Comments by "" (@neutronalchemist3241) on "Forgotten Weapons"
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@plasticbeetle6209 The trouble with the M249 belt, as described in a Marine report, is that, when it jams (that, with any automatic belt fed weapon is not a question of "if", nor of "when", but of "how often"), the gunner opens the action to clear the jam, and the belt falls into the box. At that point the gunner, other than clearing the jam, has to decide if open the box and search for the end of the belt to use the rest of it, or discard the box and use another one of his limited supply.
While he performs all those actions, he's not supporting the squad and he's defenseless.
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Top tier design, terrible execution.
Motivations vary. On one side, the Santa Barbara Arsenal had not mass produced anything for decades before the AMELI (the problem with state-owned arsenals, that made so they went out of fashion, except for maintenance. You can’t really stop and resume, at years distance, making firearms, and expect acceptable quality standards, or to iron-out all the industrialization problems). See similar problems for the British SA80 rifle (but there the design was flawed also).
On the other, by some account, CETME deceived the government. To make the weapons up to spec with the (by any account) exceptional prototypes they would have costed much more than the government wanted to spend. They had to reduce the costs of the individual weapon in production by 40%, and so the disaster was served.
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@ineednochannelyoutube5384 We have a first hand explanation in Maj. Luigi Gucci book "Armi portatili" year 1915, p.58. It's about the Carcano semiauto conversion, that had been shown here https://youtu.be/jrp7QLSlKD4
The reason was that, altough the rifle was perfectly functional, and costed way less than a new semiauto rifle, in adopting a semiauto rifle for all the army, the price of the rifle was, in the end, marginal in respect to the price of the logistic. IE the price of a brand new semiauto rifle, not a conversion, was estimated in 60L, that of a single Carcano cartridge was 0.1L, so a semiauto rifle costed like 600 cartridges. So it made little sense to adopt a solution that, "however ingenious, simple and well designed is, it's anyway a stopgap and, as such, it can't fully comply to all the requirements of an excellent infantry semiautomatic rifle."
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Nor this, nor the directly derived Hakim/Rasheed, nor the MAS49/56 are "direct impingment" actions.
Direct impingment doesn't exist. No rifle action ever was actuated simply by the "kick" of the gasses.
In Elklund's patent (mind that the guy's main job was to design hydraulic pumps, he knew a thing or two about pressure) this is clearly described as a PISTON action. The "open tube" is actually a piston, and it has the diameter of a piston, because a piston works thanks to pressure X surface area. That's why the external diameters of the "open tubes" of the Ljugman and MAS49/56 are so much larger than the gas key of an AR15 (despite the internal gas pipe being practically the same). Because they need surface area for the pressure to work.
The only difference between this, or that of the MAS49/56, action, and that of the Mini14, IE, is the location of the piston and cylinder.
"direct impingement" is how Stoner described Elklund's action in his own patent, to artifically differentiate it from it's "internal piston" action.
In reality, the ONLY thing that's patented in Stoner's patent is that, in his design, the gasses are in direct contact with the bolt (while, in Elklund's patent, they are in contact with the bolt carrier, not the bolt).
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@hendriktonisson2915 The names are misleading here. The Breda 37 had not been adopted in 1937, and the Fiat-Revelli 1914/35 had not been adopted in 1935.
1935 is the year when it had been adopted the ammo, "Cartuccia per mitragliatrice Mod. 1935" (cartridge for machine-gun mod. 1935).
The Breda 37, a scaled down version of the 20mm Breda 20/65 (1935), that was a scaled down version of the 37mm Breda 37/54 (1932), both tray-fed, had been adopted, first by the Navy, in 1936 (and even the production started in 1936), and infact it had been first called Breda 36, and the early boxes of ammos were marked Breda 36.
The Fiat-Revelli M1914/35 had not been made by FIAT, that quit manufacturing small arms in 1930. It was a conversion made by MBT. I don't know when they exactly started converting old WWI MGs, but it's higly improbable they came up with the complete conversion and the belt in 1935. The instruction manual of the gun is dated 1937.
So that belt simply didn't exist when the Breda 37 had been designed.
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