Do you think a modern attempt at .50 Ct would be more compact than the stoner designs of old?

Especially with compressed propellants.

And given that caseless 556 is literally half the size, i think the .50 is the one and only weapon that could benefit from caseless

A hypothetical Textron LWMMG with CT .338 would easily beat the competition, and volume doesn't matter anywhere near as much for a LWMMG-Type gun as weight does,  if it's being transported by dismounted infantry, for non-weight limited vehicles you do have a point about the bulk though

Remember the innovative magazine of the HK LMG11....packed 300 rounds in a tiny box. 

This is an advantage of squared rounds...scaling it up would be very hard though

smg762 said:

Do you think a modern attempt at .50 Ct would be more compact than the stoner designs of old?

Perhaps, although I couldn't find dimensions of the ARES .50 CT rounds, so can't say for certain.

But, I am pretty sure a modern .50 CT cartridge would be at least a little fatter than the .50 BMG.

smg762 said:

And given that caseless 556 is literally half the size, i think the .50 is the one and only weapon that could benefit from caseless

By "weapon" do you mean caliber?  Because the .50 M2 (weapon) cannot use caseless ammo.

If you mean "caliber", I disagree.  Pretty much all calibers would benefit from caseless ammo.

Why would 50 be the one and only weapon that can benefit?

That genuinely doesn't make sense.

Also, the real "benefits" of caseless never seem to actually pan out, hence why they dropped caseless Incredibly early in the LSAT program.

The one place we've actually seen caseless make any inroad is in things like the Russian gp25 and gp30 underbarrel grenade launcher where they haven't really provided all the fantastical value they purport to on paper.

If the Russians every really fully switchover to their "new" caseless AGL design that'll be two such systems in service. 

And honestly, caseless seems to be at least a passable fit in things like grenade launchers (where incidentally you're not dealing with quite the peak pressures of an hmg or etc)

The whole "literally half the size thing" is something I'd dispute heavily since actually keeping the rounds intact in the field ultimately results in you giving away much of the notional savings to do so.

I'd go even further and say that 50 is not only not the only weapon caseless could benefit, it's actually one of the WORST possible weapons to try this shit in!

Here's why:

Let's think about what we actually do with 50's.

1. Belted 50 gets tossed in every spare corner in every vehicle and gets bounced around for weeks or YEARS before finally getting loaded into a gun!

2. At the point you actually load a can of 50 onto a gun it can ride around for days to MONTHS To YEARS exposed to the elements being bounced around being loaded and downloaded and tossed back on the floor of the Vic untill someone gets detailed to throw it back in the arms locker.

What does this equate to? It equates to needing your fucking 50 ammo to be almost stupid durable to protect it from it's users. Your HMG ammo has a hard life and can go literal years of this abuse before being needed. And when it's needed, it's REALLY NEEDED!

Also, modern vehicles and weapons systems are already almost crazy maintenance intensive without making your 50 and it's ammo need to be carefully inspected before use, potentially in a moving vehicle under fire!

I know a couple people who were involved in the thunder run into Baghdad and the amount of ammo they went through, the fact that they often wound up using ammo they were surprised still worked because it had been so badly abused, and just the sheer QUANTITY of ammo brought along, used, and abused would have been outright impossible to do if you had to do what's necessary to keep caseless ammo intact and usable.

I'll repeat, 50 caseless is about the dumbest and worst "possible use" for caseless I can think of!

You MIGHT just MIGHT be able to get away with this bullshit on aircraft and naval vessels but in the ground forces it would fail utterly miserably

All of this is IF a 338 MG is even an actual good idea, which is probably the most spurious part of this entire line of reasoning.

I'd much rather have them develop a high tech m79 capable of slinging very modern 40x51 grenades tied to a really bitchin FCS, an American qn202 style launcher set (pike missile but not stupid), or an m202 flash style launcher but with a 4 pack of MHTK derived missiles  over a 338 machine gun!

Can't we just, you know, develop a better gpmg round and a new gpmg that's not us doing necromancy on the mag 58 to keep an interwar gomg design limping along for so long it will have seen man go back to the moon again?

That's the part that's frustrating to me honestly.

This idea that we need a round as big and stupid as 338 Norma mag to "overmatch pkm's" is just painful.

.338 Norma MMG isn't as painful as 6.8 Bleedmoor for PKM overmatch, though.

roguetechie said:

Can't we just, you know, develop a better gpmg round...?

Working on it.  

Farmplinker said:

.338 Norma MMG isn't as painful as 6.8 Bleedmoor for PKM overmatch, though.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by that.  I would think that carrying around one of the NGSW LMG's with its lighter ammo (and maybe a DM rife or two) would be a better overmatch than a .338MMG and much less ammo.  It would be not take long to use up the .338 ammo if shooting blindly at distances where overmatch is necessary.   Heck, maybe just have the designated marksmen, since their optics would be more likely to spot the enemy machinegunner at long range anyway.

Ive found the ultimate way to reduce size - design it around APFSDS

The dart is just 5-6mm and fully telescoped, so it woulf take up virtually no powder space

of course APFSDS is not ideal for troop safety due to the petal sabot. I wondered about a sabotless design with fins at the front of the dart which actually ride the bore