This is a large part of the reason why I fixate on the various designs I do in many ways...

One thing the vast majority of them share in common is them not being out of reach for a dark horse outsider company to realistically get built, tested, refined, and then pitched.

I'm very aware of the Industry effectively having all the incentive in the world not to innovate and push things forward, setting aside the fact that we've recently seen it demonstrated to a frightening degree just how little real ABILITY to innovate is left in them.

For a number of reasons I've understand for quite awhile that if some of these things better things were ever going to come to life it would have to be done by outsiders.

Scary times but far from hopeless friend.

One thing about the new technology though; yes, it has big capital costs, and is not necessarily faster; but it reduces  labor. 2 maintainers, 2 programmers, and a couple of extractors/material handlers can produce a lot of parts. CNC equipment isn't cheap either, when you look at it. So advances in manufacturing can help make better weapons, or at least free up labor for other uses.

Farmplinker said:

One thing about the new technology though; yes, it has big capital costs, and is not necessarily faster; but it reduces labor. 2 maintainers, 2 programmers, and a couple of extractors/material handlers can produce a lot of parts. CNC equipment isn't cheap either, when you look at it. So advances in manufacturing can help make better weapons, or at least free up labor for other uses.

The same number of people can service and entire factory hall full of CNC automats and pump out thousands of parts per day.
Additive manufacturing doesn't need much manpower but is much much slower than other methods. This is the problem. For the same cost in machinery and labor you get thousands of parts against a couple of dozzent in one day. Additive mfg only makes sense if there are benefits that can only be realised by these techniques.
Its also simply not true that something build with new techniques is automatically better than something build with traditional ones. It might be. But the quality of a product depends conciderable more on design and development, how production is organised and quality controll than the mfg methods used to build it.

For example a very good method to manufacture large quantities of high quality sectional steel is extrusion pressing. It would make lots of sense to design a GPMG with a receiver made this way. It would be comparable light but tough. Better than steel stampings. The method is cheap and fast. Way more efficient than any form of chipping production method.
The resulting weapon would have the potential to be tough yet lightweight, easy to mass produce and thus cheap.
No new technology needed. Just apply widely available industrial standard. It just has to be done.

schnuersi said:

But IMHO the question is if a LMG is really needed in mech inf squads if a SAW is available.

What is the distinction?

LMG is a machine gun primarily intended to be fired from a bipod and carried by infantry. This is a mechanical distinction of design.

A SAW is basically whatever a military chooses to issue to infantry squads as their primary source of automatic fire. This could be a LMG (M249 US army) a GPMG (MG3 Austria) or an automatic rifle (BAR/M27 Marines.) So it’s a matter of usage rather then design.

At least that’s my take. 

I asked that, too.  His distinction is @ https://forums.delphiforums.com/autogun/messages?msg=7720.280

graylion said:

What is the distinction?

Sorry, i am lazy.
If i am refering to a SAW i mean a SCHV, belt fed on bipod.
While an LMG is a full caliber machine gun on bipod.
Using two three letter abbreviations is very convenient.

yeah, just trying to figure out terminology. SCHV?

graylion said:

yeah, just trying to figure out terminology. SCHV?

small caliber high velocity.
I though this one is common knowledge. Sorry.

Extruded MG receiver? I like it! 

One thing about AM, though. People are, for whatever reason, willing to accept products made from it than other methods. "This has MIM parts". And do I really need to bring up some reactions to castings? 

Hopefully we'll see improvements in "acceptable" technology for weapons production.