Marine Corps Will Likely Adopt Army 5.56 Rifle Round, General Says

BadAsMo said:
I chronoraghed some with a Labradar just this past Saturday.
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Be prepared for the SPCA to complain that you are abusing your dog.
:p

Weren't the SS109 and M855 initially designed to punch through soviet era frag vests?
Now they want to punch through plates?:eek:
 
lawn gnome said:
Be prepared for the SPCA to complain that you are abusing your dog.
:p

Weren't the SS109 and M855 initially designed to punch through soviet era frag vests?
Now they want to punch through plates?:eek:
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The 193 was developed at a time when no one wore plates or armour. You went to war with your BDU shirt and as much kit, ammo etc as the CoC dictated you will carry at a minimum. It was designed for terminal effect on soft tissue which it did very very well when used with the 20" barrel M16A1 rifle after they resolved the propellant choice issue and chromed the barrel/bores and issued cleaning kits for the weapons.

The M855 was designed to meet NATO performance penetration requests to puncture a WWII era US steel helmet at 600 meters during the development process.
They designed the projectile to meet that specific criteria for penetration.
 
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Travis Bickle said:
The SS109 was developed at a time when no one wore plates or armour. You went to war with your BDU shirt and as much kit, ammo etc as the CoC dictated you will carry at a minimum. It was designed for terminal effect on soft tissue which it did very very well when used with the 20" barrel M16A1 rifle after they resolved the propellant choice issue and chromed the barrel/bores and issued cleaning kits for the weapons.
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You're thinking of M193. SS109 is M855, and vice versa.
 
M193 has a good spalling and fragmentation affect.
A pretty immediate wound channel.

M855 or SS109 was intended to punch an immediate hole initially.
It only started to cause a wound channel and do real damage once three or four inches into the target.
That is why there were a lot of initial complaints from Somalia when the targets were seemingly little affected by apparent through and throughs.
 
lawn gnome said:
M193 has a good spalling and fragmentation affect.
A pretty immediate wound channel.

M855 or SS109 was intended to punch an immediate hole initially.
It only started to cause a wound channel and do real damage once three or four inches into the target.
That is why there were a lot of initial complaints from Somalia when the targets were seemingly little affected by apparent through and throughs.
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Exactly. Immediate and Permanent wound channel from the tearing rending of the fragments spalling out on the first tumble at high velocity. More importantly, the m855 was designed primarily with penetration in mind. The penetration design of the projectile made its likelihood of fragmentation much lower on top of that.
Even for a low level chance of fragmentation the projectile needed to be in the area of 2,950 fps and above. The heavier projectile slowed down the muzzle velocity further.
So now you limited the range to which an enemy could be standing to get the desired terminal effect of fragmentation to be actually effective against human targets.
When they started chopping barrels down to M4 length and shorter, the initial muzzle velocity dropped as well. It doesn't look like a huge difference at the muzzle, but that initial drop transposes to a drastic reduction in velocity out to distance in the range an enemy can be at and still have a likelihood of fragmentation and critical wounding.
In my last position I got to sit in on some very interesting R&D briefs about the problems with the M855. M855 out of an M4 carbine length put the enemy at having to be approximately 115 meters or closer to get any likelihood of fragmentation and even then the odds were not very good. Anything further would drop desired effect exponentially. Pretty terrible. With some SOF units arming themselves with even shorter barrels you can see the problem.
Basically as was stated, without fragmentation, the cartridge tumble/flip making a temporary cavity and very minimal actual damage to tissue. at that point rifleman would have to hit the heart, spine, head etc directly. No easy task when actually engaged in combat. Center of mass is where they found soldiers would aim in any real life scenario under contact.
 
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