#Standard

SAAMI has published drawings of three newly standardized cartridges. As mentioned in the title, these are the .224 Valkyrie, 6mm Creedmoore and .24 Nosler. Let’s take a look at each of these cartridge drawings.

Fime Group, the sole importer of Rex Zero 1 pistols, is officially announcing two new colors that will run you the same price as their base models. The two new colors are Olive Drab Green (OD Green) and Grey.

The US Army’s new sidearm, the SIG Sauer M17 Modular Handgun System, will soon be available for purchase on the civilian market. SIG’s Chief Marketing Officer Tom Taylor told Military.com about the decision, saying that about 5,000 of the full size M17 variant will be released to the civilian market sometime in early 2018:

The first holster to be issued with the US Army’s new Modular Handgun System, including both the M17 and M18 pistols, will be a variant of the Safariland 7TS holster, featuring both ALS and SLS locking systems. The holster is the first of at least three holsters to be procured as part of the MHS program, to be followed by a variant that accommodates an aiming laser/light module, as well as a concealed holster for the M18 compact variant. The holster was procured through the tailored logistics program, and the vendor selected for its ability to meet MHS’s timeline, according to a Military.com article written by Matthew Cox.

The US Army has announced a decision to field the M17 MHS as a sidearm to more soldiers than were previously issued M9 handguns. Where previously only senior leadership were authorized to carry handguns, with the new M17 and M18 Modular Handgun System squad and team leaders will be authorized. The move is intended to give those leaders greater flexibility in close quarters battle. Military.com reports:

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?

Like many CZ-75 fans I have been eagerly awaiting the release of the Sphinx SDP Standard, that was announced at SHOT 2016. Sadly it appears that Sphinx is not going to be releasing the Standard. All is not lost though! They announced at SHOT that they will be re-releasing the Sphinx 3000 series of pistols.

Today, the news broke that SIG USA has become the winner of the United States Army’s Modular Handgun System contract, making its P320 handgun the next standard issue sidearm for the United States armed forces. The new pistol, to be designated “M17”, is a smaller, lighter, more adaptable handgun than the US Army’s aging M9, made by Beretta.

Both types of threads can also come in either left or right handed twist, but in the barrel-world, Metric specs are more likely to be a different “handedness”.

The Imbel IA2, a 5.56mm caliber distant relative of the FAL which has been in development since 2008, has officially been standardized by the Brazilian Army.  From IHS Jane’s:

The Russian Ministry of Defense has selected Kalashnikov Concern’s AK-12 rifle to be the next standard-issue service weapon. Deputy Defense Minister Yuri Borisov says that up to 70,000 AK-12s are expected to be delivered in 2015, Vestifinance.ru reports: