Is this nato .308 brass?
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BattleRife
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The 7.62x51mm cartridge was adopted by NATO in around 1952, so 1969 is nowhere near early.
boltonscouter
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remover crimp ......... reload as normal!
It's the NATO compatibility mark, meaning it can be fired in any well-maintained modern weapon of the calibre in question. Many other countries use it as well, eg Pakistan.
I do not think .50 BMG and up is usually so marked however.
Thanks Atom.I think rules of engagement and ammo restrictions apply also. Could be wrong but Geneva convention disallows certain ammo and if it's not head stamped NATO it could be problematic for user. Just guessing on this, not an authority on it at all.
mudgunner49
CGN Ultra frequent flyer
Bad guess - lots of ammo out there in the theatre of operations that is not NATO stamped.
Geneva has nothing to do with ammo, that's the Hague Convention's purview...
blake
The Standing NATO Agreements (STANAGs) on small arms ammo deal with such things as chamber size, pressure and so forth. They are intended to ensure that the ammo, the stripper clip, etc are capable of being used in everybody's weapons.
As it happens, the 5.56mm NATO bullet skirts very close to the edge of legality. Their rate of spin is so high and their jackets so thin that more often than not, they will fragment on impact, causing horrific wounds. If they were designed to do that as opposed to it being an unavoidable consequence of the bullet size, etc, they would be illegal.
mudgunner49
CGN Ultra frequent flyer
Source for this info?? Or are you basing it on speculation and COD4??? I've been in the military for 30 years as of 12 Jan just passed and have seen no evidence of anything that you've stated - and I've shot a LOT...
Source for what info? That STANAGS deal with interoperability? That's pretty much a given, I think.
As to the 5.56mm bullets breaking up, it's a function of terminal ballistics. The equations describing gyroscopic stability (that stability imparted by spin) has about 14 different variables. The ones that count in this case are the rate of spin, the velocity of the bullet and the density of the medium through which it is moving.
The rate of spin depends a great deal on the diameter of the projectile. If you look at a 155mm projectile, a 7.62mm bullet and a 5.56mm bullet, you will see that (and this is off the top of my head, but close enough for this discussion) to stabilize the artillery shell, it need only rotate at about 15,000 RPM. The 7.62mm needs to spin at something like 70,000 RPM. The 5.56mm approaches 300,000 RPM. Picture trying to spin tops of different diameters...
That amount of spin places enormous stress on the 5.56mm jacket. You might remember that when the CF converted to the C7 from the C1, a huge amount of 5.56mm ammo they'd bought had to be condemned because it literally was flying apart just out of the muzzle. Our favourite ammo plant had failed to make the jackets strong enough to withstand the centrifugal force imparted by that rate of spin and they were self-destructing. So that's one factor.
The other is that when a bullet moving above a certain speed transitions from air to a much denser medium (a body, ie), it becomes unstable, with the centre of gravity in the rear of the bullet wanting to twist the bullet around so that it's flying base-first. (In a water-heavy medium, base-first is actually a more stable position.) That yawing motion puts a huge amount of stress on the bullet. In a 7.62mm bullet, the jacket is thick enough and the RPM low enough that it holds together. In a 5.56mm SS109 bullet, one moving fast enough, the bullet simply cannot hold together. It flies apart, creating multiple wound tracks and a much more serious injury.
If the same bullet has slowed down enough before impact, however, it remains stable and doesn't tumble, doesn't fragment. It still makes a nasty and quite possibly lethal wound, but it doesn't have the same instantaneous stopping power.
You may have noted reports from the Yanks in Afghanistan and Iraq about their M4s with the M855 cartridge not providing sufficient stopping power. It was related to just this. Trimming the barrel dropped the MV so that the bullets weren't tumbling (and thus fragmenting) much past 100 metres (as compared to about 250 with the longer barrels such as on the M16A2 and the C7). The problem hadn't been apparent before because the vast bulk of 5.56mm weapons had had the longer barrels, giving higher MV.
There was a rush to get some old M-14s back into service and develop a new 5.56mm round designed to compensate for this, the M855A1. (If you go to the US Army website, they do a fair tapdance when talking about terminal effect on soft targets and talk a lot about penetration. Not surprising.)
Note that this problem does not have any effect on either accuracy or weapon reliability. You can hit the target just fine; it's just that the target keeps on truckin' beyond a given (and short) range. That's another reason the problem caught a lot of people by surprise - they took a round with good terminal effects out of one system and assumed it would have the same effect when the weapon changed. Range trials showed it worked just fine out of the short-barrel weapons and nobody bothered considering what would happen in battle.
I've argued professionally for quite some time against trimming the Canadian Army's rifle and LMG barrel lengths. The shorties are ###y as hell and far more convenient inside a LAV or in built-up areas, but they and the standard round just don't provide the long-range stopping power a 20" barrel will.
BTW - what's a COD4?
Gunnerlove
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I am not seeing the word fragment anywhere in the Hague convention.
It is good to know that throwing stuff from balloons is regulated and controlled though, as that is a huge issue on the modern battle field.
It is good to know that throwing stuff from balloons is regulated and controlled though, as that is a huge issue on the modern battle field.
Gunnerlove - the Conventions talk about ammunition specifically designed to increase suffering. The point is that the SS109 round we use (paralleled by the 5N7-spec 5.45mm Russian round, I believe) was not designed to do that. It is simply an unavoidable side-effect of a bullet that size under the stresses of impact.
Still sucks to be the target.
Still sucks to be the target.
Shelldrake
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