New Carbine Competition

[gute]

Army talking about a new carbine - again.

http://www.armytimes.com/news/2010/03/army_m4_mods_032110w/

Colt has a new rifle, CM901, but I have not found pictures of the rifle.

[Kiwigrunt]

Army talking about a new carbine - again.

http://www.armytimes.com/news/2010/03/army_m4_mods_032110w/

Colt has a new rifle, CM901, but I have not found pictures of the rifle.

Here (http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2010/10/06/colt-modular-carbine-cm901/) it is.

[nichols]

Colt was at Modern Day Marine last week with the CM-901, they ket it locked up and in pelican case. they only brang it to show the Commandant. I couldn't talk him into getting a look at it. :mad:

Colt is submitting 6 different carbines for the competition, the most interesting one that I saw and monkeyed around with was the hybrid; it is a mix between a piston and direct impingement gas system.

[120mm]

Maintenance and training is still broke. Buying a new system will not fix that.

Interchangeable configurations sounds nice, but the Army culture will not allow that to become useful any time soon due to "uniformity" and "accountability" standards.

In the end, none of the proposed systems will be a substantial improvement over the M4, except for the upgrades; and they will be an improvement only as long as it takes the broken maintenance and training system to wear them out, and then we'll be right back to square one.

[carl]

This may be off topic and may have been covered previously, if so forgive me, but what about the G11 rifle the Germans developed? From my civilian viewpoint it seemed a good thing.

See:http://www.hkpro.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=23:the-g11-caseless-military-rifle&catid=11:rare-prototypes&Itemid=5

[gute]

This may be off topic and may have been covered previously, if so forgive me, but what about the G11 rifle the Germans developed? From my civilian viewpoint it seemed a good thing.

See:http://www.hkpro.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=23:the-g11-caseless-military-rifle&catid=11:rare-prototypes&Itemid=5

From what I've read the Germans shelved it when the wall went down.

The AAI Corporation is developing caseless and cased telescoped ammo. I've been following the development of this ammo for the last couple of years - very interesting. In conjunction with the ammo, AAI or the LSAT program has developed a light machine gun and now an assault rifle. Here's a link.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSAT_caseless_ammunition

[carl]

I believe the Germans gave up on it not because it didn't work, but because the Cold War had ended and they didn't feel like going through the effort of fielding a new rifle when "history had ended". It already used caseless telescoped ammo. I just can't understand why we keep tinkering with the M-16 when something quite novel and seemingly much more effective already exists. Is there something fundamentally wrong with it?

David: Thanks for adding the link.

[Jslade0]

why did the XM8 get canned? It seemed pretty useful.

[Ken White]

So they got it killed. It did have some mechanical problems. The M4 isn't great but its adequate and the cost of change is humungous. Not worth it for a very slight improvement...