And back in 2005 or so, I was in on the project that took all those FNs out of their long-term storage and destroyed them.
Damn shame. I woulda bought one gladly if they’d let me, especially the little-used C2 with integrated bipod and full auto selector.
Definitely- what a lot of people don’t realise is that the British were working on a .276 calibre cartridge before WWI. They got as far as putting a few prototype rifles together (the Pattern 1913 Enfield) before WWI kicked off and they put the whole thing in a filing cabinet stored in a disused basement lavatory with a sign on the door saying “Beware of the Leopard” (if I might borrow Mr. Douglas Adams’ superlative metaphor).
The other thing is that the old WWI/WWII military rifles were intended for use at ranges that just seem silly to us nowadays- SMLE rifle sights are graduated to 2,000 yards and the sights on Mosin-Nagant and Mauser rifles are about the same IIRC. It was important to have a fullbore centrefire cartridge to achieve that back in the days when everything was in black & white and men wore hats in public- but nowadays the only people shooting that far are specialists (or target shooters) and they’ve got specialist rifles with that sort of range on them.
Those weapons were designed for trench/fixed emplacement warfare with soldiers taking lucky shots at each other for long range. The design predates the widespread deployment and use of the machine gun. (Despite the utility of the Maxim in colonial warfare and suppression, it wasn’t until WWI and improved designs like the Vickers that the machinegun came into wide use.) The Garand, while useful in the long range infantry confrontations in Europe, was extremely limited weapon in the Pacific theater of jungle warfare where the range was less important than firepower and maneuverability.
Stranger
FTR, the pre-WWI .276 cartridge the Brits toyed with wasn’t an intermediate cartridge. By today’s standards, it was a seriously overbore long-range cartridge. It’d almost certainly be marketed as a magnum cartridge if introduced today. Given the metallurgy and propellants of the era, barrel life in the P-14 rifles that were its platform would have been short.
The sights calibrated for such extreme range were for volley fire rather than an individual soldier shooting at another individual soldier at that range. Do they even teach volley fire any more or has that gone the way of the dodo?
If anything, this thread should be about whether we should adopt the H & K G36 or (more likely) the 416.
The newer rifles don’t impress me all that much, especially the 416. Consider the results of this famous dust test. Initially, the results look horrible for the m4 until you remember that this test involved 60,000 rounds per unit. The failure percentage for the m4 works out to 1.47%. The 416 comes in with .39%. The XM8 was the best of the bunch at .21%. Incidentally, this was the second time around on this test. In the first iteration, the M4 had a failure rate of only .51%.
Even if we go with the higher failure rate figure, the difference between the best and the worst rifles is not astronomical. Certainly it is not worth the cost of replacing inventories of rifles/parts and retraining the whole entire military.
I should note that I have spent a lot of time on other boards participating in debate about these tests. One thing not noted in that article is that the failures for all models were clustered towards the end of the testing. In other words, all the rifles worked well through much of the testing. When a rifle would fail, it would then start chronically failing. The tests themselves involved conditions far more extreme than soldiers would typically encounter during combat in the field. Thus, IRL all the rifles perform about equally.
I did not mention it, but I did allude to it. Does that count?
Isn’t 90% of the 416 the same as the M4? I would have thought retraining would be minimal.
The single best thing anybody can do for an m4 or any other variant of the M-16 design, to include semi-automatic civilian models, is get some good quality magazines. The low bid aluminum mags used by the American military are the direct descendant of a design orginally intended to be semi-disposable. That is, it was intended that the magazine would be used only a few times and discarded. The military, being the military, kind of lost track of the concept early on. Thus, the M-16 family has been saddled with a needlessly fragile magazine through its entire career. There are any number of more durable, and therefore reliable, magazines available today. Magpul, for example, makes one that is light years ahead of the standard issue item.
The civilian market is awash in used government surplus magazines that can be picked up for just a few dollars each. People buy these at gun shows and such, use them in cheap frankenguns, and then bitch about how unreliable the AR-15 is. I buy them myself, to use as beater magazines, but I carefully inspect each individual unit and wouldn’t consider using one if my life were at stake.
It is something of a hobby of mine to accumulate Vietnam-era 20 round magazines. I find the ones marked “Adventureline” amusing. I picture some poor slob of a draftee squatting in a rice paddy, taking fire, and being assured by his equipment that he is having an “adventure.”
Retraining would be much less extensive than with the other designs, it’s true. However, you are still talking about introducing whole new inventories of rifles and parts (from a manufacturer not generally known for their low, low prices) for an IMO insignificant increase in reliability under some conditions.
Since when has the military worried about the cost of anything?
Right, I forgot, these are critical parts.
While I respect your opinion, Delta Force seems to have found the increase significant (although I admit cost isn’t really an issue for special ops forces).
Delta Force, and some other less secrecy-shrouded units, use the 416 because it functions better with a suppressor than does the standard issue M4. I’ve also heard from some military friends whose units had 416s in inventory for exactly that purpose that the 416s were notably less accurate than the standard M4.
ahem
No matter what you Americans call it, the correct designation is 6.5x55mm SCAN. Approved by the Swedish/Norwegian union late 19th century, used in the Swedish-issued Mauser M96 and the Norwegian-issued Krag-Jørgenson M1894 until the end of WW2. Later favored as the most popular cartridge for medium-bore target shooting in both Sweden and Norway, due to its excellent ballistic properties. Quite superior to the .308Win/7.62NATO in terms of wind stability.
Remington made a ripoff of it when they introduced the .260Rem (a .308Win case necked down to take a 6.5mm/.284" bullet)
</hijack>
Martini Enfield isn’t an American. And shouldn’t it be 6.5x55 SE?
I used to have a pre-WWI officer’s infantry field manual, and a large part of it was devoted to how the officers should deploy his men and direct their long-range volley fire. It was bizarrely like Civil War style combat, only with 1903 Springfields, and without any real mention of machine guns, except when employed more like some kind of direct-fire artillery.
That’s why the old rifles have the crazy sight ranges- they were intended for long range volley firing directed by the platoon commander or company commanders. They weren’t intended for individual accurate fire at 500+ meter ranges.
Part 2:
Assault rifles came about when the Germans, after researching their WWI experiences, determined that most infantry combat takes place inside of 300 meters, which is too long for a submachine gun, but well within the 2000+ meter maximum range of the Mausers of the day. Some bright guy (can’t recall his name) got the bright idea that a conceptual hybrid of the SMG and the full-bore rifle was what would be most effective, so he developed the short 7.92 round and the Stg-44 rifle to fire it. You really do get the best of both worlds - more accuracy and stopping power than a SMG, with the higher rate of fire of an SMG and the larger magazine capacity. Combine this with a weapon midway between SMGs and full-bore rifles and you end up with a revolutionary concept.
Eventually someone else came along and realized that even the 7.92 short / 7.62x39 / 7.62 NATO were still overpowered relative to how combat actually goes down, and dropped the caliber into the 5.5 mm range, increasing the amount of ammo the soldier can carry.
For laughs: HK. Because you suck. And we hate you.
Good day sir. I believe you mispelled “Convert the rifle to gas piston/op rod operation so it stops shitting where it eats.” A minor nitpick. 
Really, my good man, I can’t quite grasp how somebody as intelligent, erudite, and good looking as yourself can make a statement this nonsensical. Precisely how do you see the additional parts and complexity of a piston retrofit as an improvement? What is the gas doing as it impacts the bolt carrier key that you see as such a blight?