what is the practical limit of a grenade launcher for something akin to a Mk 19 or AGS-40?40mm always seems to get used, but why 40mm? why not 50mm?the length is generally the same too, with the exception if the VOG-25 (which is caseless, adding to it's length)
40 mikes got a lotta ass when you shoot them. A bigger projectile needs more powder which means even more ass.
>>65546116If you convert 50mm to inches, it makes less sense than 40mm when converted.
OP here, i just remembered that the 2B9 Vasilek exists. and yeah, that seems to be the practical limit before it just outright becomes artillery
>>65546116It's largely a matter of definition. Past a certain size, a grenade launcher becomes either an autocannon or a light mortar, depending on its muzzle velocity.
>>65546116Anything above 40 mm and you start to get anal fissures.
Since I'm reading the Black Rifle and am on the section on grenade launcher experimentation, I'm going to post some of them>AAI Corporation (formerly Aircraft Armaments Inc.) presented the Disposable Barrel and Cartridge Area Target Ammunition. The DBCATA concept did away with most of the weight and bulk of a standard launcher attachment. The thick, rifled walls of each round were sufficient to contain the forces of firing the (standard M406 HE) 40mm projectile. Only a simple base-plate was required, onto which each DBCATA cartridge was clipped prior to firing.
>>65546116Making internally powered autoloader and works on vehicle pintle mounts. These two limit size and weight before being forced to make hydraulic powered turrets and externally loaded chaingun autoloader or tank autoloader.The high low pressure system of the projectile is first used in ww2 paw 600 8cm gun that drastically reduce the weight of recoil bearing components such as recoil absorber and gun carriage.Technically it could have been used in a mortar gun on a light vehicle purely for firing non-ke shells. But nobody bothered.
>>65546320>you heard of the fish gun, now get ready for the whale gun!
>>65546116IIRC 40mm was the smallest diameter warhead allowed under some cold war treaty, same reason the RPG-7 frag warhead was 40mm.
>>65546116>why 40mmRecoil and pressure are major problems. The hi-lo system was invented for 40mm. It's a bit of a sweet spot. It's hard to get benefits from going larger - better to use a rocket at that point due to recoil. It's also a very mediocre warhead so going smaller is equally hard to do. 40mm is a classic example of 'it's crap, but it's also a lot better than nothing at all.'I have to emphasize how bad 40mm is. It's Cold War era casualty statistics type design, not GWOT and onwards terminal ballistics expectations. If you're under 40 or so, you probably hear kill radius and think 'the distance where someone's 95% guaranteed to get hit and die in the next few seconds.' The cold war definition was more like 'the distance where there's a 50-50 chance of a sliver of shrapnel hitting a disgruntled conscript hard enough to give him an excuse to sit down and wait 15 minutes for a medic.'By modern definitions, the 40mm has about a 1 meter kill radius and a 3 meter wound radius.
>>65546310So this is a mutant of a rifle grenade and a caseless Vog style grenade? Why not actually just use a rifle grenade?
>>65546496It never went past the prototype stage, so I'm guessing someone in procurement asked the same question and never got a good answer.
>>65546431This is true and needs relentlessly pointed out to the 20 and 25mm grenade launcher advocates
>>65546116They needed to keep the recoil down to 12ga slug levels. That was the happy medium between explosive capacity and recoil.
>>65546496>>65546508It was originally developed for AAI's SPIW submission, so it would have been multishot capable
>>65546843The concept was fairly decent, in that it sought to obtain the benefits of a dedicated grenade launcher attachment while avoiding most of the weight. It was largely rejected due to increased costs and incompatibility with the M79 then already in service
why not 25 mm
>>65546310>>65546320>>65546323>>65546843
>>65546410>IIRC 40mm was the smallest diameter warhead allowed under some cold war treatyClose yet so far. You’re thinking of the Treaty of St Petersburg, which is I think actually the first international arms treat ever, dating back to the 1860s. It’s the reason dum-dums became taboo and also the reason 37mm became the bare minimum artillery shell caliber for while because it stipulated that an explosive projectile could not be below a certain weight.
>>65546868>internal pistonits crazy that its not the only internal piston grenade launcher at that
>>65546410They experimented with 30mm grenades
>>65546116
>>65546496>>65546310Grenade really should drag disposable barrel along with it then explode inside turning all that otherwise disposed quality hardened metal into useful fragmentation. Block the muzzle duh.
>>65546134Yeah to get a 40mm zipping along sort of ends up looking more like a Mk44 30mm bushmaster at the end of the day, with about that kind of horrible recoil impulse with the lunacy of a mortar mixed in with old timey field gun. The thought of my guys mixing up low pressure with high pressure from the Mk19's used to give me anxiety, if they could, the probably would try to fit some kind of unholy donkey dick sized 40mm into their launcher 'just to see' if they could
>>65546431>By modern definitions, the 40mm has about a 1 meter kill radius and a 3 meter wound radius.Put one into a window and everyone in that room is wounded and rapidly fucking off. Capable of penetrating light Soviet armor like BTRs and BMPs. Can mark targets for fire support with smokes.Seems good enough to me.
>>65548250Yes, it's better than nothing. You're not going to huck a hand grenade across a street into a window with any reliability, and using an LAW or AT4 in a room is slow and has backblast issues for your friends.But that doesn't make it a great weapon. It's just that everything else is worse.
>>65549312I bet that made sense in your head but by that definition a normal hand grenade is also a bad weapon.
>>65549383it is
>>65548231Donkey dick, you say?
>>65546431Them eye-talians had a hi-low doohickey that mirrored the rest of its ww2 efforts, the 60mm lanciabombe
>>65548231Iirc the chambers on the milkor m32 are juuuuust long enough that you can hammer in a high velocity 40mm casing
>>65546116120mm, cause I ain't BITCHMADE
>>65546843Christ, what was the weight on that thing?
>>65549455>Raython shares need to go upThere was the rubber baton rounds in the 1960's and 70's before they switched over to wooden baton, there was actually a big rubber black dick you could shoot at people. They were 1.5" diameter so there's a bit of girth there>>65549831That's sort of the problem, what shouldn't and couldn't left to idle hands for long enough will get something shoved in where it shouldn't ever goYou can't trust them either. They may seem almost smart at first with old timey wisdom and homestyle sayings, but soldiers are inherently made by the system to fuck up as much shit as they can
>>65551196AAI's submission was actually pretty decent, at least compared to the rest of the ones presented to the Army
More SPIW
>>65546116>why not 50mm?40mm ammo is thicc enough that it's unwieldy to carry around, at 50mm you're basically carrying a British / French / Jap light mortar around>>65546130>2 inches make less sense than 1.6 inchesfuck are you smoking dude
>>65551242The last two in the line look like really sweet guns, course what was asked for and a whole lot of other things was just too departed from what could realistically be expected. Which in some ways is part of learning and how far you think you can fiddle fuck physics
>>65546884I want a China Lake so much it's unreal
>>65553101Yeah, a couple of the SPIWs were bretty gud
>>65553101>M14 recoil: 2.65lb>M16 recoil: 1.16lb>AAI XM19: 0.39lb
More flechette designs
Alright I think I'm about done with SPIW stuff
Last one
