#Schv

In yesterday’s article, we took a look at examples of two different methods of design, which I called “preference-driven” and “process-driven”. For these examples, I supposed two engineers from two different cultures – called “Romulan” and “Vulcan” after the aliens from the Star Trek universe.* In the “Romulan” example, we explored preference-driven design, where a final product is outlined by amalgamating preferred characteristics from previous works to create a desired whole. For the “Vulcan” example, we examined the more elaborate method of developing processes that can be fed data to procedurally generate characteristics as an example of process-driven design.

If you were designing the next small arms round, how would you do it? What methods would you use to determine its physical characteristics and performance attributes? How would you know what was too large or too small, too powerful or too weak? Perhaps more critically, how do different methods for answering these questions compare to one another? Could some methods be better or worse than others?

In a recent Modern Personal Defense Weapon Calibers post, we discussed the .223 Timbs, a pseudo-wildcat load of the 7.62x25mm Tokarev that uses a sabot to fire a 50gr .22 caliber projectile at 2,000 feet per second or more. At the time, very little information was publicly available regarding the origin and purpose of the .223 Timbs, and what we knew at the time could just be summed up as “it was developed by Joseph Timbs and Quality Cartridge.” After the article ran, it gained the attention of none other than Joseph Timbs himself, who reached out to The Firearm Blog, and gave us the bar booth version of the story.

It has been a little while since we visited the subject of modern personal defense weapon calibers, so to start it off again we’ll be taking a look at a new high velocity round that is only a few years old: Armscor’s .22 TCM. This round was reportedly developed by Fred Craig as a high velocity caliber for the 1911 platform, and picked up by Philippine company Armscor. Originally called the “.22 Mini Mag”, the .22 TCM (Tuason-Craig Magnum, after Craig and Armscor’s president) is designed to fit inside the magazine well of a 1911 and function from .38 Super 1911 magazines. Although a pistol round, the .22 TCM is based off the .223 Remington case, shortened by about three quarters of an inch. Thanks to the thick web of its parent case, the .22 TCM is capable of handling high pressures of 40,000 PSI. A version with a shortened projectile, the .22 TCM 9R, is compatible with shorter 9mm magazines for weapons like the Glock 17.

Around the same time that Small Caliber High Velocity was starting to percolate through the US Military, so was another set of programs designed to increase the hit probability of the individual soldier. Considering that 5.56 was ultimately adopted as the standard loading does not take away from the ingenuity of the designers at the time, who developed many remarkable solutions.

Almost four decades before the invention of smokeless powder, the advent of the Minié ball bullet made practical the standard infantry rifle, and with it the elongated projectile. This changed the fundamental physics of infantry weapon ammunition design, allowing longer ranged weapons firing oblong, high sectional density projectiles of smaller and smaller caliber. The arrival of smokeless powder in the mid 1880s accelerated this arms race: New projectiles, clad, or “jacketed”, with a hard metal to withstand the forces of acceleration generated by a high-velocity smokeless gun, took these principles to their extreme. By the late 1880s, infantry weapon caliber had shrunk from the ~0.69″ of the roundball-firing smoothbore muskets to less than a third of an inch (~0.30″), and smaller calibers were continuing to be adopted as the arms race to the bottom accelerated.

What if the Mini-14 had arrived over a decade earlier, and been a pound lighter? Would it have still played second-fiddle to the AR-15, or would US troops be using classically-lined rifles of wood and steel right up until today? Was there really an alternative to the “Buck Rogers” space-gun-like AR-15 in the late 1950s and early 1960s?

1969 was a year of great optimism and achievement for the United States. NASA’s space program took humans to the Moon in July of that year, while the Mariner 6 and 7 probes gave humanity its first close look at the planet Mars. The Boeing 747 “Jumbo Jet” took to the skies for the first time in 1969, and that year also marks the sending of the first ARPANET data packet, heralding the very beginning of the Internet age. In 1969, it seemed as though there was nothing that America could not accomplish, if it wanted to.

As in all Small Caliber Book Reviews here at TFB, I will be covering the area of relevance and strengths and weaknesses of the book, as well as whether it is more introductory or advanced.