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No. 109271
ID: 0d01d8
>>109083
>why does the Army want 6.8 specifically?
Just an educated guess here. The reason they went full retard for the 6.8 SPC is the impressive performance--in ballistic gelatin, anyway--of a non-catalogued prototype 115gr .270 caliber Sierra MatchKing bullet that someone at Sierra was nice enough to load into some test ammunition for the Big Army circa 2002. Supposedly in tests they were highly impressed by its consistently rapid yaw cycle.
Which is weird because the conventional wisdom is that "fleet yaw" is a problem because yaw cycle is pretty random and inherently inconsistent and can't be affected greatly by bullet design or velocity, it just is what it is. (.303 British Mk. VIIz and 5.45mm 7N1 say "'sup?" I know, guys. I know.)
Nonetheless, the performance of two or three, max, of these Sierra bullets in Jello blocks made the Big Army's eyes bug out, back when they were still wedded to at least paying lip service to the Hague Convention, which the US never signed in the first place. Whether this level of performance could be sustained even in principle with ammunition using bullets that weren't basically handmade toolroom prototypes, I do not know.
I personally think there's no reason for the 6.8 SPC to exist. 6.5 Grendel does everything it purports to do, but better, with flatter trajectory and better retained velocity that, with carefully chosen bullets, (supposedly) catches up with and surpasses 7.62x51 NATO in terms of kinetic energy somewhere around 1100-1200m, and the high sectional density of 6.5mm bullets allows it to catch up with 7.62 in things like penetrating sandbags and wooden planks long before then. Of course, both 6.8 SPC and 6.5 Grendel are both MUCH heavier, round for round than 5.56mm, allowing the guys at the sharp end to carry less ammo for the same weight, and being MUCH more powerful than 5.56 also means they're MUCH less controllable in full auto fire, and these were the exact problems 5.56mm was created to solve 55 years ago.
You'd think, though, that if the Big Army were serious, and not just fucking around with taxpayer money to give Special Forces new toys to make them feel more special, they'd convert the SAW or whatever its replacement is to the new caliber first and foremost, right? Because in modern fire-and-movement infantry tactics the SAW is the infantry squad and platoon's real teeth, the riflemen are just there to keep the SAW gunners from getting outflanked and overrun, amirite guise? So they'd either create a replacement for 5.56mm that fits in SAW links or design a new link and a SAW replacement around it, but almost 20 years on, exactly jack and shit have been done on those fronts.
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