stancrist said:

OICW sought to improve his effectiveness.

Yes and that was dumb. If the effectiveness is 0,01 and I double it it becomes 0,02. Which is such a marginal improvement it is hardly worth any resource invenstment.
The effectiveness of a rifleman or better infantry man goes up significantly from 100 m and closer. So doubling a significantly larger number would have yielded significant results... most likely for less resource investment.

stancrist said:

but I see no need for an arcing trajectory with airburst rounds. Indeed, I think that in most infantry vs infantry combat scenarios, a flat trajectory would be preferable with airburst munitions.

Why? The rifle/small arm has a flat trajectory. Why have two weapons with the same profile?
For engaging targets behind cover or in defilade an arcing trajectory is far better. If airburst is used all the better. The fragmentation pattern of a steep falling grenade bursting 2 m above ground is far better and more efficient than that of a grenade traveling allmost parallel to  the ground.
Simple air burst fuses (proximity) for rifle grenades for example would work great. This solution would be dirt cheap in comparison and offer a significant improvement. Issue such grenades liberally to you men and an infantry squad can fire an instant light mortar barrage while the machine gunner supresses and pins the enemy.

autogun said:

From what I recall of suppression effectiveness research, a 40mm grenade exploding in the general vicinity has a vastly greater suppressive effect than any small arms bullets.

Yes but it there is a time aspect to supression. So to keep the effect up there needs to be repeated impacts. The question is how this effect scales. Since 40 mm grenades are rather large and heavy.

stancrist said:

Concur on the need for a large grenade, but I see no need for an arcing trajectory with airburst rounds.

Keeping recoil to a safe level?

A large grenade launched at high MV (to have a flat trajectory) will have too much recoil for being shoulder-launched.

The 40x53 mm is already producing too much recoil for a shoulder-fire system, and it's not really a "large" grenade (but the MV is OK).

Additionnally, with a high-velocity grenade you need to setup the fuze after firing, because you need to take into account the round-to-round velocity dispersion, or the grenade will detonate either too short or too long.

EmericD said:

How many fragments of 1 gram could be loaded in a 40 mm / 180 g HE grenade?

STK used 330x 0.25g Tungsten balls in its LVER grenade concept:

https://ndiastorage.blob.core.usgovcloudapi.net/ndia/2005/smallarms/thursday/fong.pdf

Performance as described - even against IIIA type protection - looks pretty solid.

It's basically like a micro claymore mine. 

gatnerd said:

STK used 330x 0.25g Tungsten balls in its LVER grenade concept:

So that is 82 g of W per grenade... in this case I think W core AP bullets are the better choice. As long as only a few of these grenades are used the use of W may be fine but since the idea we are talking about is wide spread distribution and mass use I think there is a problem here.

Furthermore 1,6 mm Ti plus 20 layers of Kevlar is CRISAT. STANAG 4512 does not define protection levels but targets for testing. So it can not be assumed that these fragments will penetrate Lvl 3A which is significantly better than CRISAT. Steel fragments will perform even worse.
0,25 g fragments also will loose KE fast. While the cloud is nice and dense the effective radius is lowish.
Its also easy to see that the vast majority of fragments is projected forward. This would work great in an arcing trajectory with time or proximity fuse so the main mass of the fragments is projected forward and down onto the target. If the trajectory gets more parallel to the ground and airburst is used only a few fragments will be projected downwards and downwards forward onto targets in defilade or cover. The majority will be projected forward in direction of the shot and some more upward and to the sides. All of which are ineffective.

The Chicoms are doing a ton of extremely interesting work with their "sniper grenade launchers"

They even ran the velocity up to 325-350 meters per second at one point to see if it made them more capable.

Needless to say recoil was an issue lol.

This said, I believe there's a workable way around this.

So I'm going to avoid writing a detailed point by point response for the sake of brevity and because I can say this quickly.

There's some other things we see in Ukraine which is what I was trying to point your attention to with my previous post, which you kinda missed the point of sadly.

This other thing we see in Ukraine is Ukrainian SOF absolutely WRECKING Russian units at night because the ukies sof is extremely well supplied with quad tubes and thermals and can see the Russians at ranges where the Russians don't even know they're near them!

When you couple things like an SSW with ubiquitous thermals and other enablers you genuinely can wreck an enemy formation without them seeing you until it's too late putting you at minimal risk.

I agree with your larger points on the Ukraine war meta but we're discussing infantry combat and blowing off organic capability to do things like this by blithely saying why not use a mortar is not helpful or useful.

Stuff like this gives you the ability to do these things if you don't have arty cover or allows your arty cover to prioritize more important stuff, both of which are useful.

Thank you, these were the actual answers I was looking for and they represent our baseline to be effective, though I question the 2 seconds thing unless combat is taking place at much closer range in your example than I'm thinking about.

I don't know how much of the available ngsw FC and FWS I / FWS CS content you've watched or read but it appears that they have gotten the lazing and reticle adjustment time way down to actually useful time increments.

Time increments which very likely give a single guy peeking by himself the ability to put effective laser ranging assisted fire down.

This doesn't even get into what we can do with offboard cuing which ngsw FC appears to have to a decent degree even.

My point here is that given a digital enabler capable of accepting offboard targeting data sufficient for the disturbed reticle of the Gunner to be giving him an accurate firing point from the second his eye and body have leaned out enough to physically get the round to the target.

If we have this capability, and it appears we do, our hypothetical gunner has the ability to put down two or even 3 high accuracy hasty shots to Kentucky windage bracket his designated target and drop back behind hard cover before he's statistically likely to take a round.

Yes you've just spent 2-3 not particularly light grenades if you operate this way, but you have at minimum pretty much guaranteed at least one wounded enemy and more likely you have killed at least one and wounded a couple others if they're stupid enough to bunch up.

Compared to the number of small arms rounds statistics indicates you need to spend to do an equivalent amount of damage to enemy infantry this is freakishly low cost.

I think when we talk about and evaluate subjects like this it's important not to only discuss the worst case poorest possible employment scenarios and actually look at what a system can do if people use it right!

Western soldiers are after all quite professional, highly educated, and capable of using what they have to comparatively High levels of competency compared to both historic and average enemy core competence levels. This is not something that should be overlooked.

Western troops are pretty damn good at war compared to almost any other force on the planet even before you factor in their superior enablers and etc.

I understand people's skepticism, but I don't believe we do ourselves any favors by deliberately focusing on how a new system could be used wrong and employed in the stupidest way possible.

roguetechie said:

This other thing we see in Ukraine is Ukrainian SOF absolutely WRECKING Russian units at night because the ukies sof is extremely well supplied with quad tubes and thermals and can see the Russians at ranges where the Russians don't even know they're near them!

I am not convinced that something that specific can be simply used to draw conclusions for a general approach. Also the conclusion would not be weapon related but rather equip all our infantry with night vision to SpecOps standarts. While desirable its simply not feasable. Its way to expensive.

roguetechie said:

and blowing off organic capability to do things like this by blithely saying why not use a mortar is not helpful or useful.

I am not blowing off organic capability. My "use a mortar" was meant like: maybe issue light mortars at platoon level. Rifle grenades are organic in any way. Mortars currently are organic to the infantry batallion. They are the main firepower asset. Mabe issue additional ones to company level?
What we are seeing in UA as well is that the ability to trow massive amounts of indirect fire is a decisive factor.

gatnerd said:

STK used 330x 0.25g Tungsten balls in its LVER grenade concept: https://ndiastorage.blob.core.usgovcloudapi.net/ndia/2005/smallarms/thursday/fong.pdf Performance as described - even against IIIA type protection - looks pretty solid.

Yes, the performance of this grenade is pretty solid, so let's summarize:

• With a grenade weight of 248 g, of which 82.5 g is tungsten balls (33%),
• Launched from a 40x53 mm HV system, with a MV of 242 m/s and an impulse above 60 N.s (a rifle grenade that brutally kicks is around 30 N.s),
• With a special muzzle device to measure the MV of the grenade, compute the ToF and properly time the fuze,
• Using a base-detonated fuze to eject most fragments forward,

=> You can expect a Pk of 0.35 at nearly 5 m against a CRISAT protected target.