/k/ - Weapons

Just use mortars

>Small ones can be used by one man in a shit situation

>Transported by two easily

>Ass rape buildings and harder structures

>Long range

>Shoot over obstacles

>>523633

And then enter Modern warfare, inside city alleys and your long ranged elephant becomes useless.

Not even the 7.62 resisted the trend.

>>523635

>Not even the 7.62 resisted the trend.

https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=c3a0df63ed769522a0cdf3df867774e8&tab=core&_cview=1

>Spend large amount of time and money building the 'super sniper'

>Spend even more time and much, much, more money training the marksmen - remember this is going to be much harder than training present snipers given the large increase in range.

>Urban environment: congratulations, it's useless.

>Cluttered non-urban environment: congratulations, it's useless.

>Lowered visibility: congratulations, it's useless.

>Clear, open, rural environment: congratulations, it's useful - right up until the enemy calls you in and their counter-sniper artillery/CAS starts blowing shit up; which is a situation your large team and (very) heavy weapon will not be mobile enough to evade.

It's also large enough to make concealment (which combined with mobility is about all that can keep a sniper alive in a battle) much harder.

Don't get me wrong it's a cool project, and could be all kinds of fun, but developments in small arms since early WW2 show that it's not range that determines victory.

>>523667

Probably because Steyr are shit at marketing. But their products are gold.

>>523633

Sniper fire past ~2km is only really useful for anti-materiel work and suppression. At those ranges your odds of actually hitting a stationary human are less than 50% even with a sub-MOA rifle, and you'll be working with a travel time of at least 2-3 seconds so hitting a moving target is basically impossible. They're also totally worthless against anybody with basic military training, because the moment you open fire they'll just throw smoke and retaliate with mortars or an armored vehicle.

>>523667

Speaking of which, why can't I find naked (AP)FSDS bullet+sabot complexes in .30?

An anti materiel rifle pressed into the anti personnel role? Nothing new.

>>523667

1. Expensive

2. Heavy

3. Role already filled by more portable, more handy and way cheaper weapons.

>>523649

>avoid civilian casualties

So we'll use a weapon that will penetrate right through the guy you're shooting at, the 3 guys behind him, the wall behind them, and the family cowering under a table behind the wall.

>sand niggers

>All wars in the future will be exactly the same as they are now.

>Absolutely nothing will change.

>Therefore it makes perfect sense to adopt gear and doctrine that can only work in the current context!

>What is military history?

If you're looking to extend the area where your guys can kill their guys without overexposing themselves, and without creating explosions in areas with wimmins and children, then you'd probably get much better results from putting a relatively normal rifle on a drone - maybe with an autonomous FCS to overcome the lag you get with drone operators being on the other side of the planet. I'll admit I'm not an expert on this next system, but how did DARPAs EXACTO program end up? Is it something that just needs a little (or a lot) more work, or is it a just another meme?

>Drone orbiting a few thousand feet above target area

>Drone operator designates targets

>Drone computer plots bullets trajectory and finds the best possible moment to fire

>Possibly self guided bullets correct for any inaccuracies or unforeseen environmental difficulties.

>Drone operator puts his feet up and sips a large cup of tea as this unfolds on his screen, asks his mate sat next to him if they're still on for the pub that evening.

>GOOD END

Shit, with enough work you could cut the rifle out of that and have the drone drop one of a few dozen warheadless micro-missiles to do the job - if you can get enough speed out of them (which would be helped by the whole 'falling from a few thousand feet thing) that could even work for anti-materiel, light anti-vehicle, or even potentially antitank roles.

>>523763

so drop say a 1-2 foot long peice of steel rubar or even tungsten rods, forget bullets, just put a small microcomputer to be the guidance for the fins on a thin tungsten shaft. wont even have to be a full foot long if it is wide enough to get weight. now drop and add propulsion to get a projectile that you can drop right through the roof of a vehicle onto the head and body of driver/pilot. congrats. you guys have a "insatnat micro meteor strike" sattelite. add a laser that can cook things on the ground, and you now have the entire un pissed but also paying you protection money till you try to launch a maintenance crew up there to make repairs

>>523694

>actual high caliber baby-seeking projectiles

>>523805

>Satellite artillery

Cool idea, especially for the extra supervillain credit you seem to be going for there. It'd probably be overall more cost effective to increase the acceleration of the projectile and drop it from 40-50'000 feet rather than orbit. You still get the top attack profile for anti-tank work, and the 'HOLY SHIT THE DRIVER HAS A METAL STICK POKING OUT OF HIS SKULL!!!' effect.

>>523725

1. Wrong, it's less than $7k for a system. A RPG is $5k, an ATGM (competitor) is $15k to $150k depending on guidance system. Ammo is like 100x cheaper than any of those systems.

2. Sort of right, 40lb, which is between an RPG and an ATGM in weight. It's the same weight as other anti-materiel rifles though, all of which are served by a crew of 2, so this isn't really the reason.

3. Ultrawrong. There is nothing on the market capable of penetrating an APC or IFV, having a magazine of 5 rounds, being so cheap, so low profile, not having a smoke trail, being fire and forget. Any ATGM which can actually compete with this for range and penetration costs twice or more per shot, has flash and smoke trail, takes 30+ seconds to hit someone, isn't fire or forget, is extremely visible because of high profile.

>>523845

All of this. Not to mention it could be even lighter If you make full use of modern materials.

Steyr had (has?) some great engineers, they made the first good bullpup and had some neat hand guns too.

>>523845

what's the point of an anti-materiel weapon when your enemies don't have materiel

there's your answer

in a protracted land war between two modern powers you might actually see the adoption of such weapons

however! there's a big problem shooting at very long ranges in that obstructions and terrain elevation make your effective range irrelevant

>>523963

>a war where enemy stays out of range on mountain bikes

Gee what could it be used for.

>>523981

>300m

A 300m zero on a 8x57 gun is also zero at 50m, G98's were zero'd at 400m.

>>523633

>4-5 man team

At that point you may as well just use mortars.

Considering that the M2 was used as a sniper weapon, could you make a very "fancy" tripod for a machine gun chambered for Lapua Magnum (or a similar cartridge), and use it as a sniper rifle?

Even in fully mechanized armies, most of the things on the battlefield aren't that armored. In Iraq and Afghanistan combined the international forces comprised of:

>1 million plus civilian contractor vehicles

>500k lightly armored supply trucks, MRAPs, humvees, APCs

>10k aircraft on the ground

>10k heavy IFVs and MBTs

That's 200 soft targets for every 1 hard target.

So pick. Order

A) 35000 javelins, OR

B) 15,000 javelins and 500,000 anti materiel rifles (cost of operators included)

>>532840

>wasn't there some gay treaty forbidding the use of putting weapons into space or something like that?

What's some gay treaty going to do? Walk into space and stop me?

>>532877

Vid related is hardly an AA gun, if anything it would be a miniature artillery piece if it was on a good tripod. And the tripod is there both for the periscope and to minimize human error. Besides, I'm thinking about if it would be a good idea to teach machine gunners long range sniping, so that they can take part in some extreme counter-sniping, or take out lone human-sized targets a good 2-3km away.

>>532866

>>532840

>>532872

It was intended to control Soviets in the early days, when they had a better capability to launch stuff up there and more experience in orbital equipment from their Almaz program. Specifically the treaty came useful regarding the Soviet fobs program which completely fucked up our entire defensive system, rendering Dew, Pinetree and Midway completely useless.

However today:

1. The space shuttle program, the only thing giving America an edge in orbital infrastructure, has been cancelled… as has manned spaceflight. Meanwhile Russia is gaining ever more experience from their resupplies and repairs of ISS and are doing more launches than ever, half of which are done on underloaded rocket (ex. foreign satellite 300kg, throw weight of rocket 700kg) which is suspicious as fuck.

2. Bush and Obama broke so many treaties that it would be crazy to expect moscow to be honorable when washington isn't.

tl;dr you can bet you ass nowadays that treaty is defunct

>>532886

>tl;dr you can bet you ass nowadays that treaty is defunct

I wouldn't be remotely surprised, a treaty signed before the first moon landing is the sort of thing that even experts in the field would need to read up on if they were asked to give advice to a government space program.

>more launches than ever, half of which are done on underloaded rocket (ex. foreign satellite 300kg, throw weight of rocket 700kg) which is suspicious as fuck.

Considering the cost of a space launch that goes a few steps beyond suspicious (especially given that Russia is not exactly rolling in money at the moment). They might as well hang large banners from each rocket saying "WE ARE DEFINITELY NOT DOING ANYTHING WE HAVEN'T TOLD YOU ABOUT *WINK*". Even if they're limited to ~400kg per launch how long will it be before Putin announces that 'Project: We Own Space Now" is operational?

>>532898

It's probably just recon sats for now, similar to the Kosmos series but smaller. I'm just guessing here, though it does seem like common sense, given their resurgence of naval missiles.

>>532934

They'd get a lot more done with Hunter/Killer satellites, especially when you consider how much the world relies on GPS these days

>>523633

Have you ever heard of something called "diminishing returns"?

>>523634

>can't shoot through obstacles

>good