Better question, which one could you pop open in the field and clean quickly? The thing with mechanical actions is while they do allow things to get inside of them, they also are 'self cleaning' to a degree. They clear themselves. Meanwhile, a little bit of corrosion will put an electrically controlled trigger out of commission until the entire trigger group is replaced. While I can see some use for electronic firing controls, it's limited, and until the tech is cheap and reliable enough to really be useful in a mass produced infantry rifle, why bother adopting it now?
If you knew anything about the history of military arms procurement, especially naval arms procurement it's that being the first to adopt something doesn't mean it's something worth adopting, or that you'll get the version of it that'll be of use. Modern military equipment is for the most part cold war based because that's when the incentive to risk all of that was around and around in spades. Governments were willing to throw money at whatever idea sounded good because it might be the edge. That's not the case now, and when you have proven hardware and a lot of it, upgrading that hardware is much more appealing than adopting a new model, especially when the new model isn't offering much over the currently planned upgrades.
You're absolutely right. You
don't want something that you have to spray down with Lectra Clean in order to get exposed, oxidized contacts to work again.
Good thing we have induction chargers. No part of the system needs any exposed electrical contacts at all. Just snap a magnetic puck to the pistol grip, same as the kind you use to charge a phone or smart watch, and let the induction coil juice up the completely sealed lithium-polymer battery.
As for the actual initiation of the round, rather than having something like an electrical contact in the bolt face, why not just have an induction coil that circles the chamber instead? Metal Storm guns used the
same exact thing.
No contacts. None. Everything completely sealed up. Well, maybe a backup charge port with a rubber plug, or something, as a second option. Otherwise, nothing to get oxidized, because it's all sealed.
It would work great with a ballistic computer, like TrackingPoint, because the lock time would be instantaneous, making it extremely precise. Plus, you could incorporate security features into it, too, like preventing the electronic trigger from being operated unless the shooter uses a fingerprint scanner or something similar, like a wireless activation code in a watch or something.
By the way, I got around to reading your shitshow ideas on how IFVs should work. By hell your designs are fucking exceptional high profile no sloped garbage that would get yeeted by any anti tank worth a shit. Your systems ideas also prove why you're as bad at gun sperging as you are at medicine.
Relying on robotic and drone support vehicles as a backbone if at all? Fucking reviving assault guns when you can just have an IFV variant or an airstrike? Assuming that collateral can just be ignored by spamming more drones? Wanting to utterly demolish any ability to easily supply an army by reintroducing light underarmored shit and glorified tanks? ACTUALLY believing China on anything they claim they can do?
Jesus Christ, just lick your doorknobs.
High profile, no sloped?
First of all, I have a personal disdain for that specific paradigm in AFV design.
Secondly, as you might recall, the Army came
this close to adopting what is essentially a very fancy, very heavy Bradley to fulfill every role imaginable, and it was called the Mounted Combat System.
It was going to be just as tall as a Bradley, but weigh 40 fucking tons.
archived 3 May 2013 01:50:18 UTC
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They wanted to replace both the Bradley
and the Abrams with that tall, heavy, under-protected, no-sloped heap of garbage. Just FYI.
Third, I have seen propositions as pants-on-head retarded as adopting a variant of the GCV that was mine-proof and weighed
84 motherfucking tons while only providing as much firepower as an IFV.
archived 12 Apr 2020 23:02:16 UTC
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A C-5 Galaxy could move a grand total of maybe
one of these at a time. Now that's retarded.
And that's still not nearly as retarded as the Stryker MGS, which jams all the time and needs a crew member to climb onto the outside to clear it.
A taxonomy of armored vehicles, volume two—the Mobile Gun System
medium.com
archived 1 Jul 2014 19:23:40 UTC
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It's literally just the turret ripped off the Teledyne Expeditionary Tank from the canceled AGS program and stuffed on top of an 8x8 armored car. The chassis can't handle the weight, and the turret is unreliable garbage.
To acquire an Airborne Light Tank, the US Army established the Armored Gun System requirement. Among the competing designs was the Teledyne Vehicle Systems Expeditionary Tank.
www.military-today.com
archived 28 Jan 2013 19:21:39 UTC
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The Army wants a light tank so badly, the M8 Buford AGS is getting dusted off under a new name:
Worried about Russia, the service is rushing to get these vehicles, but it has had big trouble with acquiring little tanks in the past.
www.thedrive.com
archived 12 Apr 2020 23:12:23 UTC
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The Army and the troops are basically
begging for a fire support vehicle to support the infantry with direct fires and remove bunkers and ambushers, and they keep getting shafted.
Well, where the hell is it?
Nowhere in the linked article did it say anything about the majority of MRAPs being scrapped. The closest it come is, 'even going so far as to shred thousands in Afghanistan instead of sending them home.' Thousands out of somewhere north of 25,000 is not a majority. They also never mention what the DoD is doing with the, probably thousands, IED damaged vehicles in Afghanistan. Really makes you thonk. Not you, David.
Most of the MRAPs went to Afghanistan. Most of the IED attacks happened in Afghanistan. Most of the country is a series of mountain valleys. This shit is not hard to figure out.
But that's not what the articles I saw said.
Even with thousands of vehicles sitting in warehouses awaiting the next conflict, the MRAPs that will remain in the force represent only one third of the 25,000the Pentagon bought since 2007, costing $50 billion.
They didn't say "thousands out of 25,000". They said that, of 25,000 MRAPs ordered,
one-third would remain in service. As in, 8500 would remain in service, while the remaining 16.5k vehicles would be scrapped.
What a waste. If they have enough money to burn to turn a bunch of million-dollar MRAPs into $12,000 of razorblades, the Army could just give
me some of that fucking steel for my projects.
David this is why I know you are a stupid person. You find solutions to problems no one has and fail to consider any problems your solutions create. You want to add a battery pack to tank capable of 1 MW(1500 hp ~ 1120 kW) of peak draw. That is a power grid-sized battery.
That used to be true. Batteries have shrunk. A lot. A LiPo battery capable of putting out a megawatt for an hour would be about 4.5 cubic meters and weigh approximately 5.4 metric tons, and would put out a peak output of up to 2.3 megawatts. The internal volume of an M1 Abrams is about 50 cubic meters. In other words, a battery bank that could do the job would occupy about 1/10th of the internal volume of a typical MBT. I mean, the hull could be made 1/10th fatter to compensate.
I
do actually think about the engineering numbers.
It
could be a fire hazard if it took a bad hit. Don't want your fancy diesel-electric tank to go up in smoke like a Galaxy Note 7.
Diesel-electric is not a hybrid system. There is only one source of power, therefore it can't be a hybrid power system. Diesel-electric has been a viable power system for off road vehicles since the 50s. Look at any of the stuff R. G. Letourneau built. The man hated hydraulics. Considering what they were working with at the time, I don't blame him.
Actually, what I am describing is a type of hybrid. It's a hybrid between diesel-electric and battery-electric. As in, it can shift from both driving the motors and charging the batteries with a generator, to disabling the generator and discharging the batteries to drive the motors. That is a hybrid.
Likewise, the GCV was referred to as a hybrid because it can function in either engine-electric or battery-electric modes:
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I'm looking at converting my old jeep to a diesel-electric at some point. All the torque of electric, all the fuel efficiency of a well-tuned 4banger running at its best speed, and I could theoretically claim the tax breaks for running a "hybrid" - assuming they still exist - because it has an electric motor on the drivetrain. That's a few years off, though...
You know what's amazing? The USAF is still flying B52s that were built in the late 50s. In fact a significant proportion of the USAF active fleet is based on designs that are north of 40 years old, because they fucking work. Half the the United States Navy is 40 or more years old, and a great deal of most reliable equipment fielded by the US army is of a similar pedigree. Turns out that the best approach to combined arms is to maintain and upgrade existing, reliable, proven platforms whilst introducing new platforms only when needed, rather than building new shit every time some train-obsessed autist demands it. The former gets you the Abrams, the M16, and the B52. The latter gets you the fucking F35 and the Litoral Combat Ship project.
The LCS program is a great big pile of crap. My father was asked if he wanted to do documentation on the
Freedom-class, and he declined.
The
Independence-class, the Austal trimaran, had all kinds of problems. They had severe galvanic corrosion in their waterjets and they completely rotted away. Dissolved into the drink.
The Navy’s newest warship is slowly disappearing, one molecule at a time. This isn’t a sequel to the 1984 sci-fi flick The Philadelphia Experiment, in which a Navy destroyer-escort vanishes through a time portal in Pennsylvania only to reappear in Nevada, 40 years later. No, this time the...
www.wired.com
archived 31 Jul 2016 01:13:40 UTC
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Fun fact, I've actually been within spitting distance of an LCS-2 when it was in a civilian shipyard.
I snapped some photos because they look cool, but other than that, they're a pile of shit.
