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Modern Intermediate Calibers 009: The 6x35mm KAC/TSWG
The 6x35mm TSWG, also commonly called the 6x35mm KAC, is a round shrouded in mystery. Apparently designed by Knight’s Armament Company for the interagency counterterrorist program cryptically named the...
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Modern Historical Intermediate Calibers 010: The 6mm SAW
In this installment, we’ll be looking at a very unique round. The 6mm SAW was probably the first small arms round ever designed using computer-calculated parametric analysis, and it was also probably...
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Modern Historical Intermediate Calibers 011: The 5.56×38 FABRL
Among the interesting concepts that were tested in the mid-late 20th Century is that of an extremely light for caliber, very long bullet made in part of a lightweight material like aluminum and...
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Modern Intermediate Calibers 013: The .17 Caliber Remington Family
Up to this point we’ve looked at calibers ranging from 5.56mm to 7.62mm, but today we’re going to look at something smaller… A lot smaller. The smallest caliber size that is feasible for a given...
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Modern Historical Intermediate Calibers 014: The 4.85x49mm British
On Saturday we looked at one British “contender” which could have in some alternate reality become the NATO standard round, and today we’re going to look at another: The 4.85x49mm. After the United...
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Modern Intermediate Full Power Calibers 015: The 7.62x51mm NATO
Shouldn’t “Modern Full Power Calibers” be its own series? No, because then there would only be two episodes! So instead, we’re rolling today’s two most popular full power .30 cal rounds into the series...
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Modern Intermediate Calibers 016: The 5.8x42mm Chinese
In the mid-1950s, the People’s Republic of China followed the Soviet Union’s example and adopted the intermediate 7.62x39mm round. This decision substantially helped to promote that cartridge’s...
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Modern Historical Intermediate Calibers 017: The 7.92x33mm Kurz
Many would consider this next round to be the first intermediate cartridge ever, and while that isn’t really true, it is one of the most influential rounds of all time, and perhaps the most influential...
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Modern Intermediate Full Power Calibers 019: The Russian 6x49mm Unified
What happens when you take the two concepts of a traditional, full-power rifle and machine gun round, and a small-caliber, high-velocity round, and smash them together? You get one of the most extreme...
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Modern Historical Intermediate Calibers 020: The 7.62x45mm Czech
After World War II, the nations of the world retired to lick their wounds and rebuild, but their arms engineers also began thinking about the next war. The war have brought forth a storm of new...
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New Ammo for British Troops: UK Develops More Effective 5.56mm and 7.62mm...
It’s not just the Yanks that are getting improved ammunition: Our friends across the pond have developed their own firepower upgrade for 5.56mm and 7.62mm weapons alike. Jane’s has a modest article on...
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Future Firearms Ammunition Technology 001: Aluminum Cased Ammunition –...
The metallic cartridge case was invented in the 1840s, and – starting in the 1860s – its military application brought with it a host of of advantages for the soldier: Now, ammunition was...
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Future Firearms Ammunition Technology 002: Polymer-Cased Composite Ammunition...
In the last installment, we talked about the growing need throughout the 20th Century to reduce the weight of the cartridge case, to lighten the burden of the soldier. Experiments in aluminum have thus...
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Future Firearms Ammunition Technology 005: Caseless Ammunition – Lightening...
Previously, we discussed trying to lighten the soldier’s load by making the cartridge case out of different materials, including aluminum and compositing the case out of polymer and metal. Yet,...
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Modern Intermediate Calibers 021: The US Army Marksmanship Unit’s .264 USA
We’ve discussed a lot of different rounds in this series so far, but today we’re going to discuss a round that actually has a shot of being adopted (at least in some form) by the United States military...
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Where to Draw the Line? Managing the Weight of Next Generation Universal...
How can one balance the trade-offs inherent in ammunition design to create a true one-caliber infantry weapon system that is both effective and lightweight? This is a question I’ve been exploring for...
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What Is a Caliber System, and How Does It Affect Ammunition Design?
In a previous post about the sometimes ambiguous meaning of the word “caliber”, we discussed how the word had mutated through the centuries, picking up different definitions and connotations along the...
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Modern Historical Intermediate Calibers 023: The 6.35/6.45x48mm Swiss GP80
Information on this round and the weapons designed to fire it is scarce, so the details in this article may be at times incorrect. Just letting you know. -NF Before the SIG SG 550 was adopted by the...
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Modern Historical Intermediate Calibers 024: The 4.6x36mm HK/CETME
Today we’ll be looking at a round with one of the strangest-looking projectiles ever designed for a military weapon: The joint Heckler & Koch-CETME 4.6x36mm round designed for the HK36 en-bloc clip...
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Modern Personal Defense Weapon Calibers 001: Introduction, and the 5.7x28mm FN
At this point, we’ve talked about 25 different intermediate and full power calibers as part of a series comparing different types of modern small arms ammunition. However, one subject not yet...
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