Is there any point of caseless guns?

Is there any point of caseless guns?
If only the Soviet Union lasted for another few years

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They certainly have some advantages, but thus far it seems that the disadvantages far exceed the advantages.

>Is there any point of caseless guns?
You have an easier time developing something retarded like 3 round burst at very high rof. Maybe when designing something less retarded you could change how magazines and feeding/ejecting works.
Goes without saying that you can carry more ammunition in less volume and weight.

>Is there any point of caseless guns?
no

not really until a good solution for cooking off is figured out.
that's still a problem, right?

Big ones actually, far lighter for more ammunition. A loaded G11 with like 3 45 round magazines is going to be about 9 and a half pounds. The smaller cartridges would lend themselves to more compact SBRs, theoretically and take up less space in general compared to a traditional cartridge.

I heard they actually worked out the kinks with the cook off issue and they made a compound that far exceeded the cook off threshold of even traditional cartridges.

nope

neat, color me informed

Yes, a significant reduction in weight and volume. LSAT's caseless 5.56 equivalent (pic related) was 51% lighter and 40% smaller for comparable performance.
Its also potentially cheaper - brass is the most expensive part of a round by a good margin. We've got good, established manufacturing for it, but it is still expensive in terms of materials and production costs. We have stockpiles of strategic materials to feed the industry if we need to. There are places to save money.

There are downsides though. The largest is basically that PCT exists now. It offers a lot of what caseless does - its 40% lighter and 30% smaller than brass cased. Caseless rifles are *slightly* hotter than regular weapon - close enough to be a negligible difference to brass cased (cook off is a different issue), but PCT is significantly cooler than brass. By trapping heat in the case rather than letting it conduct out into the chamber, and insulating its own propellant from a hot chamber you have good thermal performance. The G11 project got caseless to the point where it was competitive with brass cased for cook off - PCT shits all over brass cased.
Caseless isn't as fragile as people like to pretend but both traditionally Cased and PCT are still markedly more durable.
They're also chemically resistant - with the right polymer selection spilling cleaning chemicals or engine oil or whatever on to it doesn't matter and in some combinations it might for caseless. Both CL and PCT are waterproof though, to be clear.
And Brass, Steel, Polymer, those weird multipart repeatedly-reloadable cases that I can't remember the name of, they all obturate to seal the chamber. This is convenient. You can get around it (LSAT's CL was only 1/10th of lb heavier than the CT variant) but it is still a design limitation.

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The 3-rnd salvo burst increased hit probability at long range, and increased the probability of penetrating body armor at close range.

The real issue was durability. Drop a cased round and it'll be fine, drop a caseless and it could crack or deform ruining it or throwing off burn rate.

Handling loose rounds is really something that should be avoided in the field anyway if possible. The Germans had the right idea with issuing the ammunition in what were basically plastic stripper clips making any concerns about fragility moot. Sure it adds a trivial amount of increased volume for rounds being carried outside of magazines, but that was more than made up for by the increased efficiency of stacking square objects as opposed to round ones.

The heat was fixed.

Sealing the chamber and preventing explosions wasn't, by modern standards, but it was good enough for disposable cold war conscripts.

Dont see the point besides just being cool and different

>Handling loose rounds is really something that should be avoided in the field anyway if possible.
You don't get to choose under what conditions you handle your equipment in the field, user.

>The Germans had the right idea with issuing the ammunition in what were basically plastic stripper clips making any concerns about fragility moot.
Fragility includes solubility, and exposure to water was a MASSIVE problem discovered in their tests. Shelf-life was also hideous considering how even low humidity drastically damaged the consistency of the ammunition.

>Sure it adds a trivial amount of increased volume for rounds being carried outside of magazines, but-
There are no buts here. Having larger, fragile, perishable stores of ammunition makes logistics (the most problem-prone part of any military) infinitely more complicated for no discernible reason.

>preventing explosions wasn't,
You posted in the MR-C thread as well and were corrected by the user there. Its bullshit.
>Sealing the chamber
Gas jet cutting at the chamber was somewhat an issue but it was a long term one - it could cause a higher part replacement rate when there was not a proper seal.
They're not that fragile. Just dropping it isn't going to crack them.
The concern was more rough handling during transport - brass cased ammo can and routinely does get damaged during it, which means a higher percentage of caseless would.
>Fragility includes solubility, and exposure to water was a MASSIVE problem discovered in their tests
When they were using nitrocellulose. Which they stopped using almost a decade before the end of the ACR trials.

>You don't get to choose under what conditions you handle your equipment in the field, user.
You do if it's specifically issued in a way that prevents handling it in some non-prescribed way. Much in the same way belt fed weapons aren't issued with a limited number of belts with their users expected to reload them when they're empty, you can issue rifle ammunition in a way that the individual soldier isn't expected to handle loose rounds of ammunition. Shipping ammo already in stripper clips was a pretty standard practice when they were being fielded, this is just a return to that with a slightly larger emphasis on not deviating from using the provided device.

>Fragility includes solubility, and exposure to water was a MASSIVE problem discovered in their tests.
The plastic cases were water sealed and the ammunition itself was relatively resistant to water by the time the G11 made it into the hands of the Bundeswehr special forces that did field trials. It's not like Germany is a particularly dry country.

>for no discernible reason
The reason is it in theory gives you a massive battlefield advantage. The military is built around the concept of leveraging logistical superiority into tactical superiority. Having a big powerful supply chain doesn't do you any good if it's just sitting there.

Cookoff issues have mainly been fixed, but cookoffs were just a symptom of a bigger issue with the caseless weapon design, which is heat dissipation, since expended metallic cartridges take a large percentage of the heat from each explosion with them, as well as open bolt designs allowing further heat to dissipate quicker. Open bolt could arguably be added to a caseless rifle but that would add it's own unique disadvantages to an infantrymans standard issue rifle

There are a couple of solutions to this like designing your rifle to fire reliably at a temperature, but this can only go so far and tends to add a lot of weight to the firearm (due to things like heavier barrel). You can also do things like water cooling, but this is obviously a very niche solution for obvious reasons. Another solution is to essentially have swappable barrels or other form of heatsinks, but this adds additional complexity, overall weight and requires more gear to be carried by the individual rifleman.

You can shoot five rounds from a single pull of the trigger.

>or other form of heatsinks
The big brain move would be to find a way to safely dump heat into the magazine since those are being rotated on and off the gun anyway. If you could keep the heat isolated or low enough per magazine that there was no chance of anything cooking off, keeping them safe to handle, and the weight low it would be a pretty ideal solution.

caseless ammunition is already a thing among tank guns

Every single time.
First no. Brass cases take out a single digit percentage of heat from the rifle. You can do the math yourself if you like. All you need is the temperature of the case after firing, the weight and the specific heat of brass. Yes the effect exists, yes some heat is voided that way, but its basically negligible for this purpose.
>But user why was cook off such a problem then?
Because brass is thermally conductive and chamber temperature isn't perfectly even. Uneven chamber surfaces from defects or damage, variation in combustion etc can cause sections of the chamber wall to be hot enough to ignite the propellant even when the average chamber temperature is below the required threshold.
When the propellant block is in direct contact with the chamber wall, this means the small part contacting that hot section can get hot enough to ignite and start chain reaction, cooking off the round even when the average chamber temperature should mean it safe.
Brass helps this by being thermally conductive. Heat will spread around the case as it transfers from the chamber to the propellant, averaging out the temperature over the whole case, meaning your average chamber temperature is now directly representative of actual cook-off chance.
If you think about it, it makes sense because the G11 didn't have any significant heat issues after they switched to HITP.

Ok, retard