Quote Originally Posted by William F. Owen View Post
@ What do you mean firepower? It's a meaningless term. Every man has an automatic weapon, so you cannot physically increase the number of automatic weapons.

@ Says who? A Long range rifleman is the trained operator of the long range rifle. About 2 days of instruction and range time.

Fuchs, if you know better and have the data, then show me.
Wilf,
so why don't you delete the last two GPMGs? 2 GPMG are no more automatic weapons than 2 assault rifles are. You used a meaningless argument.

Firepower is the weapons effect that intimidates, destroys, wounds, kills and occasionally even ignites.
I have probably for the very first time found someone who argues that an assault rifle has as much firepower as a GPMG.
The usual point of view is that controllability, ammunition capacity before reload and ability to fire more shots in a fire fight (without a glowing barrel, molten handguard or cook-offs) constitute superior firepower against all but the smallest (and at the same time slow) targets. This point of view has strong and obvious merits.

I remember your argument about accuracy replacing volume of fire for suppression. That works fine - unless you don't know where exactly (really exactly - like accurate to one metre) the enemy is. In that case you need to spray a bit - that requires volume of fire. You'll also need volume of fire to tear through some cover like sand bags or walls and to drive enemies away from behind such imperfect cover - you won't be able to do that with LSW or 5.56 assault rifle shots.


About the "Long range rifleman"; who is this? Is this someone who has joined the Army three months ago?
Even conscript armies have enough time for a six-week sniper course to add fieldcraft, sniper tactics, counter-sniper tactics and FO skills to the repertoire for marginal costs. They just need to want it.
I don't think that you can have any data that rejects this because this isn't about data at all.
A two-day course won't even suffice to learn to read the wind. It's enough to have two cold days during this instruction = they won't be able to learn much about mirage. Two very windy days = they won't learn much about reading slight bushes movement. Two days is enough to learn how to use their weapon, their scope and a LRF tool, that's nothing in comparison to what these two could learn in just a couple more weeks (it would help a lot even if they were no talented snipers) and certainly not enough to exploit the potential of a .338LapMag rifle simply because it's about more than holding the weapon steady and read the distance from an electronic tool.

A single rifle type like 8.6mm (.338LapMag) is just a compromise. Such a weapon won't be able to shoot a powerful subsonic bullet to fool acoustic-based sniper detection systems (which all seem to depend on the sonic boom of the bullet) and to achieve minimum signature overall like VSSK does.
A .338 will also not be able to match the armour penetration effect of a .50 or to achieve its range. Both could be even better with 9x90, but as long as that's just in prototype stage I'd recommend a .50 for really long-range shooting and for the ability to penetrate BMD/BTR and recce vehicles with SLAP.
That's why I prefer to offer the platoon snipers the choice between three different weapons. Conventional sniper rifle, AT rifle and suppressed subsonic heavy bullet rifle.

I don't want to piss you off; but these are components of your layout that don't seem to be anywhere near-optimal to me. And that's what you claimed; to have an idea how a platoon could be optimised.