Is caseless ammo a viable option now?

[benEzra]

A thought about the hot cases... How hot would a chamber get if the powder wasn't inside a metal container? Does the brass or steel case cause heat retention? Is the case part of the problem?

The combustion temperature inside the case is in excess of 1000 degrees fahrenheit. If you do away with the case, you have 1000-degree gases at 50,000+ psi directly against your chamber walls, and will heat them far more effectively than brass will.

With a semiauto, the case breaks contact with the chamber walls within a few tens of milliseconds after the round is fired, so that the brass case doesn't get to transfer much heat to the chamber. Plastic cases transfer even less (being an insulator). Both transfer much less heat than a caseless round would.

Couldn't you do away with the attached propellant entirely? An air rifle uses compressed air. Why not an internal combustion cylinder? Combine fuel and air behind a hollow based bullet, add spark, and off it goes! Add a second barrel and piston, and crankshaft, and they can work together. I can see this working first on a Vulcan or a Gatling-type.

If you have trouble picturing it, think of a potato gun with military applications!

Could be done, but the beauty of the current cartridge system is that as long as you have cartridges, you are good to go (don't have to worry about the fuel supply in the stock running out).

Also, with liquid or gaseous propellants, it's tough to get them to burn slowly enough to keep chamber pressures down. Solid propellants are designed to surface-burn relatively gradually, producing a smoother pressure pulse; a gaseous propellant gives you a detonation instead, which would be good for only the lightest projectiles and wouldn't work very well for firearms.

 

[whm1974]

The VPC was all in a bunch about the thing, apparently forgetting that the Black Magic Juju of the Voere really doesn't do anything that a shell catcher and a litter bag doesn't do as well.

Or a revolver for that matter. I may be wrong but wouldn't the spent bullet be more important then the empty brass?

-Bill

 

[Hawk]

Revolver, single shot, good housekeeping: lotsa ways of not leaving behind a case. Most of their concerns over the VEC-91 would presumably be shared by cap and ball revolvers. Quick! write your congressman to halt the flood of Colt Walker replicas - available without a permit even in New York!!!

Uberti: the new SNS demon.

Doesn't take much to twist the VPC. On the brighter side, I would've never found the VEC-91 without their press release scoring so high in the search engines.