Lightweight, who are they kidding!
A quick follow up to the General Dynamics .338 Medium Machine Gun video from earlier this week
Would we interesting to compare weights and measures v target effects and range with the .338 Norma Magnum MMG
Read more at GD, click here
Such heavy machineguns should be considered vehicle weapons. I don’t get why they keep popping up in infantry-themed promo videos.
Vehicle-mounted machineguns don’t put a premium on weight. Volume of ammunition (defining the ammo supply on-board) and suitability for operation in a vehicle (propellant gas emissions to the inside) are important instead. Furthermore watch at 2:11 – a moving barrel is not really suitable for using the vehicle’s mass for cooling because of poor thermal bridging. I suppose this gun would never be considered for employment as a coax and could thus not become a standard vehicle machinegun.
Interesting family of weapons
XM806 Lightweight .50 Caliber Machine Gun (LW50MG)
XM307 Advanced Crew Served Weapon (ACSW) 25mm cannon
XM312 Heavyweight .50 Caliber Machine Gun
XM25 Counter Defilade Target Engagement (CDTE) System Individual Semiautomatic Air Burst System
XM29 OICW (Objective Individual Combat Weapon)
all cancelled
Hey GD, the actor lugging the 0.5 cal wants extra pay.
Honestly though, I’m not impressed.
http://world.guns.ru/machine/sing/cis-50-mg-e.html
Something from 1990. 23 years ago.
Its called the XCIS 50. Just kidding. Its a CIS 50
Funding for this weapon has been stopped. It is now not much more than a museum piece. One reason, apart from cost, is that the weight saving for this weapon really doesn’t make that much of a difference when it still weighs much more than one man can easily carry. More than that, recent improvements to the Browning .50 Cal HMG have further extended its useful life.These include fixed headspace and quick change barrels.
Rheinmetall is working on a new electrically driven .50 Cal. I’d like to see a video of that.
The advent of .338 machine guns is an extremely interesting development. I don’t understand why General Dynamics used the .338 Norma cartridge instead of the .338 Lapua one. With a shorter case, you get greater chamber pressures and thus increased throat erosion. We also get another calibre / cartridge for the QM to have to worry about. If .338 is going to become a new sniper and HMG standard, we need to have a single cartridge type and for my money that’s the Lapua .338 not the Norma .338.
As much as i applaud the GD .338 MMG, I’d like to see a magazine-fed LMG / semi-automatic sniper weapon weapon emerge – if it could weigh less than 7 kg (and there’s no reason why it couldn’t) it would provide a truly portable MMG at section and platoon level.