The cool factor can help recruitment - it's easier to sign up if you think you'll look good.

It's harder if you think you're gonna look like you lost a bet.

-Siege

KillaJ, the Air Force in its infinite wisdom has always been more about image than functionality (or common sense).

What they really show are cavities caused by the projectile in ballistic gelatin, a calibrated gelatin which performs very much like human tissue.

Normally, against humans, you'll want to but a cavity of significant size at least up to 12"/30cm of depth. The diameter of the cavity is of obvious importance, and the 30cm mark is important because from many angles you will need to penetrate at least that much tissue to get to the large arteries in the thoracic cavity, as explained here.

Because arms and less important often covers the first 4"-8" of the tissue encountered by the projectile, it might be better to get a straight, 1.5cm/0.6" diameter hole through to 18"/40cm (such as some controlled expansion handgun rounds provide) than it would be to get a huge cavity at 2"-6" and very little at 10"+ (such as provided by some light, frangible bullets for smaller caliber rifles). It is certainly better to get the former than it would be to get a very large cavity at 2"-6" and none deeper than that (such as provided by glaser rounds), as explained in depth in the article linked above.

It's probably a good idea to go through the whole of this page and read some of the linked articles. And, in case you haven't read through it yet, this site has plenty of useful information.

Obviously, the rifle would be painted differently when it's not a prototype. I would expect that to be obvious. As for the OICW, it was not heavy at all. The whole gun, unloaded, weighed 7 or 8 pounds. The grenade launcher might have had heavy ammo, but the rifle used the same stuff as an M16. The real issue was that it was monstrously expensive and loaded with coomplex gadgets of dubious value, like the fiber optic camera. The army can't afford a $20,000 assault rifle.

Where did you read 7 or 8 pounds? That's not right at all. Even the target weight that was never reached wasn't that low. The real 'issues' with the rifle were far more numerous than simple cost.

The OICW was an ungainly bitch. Hardly manueverable enough for outdoor ops and if you were forced to go indoors for any reason you were just screwed.

7 or 8 lbs??? 7 or 8 kg was more like it, but loaded it felt like lugging around a SAW.

The target weight, loaded, was 14lbs/6.35kg, which means around 11.2lbs/5.1kg unloaded. The last prototypes weighed somewhere around 18lbs/8kg loaded. The comparison to a SAW is certainly justified, since the M249 weighs 15.6lbs/7.1kg empty.

While the price of the prototypes was closer to $20,000, the target price was around $10,000. Still pretty steep, though.

I could have sworn that it was supposed to be 8 pounds or so. That's what I read, anyway, but I'm not surprised to find out they were unable to make that. Also, I thought they were hoping to have 4 in each squad. Or maybe it was 4 rifles, and 2 combos, or 2 rifles and 2 combos.

As for the grenades not working well enough, you may have noticed in my last post I reffered to "complex gadgets of dubious value." The minigrenades are one of those. I never said cost was the only issue, only that it was the biggest. It shouldn't have taken research to tell them that 20mm grenades would be a lot less powerful than 40mm ones.

So, if this new thing, which looks like a simple evolution of the g36, is going to replace the rifle component of the OICW, what about the grenade launcher? Is the new grenade launcher going to be 20mm or 40mm, and will it have that fancy airbursting function?

Also, how does a SOPMOD m4 carbine cost almost as much as the OICW? What SOPMOD items are there that cost that much? There are laser designators, suppresors, bipods, grenade launchers, ACOG scopes, aimpoints, and night vision and infrared variants of the scope. Am I missing something, or are the night vision and infrared scopes just a hell of a lot more expensive than I thought?

Wow, I was way off about the weight of the OICW. So, 25mm smart shells, with an integral scope and range finder. Sounds pretty good. They'll probably be able to make the new fuse types work using a combination of laser rangefinding and inertial timing, so the main challenges are weight and the lethality of fragmentation against body armor.

From experiences with the 20mm grenades, I assume they figure they can't have fragments that penetrate modern body armor and have sufficient terminal effect, so they'll just go with whatever increases casualty radius against unprotected troops. But you never know...

You people know entirely too much of the science of killing ppl. Really.

The SOPMOD M4 is expensive mainly for night scope. Don't be fooled by the lower prices you might find for some of the night vision equipment that is commercially available. That's mostly old first generation technology. The US is on 3rd gen night vision I believe, which is significantly more expensive. Also, the ACOG sights aren't exactly cheap, either.

Doggbert, it's not like we are killer psychopaths or something. Think of me as a killing enthusiast.

Clever.

Yeah! it's a lot of fun really, we sing songs, make sm'ores around the campfire, trade lethal wounds...
You might like it; you should try it sometime.

Yep, you should have been at our last get together, where we had a grat contest of who could stick the most live grenades into our mouths and live to tell the tale. Of course, we were goverened by a diferent ruleset back then. You new guys have it easy