/k/ - Weapons

*infantrymen on either side

>mini tanks invulnerable to small arms fire

Complexity.

Cost.

Military-industrial corruption.

Dubitable effeciveness.

Training issues in general.

The same reasons every infantryman doesn't carry an RPG an LMG and have a strike drone at their beck and call.

Both sides wear ceramics capable of stopping one or two rounds, not magically invulnerable armor.

>>619796

Look at the current conflict of Ukraine: airplanes are useless because they'd get shot down by AA. Any larget formations of groun troops get wiped out by artillery striker if they don't have the speed and armour to survive it long enough for the enemy to stop. But troops in cities are much less vulnerable to indirect fire, therefore cities act as fortresses a few centuries ago. Inside the cities you have short operations followed by long periods of static warfare. Therefore infantry combat would look like a cross between Verdun and Stalingrad, but with much better technology.

>what is stopping either side from becoming mini tanks invulnerable to small arms fire?

Weight. Also, there is a lot more to small arms than carbines. A full plate armour made of AR500 will just make sure that you can't escape from someone who is equipped with thermobaric weapons.

>>619799

>>619800

Sorry, I think I might have made the question more complicated. In other words, how do two squads of infantry kill each other if they are both equipped with body armor which stops the opposing forces intermediate rounds (which modern military armor does). Is small arms fire more of a psychological thing then?

>>619801

Armor doesn't stop everything, even if it's technically rated to, for any number of reasons. The two opposing squads also don't exist in a vacuum, each would have other elements that they could rely on.

>>619801

People would spend most of their time dying in new and exciting ways, because their training and doctrines are outdated, and we will look down at them for not figuring out things that are perfectly obvious in hindsight. Just like how it was in the previous two world wars. The question is how infantry combat will evolve after that phrase, and what kind of new innovations will shape it. We could speculate about that, even come up with a plethora of new ideas that could work. But we can't see the future, and I doubt that currently any of us in a position to shape it.

>>619803

>big

>heavy

>requires time to set up

>only works for direct fire

Those are not thermobaric rifle grenades.

>>619805

>thermobaric rifle grenades

You might as well be talking about standard grenades. I started this thread primarily in regards to the standard infantryman's rifle.

>>619796

>invulnerable to small arms fire

Theres no body armor on earth that will protect you from an AP .50 BMG. And even if by "small arms" you actually meant intermediate cartridges currently utilized by common service rifles I think you'd be surprised what hot rounds out of a 20" barrel can do.

In any case to answer your question it would basically just come down to each side trying to establish air supremacy at which point the battle is over.

>>619816

I would be completely fine as long as said rounds impacted against my plate. What was your point again?

>>619822

I think it was that modern warfare occurs on shooting ranges, with riflemen unloading their magazines at unobstructed targets 25 yards away. I could be wrong about that one though.

>>619822

His point, you insufferable fucking retard, is that plates only cover a very small part of your body. Bullets and shrapnel can still hit your entire abdomen, your sides, your neck, your back, your head and your limbs.

Even in the case where body armor started becoming an issue, governments could very quickly fund the mass-production and issue of armor-piercing rounds.

>>619824

>Even in the case where body armor started becoming an issue

It is

>>619796

>what is stopping either side from becoming mini tanks invulnerable to small arms fire?

Weight. Cost.

>>619824

Are soldiers trained to aim at the limbs, abdomen, head, or are they trained to aim at center mass.

>>619826

No it isn't

>>619828

They just shoot at the general direction and hope for the best. There's a lot more exposed areas than the plate can cover.

>>619831

>I thought the northern hemisphere summer was over by now?

Ever since 2007 we've been in a state of eternal summer. The only solution is to remove internet access from all mobile devices.

>>619822

My point is: just do it, buddy. And post video.

>>619828

> or are they trained to aim at center mass.

They are. But real world accuracy of small arms fire is so low that bullet hits recorded in post combat BDA studies are all randomly dispersed across presented body projection (head and neck have some disproportion and get more hits then their presented area, obviously cos they are exposed to teh fire the most, too bad beloved rifle plates are no help here). Rifle plates cover 15% of frontal standing body area. Now do the math (inb4 prone, in prone they cover 0%).

Modern armor isn't invulnerable. US has good luck in the Middle East because the snackbars mainly use 7.62x39. Russians are issuing 5.45x39 which, like 5.56, is an absolute armor killer. Add to this that the US relies in ceramic plates which are only good for a few rounds and now the reason for issuing everyone fully-automatic weapons is apparent. Dump 10 rounds of a small, fast cartridge into a level IV ceramic plate and you're likely to get penetration even though it's "rated" to stop larger calibers.

>>619800

It excites me that artillery has shown itself to be useful again, but it also disappoints me in that the United States has significantly decreased our use of artillery in doctrine because the big whigs deemed it useless in the jet age.

>>619860

>if you don't want to level a city bloc with artillery every time you need to take one

Why not use chemicals instead? Muh warcrimes is not an argument

>>619822

Getting hit with a 5.45 and a 5.56 are a whole nother category in comparison to bigger shit like .30-06, .303 and the like.

>>619801

>how do two squads of infantry kill each other

By shooting each other's dicks.

You have no armor there, and even if you miss, chances are that you are going to hit an artery, or bone, or more or less the weakest part of the armor that the target is carrying.

>>619872

Just use thermobarics. Your enemy will not fight you if he has no oxygen. Or functioning lungs for that matter.

>>619860

That armor is meaningless when you get killed by the over pressure from the thermobaric.

>>619800

>that opening music

lol

>>619916

>That armor is meaningless when you get killed by the over pressure from the thermobaric.

Of course. But thermobaric ammo aren't just vacuum explosions, they also make bigger explosions which means more shit flying at high speed.

The russian data roughly equals 1 RPO rocket to a 155mm HE shell so basically a RPO sapper team is always technically in the kill radius of the weapon (which is why that shit isn't mass issued, you do need the sapper special course "the 1001 to blow yourself up and how not do it".)

I'm waiting for companies to start making polyethylene breast plates, not just tiny rifle plates. They're light enough you could cover a large area for the same weight as a ceramic lvl4 plate. The plastic ones are only lvl3, but I'd take more coverage over more concentrated protection. Hell you could make full plate armor out of the stuff for breaching teams.

>>619953

Yeah, UHMWPE is the shit.

UHMWPE

Pros

>8.5x less dense than steel, 1.4x less dense than Kevlar

>Doesn’t require weaving like Kevlar

>More room for improvement than Kevlar or steel, not only is it unexplored, we can just make the polymer chains longer

>Cathes bullets as opposed to causing them to splatter like steel

>Extremely non-reactive (not including combustion), won’t be structurally impaired unless left in the sun for years

>Thermoplastic, can be injection molded

>Potentially very good for composites, HDPE and LDPE are

>Could probably be woven, HDPE can

>Could be made into decent radiation shields by adding boron carbide

Cons

>Extremely difficult to stop burning, if the enemy uses napalm, you’re fucked

>Exceptionally high thermal expansion coefficient, difficult to machine, can’t be 3D printed with the extrusion method

Forgot this in my last post but you guys are forgetting about aerogel.

>>620146

Injection moldiding it would remove the need to machine it, or 3d print it.

The high thermal expansion coefficient might make it hard to do composites it.

Just thinking about AR500 style plates with UHMWPE addition to save on the thickness of steel needed, with additional bonus of the fragmentation being dealt with.

>>619814

That was not the point of the breastplates. The point was that melee combat still happened, with swords, halberds, and bayonets.

So is that Ronin bulletproof helmet thing the real deal or not?

>>619828

In the Marines we are taught to shoot chest, pelvis and head. However in an actual fire fight I would be just shooting in the general direction fire is coming from and if I can actually see them through my optic then I would still be just trying to shoot them anywhere(prioritizing chest obv since its the largest target) you're not really going to be sitting there like you do in a video game lining up the perfect head-shot because if you can see them, they can see you and your life is at risk so you just shoot them and training takes over. Note: I have no combat experience i'm just making assumptions here.

>>619854

Actually anon as someone in the military I can tell you in terms of the south China sea at least artillery will play a bigger role then you think.

>>619796

it will turn into 7 foot tall supersoldiers stalking through underground tunnels in rubble to shoot each other with 80 caliber APIE ammo from oversized FALs and SVDs.

>>620966

You play too much Fallout.

dudes who get shot in the arms or legs will be out of commission real fast

dudes who get shot in the head will be dead

dudes who get shot in the bulletproof area will be dead after 3, 4, 5+ shots instead of 1 (though each shot will knock them down and put them in progressively worse pain)

grenades and explosives and tanks will still exist

snipers will still be able to target unarmored areas

armor-piercing ammo still exists

So yeah, it'll take longer to kill people for both sides, but it's not like they're going to throw up their arms and say "fuck it, we can't kill each other; let's all go home"

>>620977

also remember that the goal of any war is not "kill as many people as possible - whoever kills the most wins"

casualties =/= deaths

war is just a byproduct of politics… just a more intense version of negotiating

>>620146

>Thermoplastic, can be injection molded

You're on the money with every other point AFAIK but I'm pretty sure UHMWPE can't be injection molded, at least if it's to be used for armor. The armor gets a large portion of its strength from alternating the angle of the fibers across multiple layers and I don't know of a way you can create any sort of cohesively oriented fiber structure through an injection molding process.

>>620034

>RPO has effective casualty radius of 5 m.

That's the lethal radius of the original RPO which had some kind of napalm in it.

We're talking about thermobaric RPO (A series) of course.

After looking it up it's not a 155mm but a demolition effect similar to a 122mm shell blast and a lethal radius of 50m in an open area (and 80m^3 in an enclosed area).

Knowing the warhead is 2.1kg of a thermobaric compound when a classic WARPACT 122mm shell is 3.6kg of TNT it's doesn't appear to be a ludicrous claim that the effects are similar given how better thermobaric compound are.

And the newest RPO (RPO PDM) have a 3kg payload.

Of course the downside of a heavy payload on relatively small rockets is the range… hence the armor and the sapper formation as it is a weapon system that will definitely kill it's operator if fucked with.

>>620978

oh anon tell that to the ghosts of the millions who have died in world wars.

Can someone clue me in as to why titanium isn't being talked about?

>>621764

It's rare and hard-to-work-with, and that makes it expensive, therefore it's out of the question for mass-issued items. Also, it's not a Wundermaterial, it's just halfway between steel and aluminium both in strenght and weight. It's only good when aluminium is too weak for a certain application but you want to save weight. Also, South Koreans experimented with steel-aluminium alloys that have similar strenght to titanium while being even lighter. Once the technology is fully developed titanium will be only used in certain fields (like medicine).

>body armor

make like vietnam fucking shit on go into battle naked

t. sun tzu