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01-10-2018, 19:19 #1
US Army might have found its new rifle
https://gazette.com/military/army-mi...5a0e767a4.html
If you want to see photos, open the link above.
Army might have found its new rifle in Colorado Springs garage
With four rifle bores cut into a single block of steel, new-fangled ammunition and a jam-proof electronic firing system, the creation of Colorado Springs inventor Martin Grier could revolutionize the Army's combat rifles.
By Tom Roeder tom.roeder@gazette.com
The Army adopted its battle rifle in 1963 and has spent 55 years looking for a replacement for the M-16 and its variants.
They might have found it in Martin Grier’s Colorado Springs garage. Grier, a self-described inventor who has worked at a local bed and breakfast, built the new “ribbon gun” with a hobbyist’s tools. It looks like a space-age toy drawn by a fifth-grader.
But goofy origins and cartoon-looks aside, this could be the gun of the future. The Army is studying Grier’s gun and has ordered a military-grade prototype.
The specifications are incredible, four 6 mm barrels cut side by side within one steel block. New ammunition blocks fired by electromagnetic actuators that could theoretically give the weapon a firing rate of 250 rounds per second.
And then there’s the feature no soldier would turn down. “It’s called a power shot,” Grier said.
That’s the shotgun feature of this sniper-shot, machine-assault gun that can send four bullets simultaneously whizzing toward an enemy at more than 2,500 mph.
It isn’t science fiction. He’s built the gun and patented the technology behind it. Now his garage-based company, FD munitions, is hoping the Army will buy it.
“A multibore firearm, with several bores within a single barrel, could potentially exhibit many of the advantages of a multibarrel design, while reducing the size, weight and complexity disadvantages,” Grier wrote in his 2016 patent application.
The “ribbon gun” can fire multiple rounds at once.
He got the idea in the 1990s after a day of shooting a .22-caliber rifle with his kids.
Modern weapons aren’t that far removed from the ones used by George Washington’s army, Grier says. They use a mechanical firing mechanism that’s prone to failure. And from muskets to the AK-47, they fire one bullet at a time.
“What if a rifle could fire more than one bullet at a time and be tied to the tools of the electronic age?” he wondered.
His first invention changed the ammunition. Rather than a single shell casing, his bullets are encapsulated in blocks.
In a block with four rounds, each round is aligned with a barrel. Grier prefers to call them “bores,” because all of the barrels are in a single piece of metal.
The second invention is behind the bullet. In other rifles, the trigger is connected to a mechanical trigger pin, which fires the gunpowder and sends the bullet flying.
The “ribbon gun” includes a new style of ammunition with bullets encased in a four-round block rather than individual casings.
In his weapon, the trigger is an electronic switch that sends a signal to an electromagnetic actuator behind the block of bullets. The four bullets in the block of rounds each has its actuator. That means you fire the rounds individually or simultaneously.
Selecting the “power shot” option fires all four bullets at once.
Getting this to work requires a new kind of machining to get the four rifle bores lined up. In a traditional weapon, this is accomplished with technology that would be familiar to 19th-century blacksmiths — a drill.
With Grier’s gun, the barrels are cut by electricity that runs between a pair of electrodes through a thin wire. The high-tech method offers an incredible degree of precision thanks to computer control.
The first rifle, which weighs about 6˝ pounds, slightly less than the M-16, hasn’t been cheap. Grier has poured more than $500,000 of his savings and investment by others into the working prototype.
But by having a functioning weapon, he has drawn a lot of attention.
Grier has been asked to create a prototype to Army specifications for testing. The Army will run the rifle through its paces to determine if his idea is worthy of the battlefield.
Grier said he finds motivation for the weapon in every attack on U.S. troops overseas. While the U.S. owns the skies and has satellites and missiles that are beyond compare, American troops have few advantages in a stand-up rifle fight.
“Our guys have the same junk weapons as our adversaries,” he said.
But Grier’s ribbon gun, which can work even if one of the four barrels fails, will change that, he said.
“I want to give them a Clint Eastwood kind of edge.”
Getting the weapon in the hands of troops could take years. The Army’s requirements are backed by grueling tests.
The last rifle that was seen as a possible replacement for the M-16 family of guns was tested for six years before the program was canceled in 2008.
The Army found that the XM-8, despite its high-tech looks, offered few advantages over the weapons troops have carried since Vietnam.
Grier is convinced that his weapon is so revolutionary that it will overcome Army foot-dragging.
“This is the future,” he said.
And he’s not apologizing for the rifle’s humble origins in a Colorado Springs garage.
“All the best stuff comes out of somebody’s garage,” he said.
Contact Tom Roeder: 636-0240
Twitter: @xroederx
View on https://gazette.com"Guns are just tools, the way they're used reflects the society they're apart of, if you don't like guns, blame it on society" ~Chris Kyle
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01-10-2018, 20:03 #2
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Re: US Army might have found its new rifle
2500mph = 3666fps.
This reminds me of the HK G11 which also could have revolutionized the firearms industry. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckler_%26_Koch_G11
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01-10-2018, 20:48 #3
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Re: US Army might have found its new rifle
Doesn't sound practical at all.
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02-10-2018, 06:54 #4
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Re: US Army might have found its new rifle
Interesting idea, but rather impractical. Reloading with a block of metal which contains four rounds at a time?????
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02-10-2018, 06:59 #5
Re: US Army might have found its new rifle
I’m sure the drawbacks will be addressed fairly quickly. This is incredibly interesting stuff.
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02-10-2018, 08:03 #6
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Re: US Army might have found its new rifle
The L5 ribbon gun is still VERY early days. Much of the wording in the original article, and subsequent interviews and articles are very much marketing talk, some of it cool and some a little bit stretched (to put it mildly).
More info here: https://www.popularmechanics.com/mil...rmy-prototype/
And the company website here: https://www.fdmunitions.com/
To progress, the concept has first to overcome it's own basic flaw, the assumption that US infantry has fallen behind the rest of the world in term of basic infantry rifle technology (it has not), and that such a disadvantage can be better addressed by adding rate of fire options, as opposed to addressing caliber.
Very very early days.
Pre-sonogram days
Counting daddy's swimmers days.
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02-10-2018, 08:31 #7
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Re: US Army might have found its new rifle
if he got this far on his own capital
imagine what he can do with gvovernment backing and funding
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02-10-2018, 08:37 #8
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Re: US Army might have found its new rifle
Project SALVO back from the dead!
The concept looks good on paper to those that believe hits on target can be achieved by statistical models... While others have proven that more hits in shorter units of time can be achieved on MULTIPLE targets using aimed single shots.
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02-10-2018, 09:14 #9
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Re: US Army might have found its new rifle
I can see it being rejected based on the retooling costs and shipping weight for the ammunition, without the technical problems ever being looked at.
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02-10-2018, 09:18 #10
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