Future Warrior
- Thread starter Shadow Reaper
- Start date
Richard Bong
Space Marshal
My recommendation is to spend a couple of days on the range before buying one.
Remember, the difference between you, as a hunter, sneaking and a grunt sneaking, is the amount of gear grunts have to carry. Reloading at further from the body is easier, due to gear. That even applies to a pump shotgun.
Funny thing, I found a bullpup more difficult to bring up and more difficult to swing onto target. The muscle memory is all wrong.
The problem with the 5.56 armor piercing is it only works to about 100 yards. The standard bullet is 55 grains and the armor piercing with a tungsten rod is over 100. It’s just too light a round.
I believe the problem with the .308 is it requires a larger boldface, so you are carrying a medium action like the M10 that soldiers love to hate, and the much larger casing diameter limits you to 20 round mags.
The 6 Max uses the same, small rifle action and boldface as the 5.56, but with a larger, untapered case. It fits 35 grains bang powder instead of 29, which is a significant step up, and shoots bullets from 90-104 grains. So you have more energy but not so much that you get stiff recoil and heavier rifles and ammo.
The Sig XM-7 and Fury ammo requires a medium bolt face and action, and its larger diameter gives you 20 round mags. Soldiers hate it.
The .308 is a great round, but .24 (6 Max) ballistics are far, far better down range, and they recoil much less.
I believe the problem with the .308 is it requires a larger boldface, so you are carrying a medium action like the M10 that soldiers love to hate, and the much larger casing diameter limits you to 20 round mags.
The 6 Max uses the same, small rifle action and boldface as the 5.56, but with a larger, untapered case. It fits 35 grains bang powder instead of 29, which is a significant step up, and shoots bullets from 90-104 grains. So you have more energy but not so much that you get stiff recoil and heavier rifles and ammo.
The Sig XM-7 and Fury ammo requires a medium bolt face and action, and its larger diameter gives you 20 round mags. Soldiers hate it.
The .308 is a great round, but .24 (6 Max) ballistics are far, far better down range, and they recoil much less.
Richard Bong
Space Marshal
The .308 is already in the inventory, is already mass produced and isn't proprietary. The .308 has an effective range of 1000+ M so meets the specification. It also punches through the side armor of light armored vehicles so body armor isn't an issue. It has lots of proven platforms.
Everything I've seen of the SIG say the problems are reliability and recoil. Reliability also doomed the SCAR.
And as a former NCO if I can see you at 1000m that means you can see me. At that range I'm not going to fire, I'm going to make it rain. Time On Target.
I’m taking Richard’s advise and renting a Wolverine before I buy.
If someone could build a .308 that weighs 7 lbs, has manageable recoil (for the average soldier—I used to shoot a .300 Win Mag) and 30 rd mags, I think that is a solution. I think though whatever solution they come up with, they have to reduce the pack weight. Adding body armor to every soldier is where we’re headed and that is nontrivial. Adding 15 lbs to weight already carried is asking a lot. We need to make it up somewhere. BTW, I have backpacked thousands of miles of wilderness with an 80lbs pack over decades. I know all about what is possible. Adding 15 lbs is a very serious issue.
And let me digress a moment to SC.
I’m a proponent of “light builds” in fps combat, meaning keeping your weight below 15 kgs when you drop your pack. This is really hard to do, but it yields 100% movement rate which none of the NPCs can hit and only very few PCs can hit. If you follow Star Marine, ALL of the top players are “dex tanks”, or very high mobility shooters, who normally sprint and fire from the hip. The new Palatino Digital Helmet actually helps you aim from the hip and the Lumin V is the meta for doing this.
In order to go below 15 kgs total carried, you can wear any helmet (they all weigh 2kgs) and a medium torso (they all weigh 5 kgs), and no other armor. If you carry a light SMG like the Lumin, a Multitool as you want in the PU, and 3 grenades, and 6 batteries, you are already overweight. That’s how hard it is to get 100% movement. Sometimes you’ll leave a grenade or battery behind, which is irksome. Sometimes leave your Multitool in your pack, which hinders healing, but if you don’t get hit that doesn’t matter. (BTW, the Multitool gives a tiny fraction of overdose compared to the healing pistol. It’s a much better solution until you assign a medic who heals at range.). Some choose light torso.
We’re pioneering some new techniques. Odd as it may seem, dropping the Lumin for an Arc Light and light arms protection is a viable option. Knife takedowns become much more appealing when you move that fast. People are planning to optimize dex tanks around use of the Vanduul Plasma Lance. All manner of options are presenting themselves.
The point is, light makes might. Speed kills. First to Target with their weapon is much, much more important than Time to Kill, because opponents can’t shoot while they’re being shot. So light weapons on lightly armored PCs, running at 100% and firing from the hip is often the way to go; which means every kg matters.
If someone could build a .308 that weighs 7 lbs, has manageable recoil (for the average soldier—I used to shoot a .300 Win Mag) and 30 rd mags, I think that is a solution. I think though whatever solution they come up with, they have to reduce the pack weight. Adding body armor to every soldier is where we’re headed and that is nontrivial. Adding 15 lbs to weight already carried is asking a lot. We need to make it up somewhere. BTW, I have backpacked thousands of miles of wilderness with an 80lbs pack over decades. I know all about what is possible. Adding 15 lbs is a very serious issue.
And let me digress a moment to SC.
I’m a proponent of “light builds” in fps combat, meaning keeping your weight below 15 kgs when you drop your pack. This is really hard to do, but it yields 100% movement rate which none of the NPCs can hit and only very few PCs can hit. If you follow Star Marine, ALL of the top players are “dex tanks”, or very high mobility shooters, who normally sprint and fire from the hip. The new Palatino Digital Helmet actually helps you aim from the hip and the Lumin V is the meta for doing this.
In order to go below 15 kgs total carried, you can wear any helmet (they all weigh 2kgs) and a medium torso (they all weigh 5 kgs), and no other armor. If you carry a light SMG like the Lumin, a Multitool as you want in the PU, and 3 grenades, and 6 batteries, you are already overweight. That’s how hard it is to get 100% movement. Sometimes you’ll leave a grenade or battery behind, which is irksome. Sometimes leave your Multitool in your pack, which hinders healing, but if you don’t get hit that doesn’t matter. (BTW, the Multitool gives a tiny fraction of overdose compared to the healing pistol. It’s a much better solution until you assign a medic who heals at range.). Some choose light torso.
We’re pioneering some new techniques. Odd as it may seem, dropping the Lumin for an Arc Light and light arms protection is a viable option. Knife takedowns become much more appealing when you move that fast. People are planning to optimize dex tanks around use of the Vanduul Plasma Lance. All manner of options are presenting themselves.
The point is, light makes might. Speed kills. First to Target with their weapon is much, much more important than Time to Kill, because opponents can’t shoot while they’re being shot. So light weapons on lightly armored PCs, running at 100% and firing from the hip is often the way to go; which means every kg matters.
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While we’re talking future warrior tech, there is another cartridge breakthrough that deserves note. The 6 Max is delivering just the necessary power increase to the light rifles with small boltfaces that make the 5.56 and M4 popular. Another future tech notable is the Boombox.
The Boombox is based off the medium bolt face M10, so is in the category of the Army’s current derangement, the Sig XM-7. Unlike the Sig, the Boombox relies upon cutting edge metallurgy and tooling, to build an enhanced replacement for the .300 Blackout cartridge.
.300 Blackout is famous for its ability to fire subsonic projectiles with enough power to consider them lethal out to at least 100 meters. Its high tech replacement is the 8.6 Blackout. The 8.6 (.338 caliber) has roughly 3X the energy of the .300, and fires bullets up to 360 grains. This is a monsterous subsonic bullet that tears horrific wounds out to 3 times the distance of the .300, and to much greater distances when loaded with lighter, supersonic bullets. Why build such a thing?
Well, what the crazy men over at Q, LLC seem to be doing is replacing the 9mm handgun cartridges in modern SMGs with something much, much more powerful, that can provide stopping power sub and supersonic at huge distances the SMGs cannot.
To do this, they are forced to use next gen metallurgy. Standard stuff can’t manage, especially given their mandate to make the carbine extravagantly light for its raw power. That’s the BoomBox.
So that’s cool, and reminds of another advance we may be just half way through—60 round quad stack magazines.
Quad stacks are just what they sound like. The top of the mag is dual stack just like any other modern rifle magazine, but as these catch on we should expect lower receivers to adopt a new mag well and the magazine will be shorter and perhaps even higher capacity.
And while we’re guessing about future design, consider this: given various types of ammo for any specific rifle—standard and armor piercing, sub and supersonic—just how long will quad stacks go before they offer a selector that allows a soldier to choose between two types of ammo? Seems an obvious evolution of the quad stack design.
KelTec has actually done this in part. It’s slide action, tubular fed, bullpup shotgun allows selection between the 2 tube mags, so you can select 00 or slug, etc.
It sounds to me the guys at Desert Tech have already figured this out and are working at bringing it to market, so we may see selectable quad stack mags in 6 Max in future Sabertooth lower receivers.
The Boombox is based off the medium bolt face M10, so is in the category of the Army’s current derangement, the Sig XM-7. Unlike the Sig, the Boombox relies upon cutting edge metallurgy and tooling, to build an enhanced replacement for the .300 Blackout cartridge.
.300 Blackout is famous for its ability to fire subsonic projectiles with enough power to consider them lethal out to at least 100 meters. Its high tech replacement is the 8.6 Blackout. The 8.6 (.338 caliber) has roughly 3X the energy of the .300, and fires bullets up to 360 grains. This is a monsterous subsonic bullet that tears horrific wounds out to 3 times the distance of the .300, and to much greater distances when loaded with lighter, supersonic bullets. Why build such a thing?
Well, what the crazy men over at Q, LLC seem to be doing is replacing the 9mm handgun cartridges in modern SMGs with something much, much more powerful, that can provide stopping power sub and supersonic at huge distances the SMGs cannot.
To do this, they are forced to use next gen metallurgy. Standard stuff can’t manage, especially given their mandate to make the carbine extravagantly light for its raw power. That’s the BoomBox.
So that’s cool, and reminds of another advance we may be just half way through—60 round quad stack magazines.
Quad stacks are just what they sound like. The top of the mag is dual stack just like any other modern rifle magazine, but as these catch on we should expect lower receivers to adopt a new mag well and the magazine will be shorter and perhaps even higher capacity.
And while we’re guessing about future design, consider this: given various types of ammo for any specific rifle—standard and armor piercing, sub and supersonic—just how long will quad stacks go before they offer a selector that allows a soldier to choose between two types of ammo? Seems an obvious evolution of the quad stack design.
KelTec has actually done this in part. It’s slide action, tubular fed, bullpup shotgun allows selection between the 2 tube mags, so you can select 00 or slug, etc.
It sounds to me the guys at Desert Tech have already figured this out and are working at bringing it to market, so we may see selectable quad stack mags in 6 Max in future Sabertooth lower receivers.
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