting that BMW 4 Series after all, because wouldn’t an armored car be so much cooler? Well, if you still want to try to convince the missus, maybe Atlantic’s video, embedded below, will help:

As a researcher and history enthusiast, one of the issues I often have to wrestle with is that of eyewitness accounts, specifically when to trust them and when not to. That subject itself is one for another time, but today I want to look at a specific example of an eyewitness account as an illustration of how they can be misleading to someone trying to reconstruct historical events.

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 propulsion perspective are the widest ones, as they have the most area at their base for the expanding gases to push on, making them more efficient, especially from shorter barrels.

The United Kingdom has become the first nation in the world to receive  a modern cased telescoped ammunition (CTA) automatic weapon, the French 40mm CTCS, according to IHS Jane’s. The UK procured the weapons in July of last year to upgrade their Warrior IFVs, and as the main armament for the new Ajax scout tanks, expected to enter service in 2017.

After the Wednesday round of the 2016 SHOT Show, I sat down for an evening of quiet work, to finish up a few articles I had from the day’s show-trekking. Less than an hour later, I was standing in a crowd at Battlefield Vegas, watching a Chieftain tank crush a sedan.

Last week, we took a look at the troubled American M73 tank machine gun, designed to be the ultimate rifle-caliber tank MG. Tanks and other armored fighting vehicles together are another fascinating subject that is often closely related to that of small arms. In light of that, our Blog of The Month for August is Tank and AFV News, a blog similar in concept to this very site, but with a pivot towards armored warfare in all its forms. Following our coverage of the M73 family, TaAFVN posted their own piece on the weapon adding not only an article from Small Arms Review, but also two PS Magazine articles on maintaining the M73. I recommend anyone interested in the M73 tank gun and its history click through and read the whole thing.