wmartin@ST-LOUIS-EMH2.ARMY.MIL (Will Martin -- AMXAL-RI) (04/26/89)
From: Will Martin -- AMXAL-RI <wmartin@ST-LOUIS-EMH2.ARMY.MIL> Back in January, I sent a posting, title as above, with some info gleaned from an issue of a military-goods magazine called Armada International. One of the items I described was a really strange-looking individual weapon from FN Herstal called the "P90". There was just a picture and brief caption in that issue so I couldn't give much detail. Well, in today's mail, what should appear but the April/May issue of that same magazine, and this one discusses the weapon in much more depth. Here's the info: This is in an article entitled, "A Look At Some Novel Infantry Weapons -- An Embarasssment of Riches?" by Walter Stone. [Begins with a discussion of how to arm the second-line soldier who has other things to carry besides a rifle. Two separate development efforts came up with rather similar solutions.] "Fabrique National Herstal looked at this problem about three years ago [which] led them to look more closely at the conventional pistol and submachine gun ammunition in current use ... which brought them to the final decision 'to introduce a new calibre which will advantageously replace the obsolescent 9 X 19 mm Parabellum ammunition'." "The result of their thinking is 'Project 90', a 'personal weapon' resembling a small submachine gun and firing an entirely new 5.7 X 28 mm cartridge. The weapon is formed from plastic, with a thumbhole stock which allows a good grip while holding the weapon along the crook of the elbow. [Side note -- that is, held like the Bushmaster pistol.] The 50-round magazine slides in horizontally, above the barrel, with the rounds lying at 90 degrees to the axis of the barrel. The feed mechanism takes the round and turns it through 90 degrees until it is in line with the chamber and then feeds it down in front of the bolt. The mechanism is blowback, firing from a closed bolt, and the weapon is fully ambidextrous, with the safety, cocking lever and change lever duplicated on both sides of the receiver. It looks as if it will make an excellent 'instinctive' weapon, since it will virtually become part of the man's forearm. It is compact enough to be used single-handed in an emergency, but designed so that a more deliberate aiming stance can be taken when time permits." [Note: I still can't figure out the ejection direction from the photo shown. It doesn't appear to be downward, so it can't be totally ambidextrous if the user has to adjust it to determne which side cases eject from... Will] "FN claim that the 5.7mm bullet will defeat a standard steel helmet at 150 meters range and penetrate 48 layers of Kevlar at 50 meters. It is also claimed to have three times the stopping power of the 9mm Parabellum bullet and yet have a recoil impulse which is one-third that of the 5.56mm rifle round and less than two-thirds of the 9mm round. The effective range of the weapon/ammunition combination is said to be 150 meters." "...a similar weapon developed by GIAT in response to a French Army request for a personal weapon. Although GIAT had done their arithmetic independently of FN, they came up with almost the same solution, a handy little automatic weapon firing a 5.7 X 25 mm cartridge, only 3mm shorter than the FN design but using the same calibre to attain what is probably the same ballistic result. The weapon has yet to be developed in its final form, but one possible solution shown was a submachinegun-like device with two pistol grips and triggers. The weapon is held by the two grips and fired with the rear trigger for quick action, while for more deliberate work the rear grip acts as a shoulder stock and the front trigger fires the weapon." Other items mentioned: Steyr Mannlicher planned to unveil a new "Tactical Machine Pistol" at the Shot Show. This will be in regular 9mm and also in 10mm. They will also have a new "Special Purpose Pistol" in both 9mm & 10mm -- no info yet on just what these will look like. [Also, since this text must have been written before all the recent disgustingness on the legislative/legal front in the US, it may be that they will NOT have this sort of thing at the Shot Show; they may well not be able to bring them into the country!] HK presented a paper at the Small Arms Symposium of the American Defense Preparedness Assn in September in Quantico on a light machine gun firing the same caseless ammo used in the G11 rifle. There have been questions as to the suitability of caseless ammo in sustained-rates-of-fire weapons like machine guns. "Heckler & Koch appear to have thought up an entirely different mechanism for their proposed machine-gun. As with the G11 the barrel and breech reciprocate inside an outer casing, and in the proposed design the breech mechanism is a three-chambered revolver cylinder. This is indexed round by the recoil motion of the barrel/breech assembly, and at each rearward stroke a fresh round is fed into an empty cylinder chamber. HK state that this system has been selected in order to increase the number of rounds which can be fired before the "cook-off threshold" is reached, the point at which the heat of the chamber causes the cartridge to explode. Since the chamber is the significant hot spot, having three chambers allows two to be cooling down at any given moment. The feed system has come in for some rigorous examination. The geometry of the encapsulated caseless cartridge -- a simple rectangle -- gives the designer a certain scope which the conventional cased round denies him, and together with the size of the caseless round allows the packing of a considerable number into a very small space. After considering the conventional placement of magazines, the decision was taken to place the ammunition supply inside the weapon's butt. It has proved possible to pack 300 caseless rounds into the hollow plastic butt. The feed mechanism is part of the rifle, and the position of the magazine allows feed with very little mechanical complication. Reloading is done by simply hinging the butt down, rather like a break-open shotgun, dropping a pre-packed magazine into the butt. HK .. have produced a working hardware model of the ammunition feed system, and have fired a fully functional breech and loading system. Most recent information is that they are now conducting firings to determine the cook-off threshold." My, my... shades of the Spencer carbine from the Civil War and the other interesting magazine-in-butt designs from the 1800's... And the multi-chamber idea is a lot like the Dardick from the 50's. There may be no new ideas under the sun, but we CAN dump the old ones into a hat and shuffle them up and come up with new combinations! :-) Regards, and I hope you enjoyed reading this! Will Martin US Army Materiel Command CSDA, St. Louis, MO