Current developments with caseless ammo?

Not as far as I know.

Seems like the thing these days are Textron's "telescoped" rounds or more conventional rounds with two-piece "hybrid" cases.

I believe caseless Ammo is going to come approximately the same time as flying cars. By the way I’ve been reading since 1970 that said cars are right around the corner. How long would the walls of the chamber last with burning powder. Takes throat erosion to a whole new level. LOL

This is one of the most interesting presentations I have read on caseless ammunition:

Caseless Ammunition Small Arms, The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

Because I have zero experience with caseless ammunition, I only know about caseless ammunition from pictures and presentations.



I think the trend appears to have gone back to providing a gas sealing case, but a lighter one. Notice the color of the case head, and aluminum case head is cast or woven into these light weight cartridges. Of course the plastic is not strong enough to provide a gas seal at the temperatures and pressures these cartridges operate at.






This is an earlier, and failed concept. What has caused these experiments to fail is separation of the plastic upper with the metallic case head. If the plastic stays in the chamber, it creates a jam!





This is recent and I wonder how well it works. And I wonder if the plastic upper is consumable. If that plastic would burn and blow out the tube, leaving the brass case head to extract, that would be good. If it does not, I wonder how they fixed the joint between polymer upper and the brass case head.




I wonder how an Ackleyite would explain how these cases function. P.O. Ackley was a charlatan, a snake oil salesman, his main claim to fame is he could operate his Ackley Improved cartridges at 15,000 psia over SAAMI specs because straight cases reduced bolt thrust. While P.O has gone down to where the Goblins go, he still has a Cult following. What you observe that Ackleyites seem to think of a case as a solid wedge. And they more or less seem to think that the barrel is puking the case out. More taper would mean better puking. So, when there is a plastic front, how does that fit into their wedge theory?

And then, caseless ammunition does not have a case.

Casefull said:

I believe caseless Ammo is going to come approximately the same time as flying cars. By the way I’ve been reading since 1970 that said cars are right around the corner. How long would the walls of the chamber last with burning powder. Takes throat erosion to a whole new level. LOL

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We are always 50 years away from a successful Fuel Cell automobile. And I heard that, 50 years ago, and they were right.

One of the leading gun magazines had an article on the new ammo. The tester also fired belts of it from a machine gun (M249?) and had no malfunctions. He chuckled in that the "brass" was not re-loadable and great for dumping on rebel ground where it could not be used against us.

Someone’s absolutely going to wildcat a stubby little autoloader cartridge out of those case head remnants, you watch

Heat does wonderful things once transferred to surrounding metals and more rounds fired in quick succession i.e. military app equals transfer. Fantastic plastic / polymer / whatever fused to the inside of your chamber. Wonderful cleaning project, and absolutely necessary or future rounds would not chamber. Of course the chamber could be post manufactured with a little less tolerances. But that would bring the case head gas seal problem all over again. Actual use in civilian would probably maybe someday work, less round counts. I do not see how the heat problem can be / could be overcome, I do not have a degree in metallurgy but one in common sense I guess.

I M Skeptical. A Doubter. Chase rabbit down hole. Rinse, wash, repeat.

Caseless is perfectly viable, functionally.
Militarily, commercially, financially, or industrially? Maybe not. At least not yet.

The heat wouldn't really be much of a problem... for mounted weapons. No issue designing in a heat sink and fan or liquid cooling system; many machine guns WW2 and before use water cooling. We could certainly do better with today's metallurgy and engineering. But it will be tomorrow's that allow us to put caseless rifles into soldiers' hands.
But for the foreseeable future, the extra cost, weight of cooling equipment, and retooling manufacturing might outdo the weight- and cost-saving measures.

IMO the important steps before caseless will be telescoping and partially-cased ammunition. Both much easier to make actually function, and telescoping rounds are more a matter of re-engineering the ammunition, not the weapon systems.

I have similar discussions with one of my sons concerning the colonization of space. I always tell him that if it doesn’t make sense commercially, i.e. can you make money doing it, it will never happen.
I believe there are similarities to that idea with so-called caseless Ammo. The minor benefits are totally outweighed but what it would take to make it happen.

Obturation has been the problem with caseless, that, and case debris, going all the way back to needle-fire arms.

H&K spent years trying to solve the riddle, and could never quite find an elegant cure. The G11 was going to be a Version 1.0 and get beta tested in the field. Except the Wall came down, and the Germans were saddled with an entire nation's worth of Kalashnikov rifles. So much for invention, then.

The hybrid cases are not meant to be combustible, per se. They are an attempt at weight saving. They have to resist rough handling and being stored from -20º to 40ºC. Military usage never takes reuse into consideration, reliability and repeatability are far more important for military ammo.

None of which much translates into non-military use.

German research pointed towards using solid rocket fuel, as it can be moulded, is relatively stable. The problem was in chamber residue. Which becomes an issue for jamming a next round in. Cracking or crumbling the next round is not good, since it indexes the round to the barrel.

The number one major issue, in practice, rather than theory, is that there's no way to remove a loaded round other than be discharging it. There's nothing to lock open and show clear. In a military setting, that's an ongoing invitation for ND. (If that scans odd, remember that the "point" of caseless is to have nothing to eject, so, no extractor, o ejector, no ejection port.)

Early on, Textron had both plastic cased and caseless versions of telescoped cartridges. The caseless seems to have fallen by the wayside.
Gendye has a mostly plastic neckless cartridge.
Sig has a steel head on brass body to take the high pressure necessary to get .270 ballistics out of a 51mm case in a 16" barrel.

Jim Watson said:

Early on, Textron had both plastic cased and caseless versions of telescoped cartridges. The caseless seems to have fallen by the wayside.
Gendye has a mostly plastic neckless cartridge.
Sig has a steel head on brass body to take the high pressure necessary to get .270 ballistics out of a 51mm case in a 16" barrel.

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I was reading about that, my first thought was how painfully loud that might be to the soldier. Imagine 80k psi out of a 16” barrel without ears

DoubleMag said:

I do not see how the heat problem can be / could be overcome, I do not have a degree in metallurgy but one in common sense I guess.

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Data is out there about the amount of heat transferred to a weapon, and what you find, thermal management is an extremely difficult problem. At some round count the weapon will over heat. There are limits to heat transfer with conduction. The Lewis gun had barrel fins and the upper handguard was supposed to draw air up and out, but the cost was not worth whatever extra cooling it gave. I don't know if a Vickers could be fired indefinitely if the water tank is always filled up. I heard stories of water cooled WW1 machine guns firing for hours, but when the firing stopped, the weapons more or less welded shut.

Air cooled weapons, heat transfer to air is worse. The Army does fire 6000 lot acceptance of rebuilt weapons at Anniston Army Depot. Between magazine changes, an air hose stuck in the chamber and cool air is blown up the barrel. That magazine is fired full auto. That is apparently enough cooling to keep cartridges from auto combusting during full auto. However, a jam, might have to wait till the round cooks off. I do know the barrel is so hot, that when a stand worker stuck an OBI into the chamber, it melted and they had to repeat the whole test again.

A shooting bud of mine, Master Sergent Polk, he fought in Korea and Vietnam with the USMC. We were pulling targets and some guy on a range adjacent was ripping off belt after belt with a 1919 machine gun. M Sgt Polk grimaced and said something like "amateurs". M Sgt Polk told me, that you never run a weapon hot in combat. It will malfunction.

whm1974 said:

The G11 from a video I've watched show that you could turn the action 90 degrees after removing magazine and the loaded round will drop right out of the chamber.

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Yes, that's correct. The heart of the G11 was a rotary fitting that was blind-bored to fit the round (other than firing pin channel).
Magazine spits them out, base down into the rotary. Which is then rotated to align to the barrel for firing. The speed of being able to simply rotate a disk, without any reciprocal action is a key part of the "burst" feature. Which was three rounds at around 1100 rpm, so that the recoil impulses were reduced to a single "push." (IIRC, they were keeping all three shots on a 30cm target at 300m.)
And, yes, if you pulled the top-mounted magazine out, and inverted the weapon and cycled it, the loaded round would slide out. Of a clean weapon.
The working version looked like this:

That block is around 10x10x33mm. The plastic "neck" gave you obturation when fired, and offered something to prize out of the rotating disk. I have been told this was akin to fishing cases out of bullpup actions--you are reaching deep into places somewhat blindly. Apparently, Bundeswehr was going to include a tool with a shim on it, that would slide in and catch the recess on the case.

The G11 was going to want a Manual of Arms that would have been unique. There's no bolt to lock open. Running the charging handle just spins the action disc (and cocks the striker/hammer). No ejection port to open, either. So, "Inspection Arms" (Inspektionarmes []) would be very odd, no action to "open," no ejection port to look into.

But, such things are common with the lead bit of engineering, too,
This is Herr Benz' first automobile

Edit to fix image link

whm1974 said:

And where is engine of that tricycle? Electric powered?

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It was, as I remember, a tiny alcohol-fueled putt-putt behind the seat, with some gears to a flyshaft. But, I could be wrong in that, I just remember the image as a contrast to a "K" wagon []

Casefull said:

I have similar discussions with one of my sons concerning the colonization of space. I always tell him that if it doesn’t make sense commercially, i.e. can you make money doing it, it will never happen.
I believe there are similarities to that idea with so-called caseless Ammo. The minor benefits are totally outweighed but what it would take to make it happen.

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The ash heap of history is filled with great ideas that failed due to one tiny parameter. And, no one remembers failures, or what caused the failure. This is one of the doom's of mankind. We repeat the failures of the past.

TheFirearmBlog has a Textron interview:

https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog...gram-history-ammunition-technical-discussion/

They did a lot of work on caseless rounds before going with the telescoped case. They found the solvent-based process involved environmentally difficult and couldn't get costs down far enough.

https://discover.dtic.mil/results/?q=Caseless ammo

The contract looks like the same old cased ammo.

Olin Corp., East Alton, Illinois, was awarded a $90,880,484 modification (P00008) to contract W52P1J-16-C-0003 for 5.56 millimeter, 7.62 millimeter, and caliber .50, small caliber ammunition cartridges. Work will be performed in Oxford, Mississippi, with an estimated completion date of July 31, 2018. Fiscal 2015, 2016, and 2017 other funds in the combined amount of $90,880,484 were obligated at the time of the award. Army Contracting Command, Rock Island, Illinois, is the contracting activity.

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https://search.defense.gov/search?utf8=✓&affiliate=defense_gov&query=5.56&commit=Search

Same M4

FN America LLC, Columbia, South Carolina, was awarded a $119,216,309 firm-fixed-price contract for M4/M4A1 carbine. Bids were solicited via the internet with six received. Work locations and funding will be determined with each order, with an estimated completion date of Jan. 30, 2025. U.S. Army Contracting Command, New Jersey, is the contracting activity (W15QKN-20-D-0006).

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Colt Defense LLC, West Hartford, Connecticut (15QKN-15-D-0102); and FN America LLC, Columbia, South Carolina (W15QKN-15-D-0072), were awarded a $212,000,000 firm-fixed-price multi-year contract for M4 and M4A1 carbines for the Army and others, with an estimated completion date of Sept. 24, 2020. Bids were solicited via the Internet with six received. Funding and work location will be determined with each order. Army Contracting Command, Picatinny Arsenal, New Jersey, is the contracting activity.

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Obturation over single rounds in itself isn't very difficult. Heck, I've sketched out half a dozen designs myself.
Relatively low-durometer tapered polymer sealing faces, spring steel pressure rings in a flared chamber opening, brass or thin spring steel bolt heads that are essentially half a cartridge...
And they could all be made to work just fine, with modern materials.
But they would all work briefly. The issue isn't so much to get it working (heck, I could whip up a bolt gun with sealing rings over a long weekend), it's to get it working reliably enough--which means being able to clear an issue, which is hard when the gun itself has to be the seal--and durable enough that you won't have guns transitioning from 'minor problem' to 'unusable' in less than a magazine in the field, and need serious armorer attention to get working again. Quickly and constantly.
It can happen. IMO it will happen, eventually. But it's going to be a long time.