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That's the primary goal, to create and achieve the best small arm weapon design with modern technology. The weapon must of course, must also adhere to the rules Geneva convention.

The objective is basically to create an extremely effective small arm capable of being used by every member in a squad. This is for it to be effective in full auto and as a suppressive weapon, as an Automatic Rifleman, accurate enough for a Marksmen/Sniper, and yet of course, still be versatile enough to allow for rapid enough accurate fire for a Rifleman/Marksmen.

Several issues need to be addressed, such as weight, recoil, ammo capacity, lethality, and range. A good balance of all of them are looking to be achieved.

Basically, I want this to be a conglomerate think tank where we can all share ideas/research on guns, ammunition, and various techniques to help design the ideal firearm possible with modern technology. Obvious limitations include weight, recoil, and the Geneva convention (which, the Geneva convention prohibits the use exploding, expanding, or fragmenting bullets, severely inhibiting lethality :/)

Feel free to think of modifications to bullets, ammunition and various other gun types. Also feel free to present problem solving ideas. The weapon can be electrical or chemical, and possess any kind of firing mechanism. The weapon could even be a rail gun or guass gun. Feel free to be as creative as you want.

Accessories, obviously, are generally considered to removable and attachable. While obviously not an integral part of the weapon itself, your design or general consensus can be to add a certain type of accessory which will improve the capabilities of the rifle as a whole. This includes grenade launchers, round counter, scopes, lasers, and various other standard weapon accessories.


Basic Objectives are-

-Under 40 inches long, preferably well under 35 inches
-Under 10 lb, preferably well under 8 lb
-Effective range at least 600 yards, preferably around 900
-Effective in close quarters combat
-At or more accurate than 2 MOA
-Capable of incapacitating an enemy nearly instantly in a single shot
-Capable of creating extremely lethal wounds
-Minimum magazine capacity of 20 rounds
-Capable of using High capacity magazines, Preferably, 100+ rounds
-Have 450 RPM or higher
-Be as reliable as or more reliable than an HK416 or FN SCAR
-Capable of using multiple detachable accessories (I.E. possess picanty rails or equivalent).
-Be relatively Ergonomic

This list is more or less of a guideline. If you are capable of achieving a weapon design that you feel would better improve on the particular weapon systems in existence, but your weapon system does not meet one or more of the basic criteria, please explain the advantage of your weapon system and how it compensates for the lack of a base objective.

How about trying to use a "Hollow Point" round? Its actually a little lighter and its lethal to lightly armoured targets.

Yeah, but it's illegal according to the Geneva convention :/

I would just use a caseless armor piercing explosive lightweight round if it were all things go.

You could potentially use a German G11 caseless round, that was around 5 grams per round (it could be less with modern technology), that's suped it with modern propellants and the like, with a 1 gram steel tip, 1 gram thermite ignition system (probably .5 gram thermite), 1 gram of RDX and .25 grams of copper jacket.

1.75 grams of propellant is good enough for like 2100-2200 joules, so if you had at least 2000 joules (from a stand barrel length), you could have a 5 gram cartridge, firing a 3.25 gram bullet at around 1100 m/s with 2000 joules.

It also would be around 4.5-4.7mm. Now, of course, I'm firm believer that a really sharp small caliber bullet traveling really fast usually has poor wounding capacity.

However, if the round was steel tipped and travelling extremely quickly, it could pierce most materials (including armor) and with the C-4 and thermite, basically blast a hole in anything, instantly killing anything you hit. If you timed it right, it would be amazingly lethal in basically any living target you hit, and be capable of piercing things like concrete bunkers, walls, and even lightly armored tanks.

A good idea of how much power 1 gram of C-4 puts out is here, or on that deadliest warrior episode of the CIA Vs the KGB with the exploding cigar.

You would essentially use a high explosive armor piercing incendiary round, that would be like 5-6 gram per round, or less than half of a standard cased 5.56mm round.

With proper aerodynamics and a ballistic coefficients, the round would easily be capable of reaching distances of say, 1000 yards.

While it wouldn't necessarily be lethal on it's own at that distance, as long as the bullet had enough energy to set off the main explosive (probably pre set around 200 joules, or around 150 foot pounds of force) it would be incredibly lethal, and still launch a 1 gram steel projectile at relatively enormous speeds.

If you didn't want it to be armor piercing, you would probably replace it with a plastic spitzer point.

Anyways, you could carry around roughly twice the ammunition of 5.56mm rounds, yet it would create holes powerful enough to blow a man's face off. xp

I think a good idea would be a scope with iron sights on top of it.

That way, the user could switch between iron sights and a scope simply by moving around their vision.

Of course, the land warrior system would be used in conjunction with this.

Meaning that the user could potential use and see both their scope and iron sights at the same time O_o

But it's always good to have the option.

Actually I was mostly talking about assault/battle rifles.

Small Arms.

Well, the AR format is very ergonomic and relatively useful.

And I like the short stroke gas piston operation, but most assault weapons actually use the piston operated system, and there are mixed results with all of them.

I need to find which one is the best in comparison. Reliability or recoil reduction can be key, or really any other variable, it really depends on the firing system itself and how much of an advantage it provides.

And the "Perfect" round could easily be between a 6mm and an 8mm round.



One thing that's usually not considered so much is that, the smaller the bullet, the longer the barrel needs to be to be able to transfer the kinetic energy, so generally larger bullets are more powerful from similar or smaller barrel lengths.

Guess what you could do to fix all of that? Make Panzer Cops. Then you could have them use pistols and take their time lining people up to be as effecient as possible.
But in all seriousness, I have no solution other than just having a balanced group with a few guys who focus on mid-range, someone who takes care of long-range, and another for close-range.

I can offer up weapon designs and theories on how they should work, but being fictional weapons with no existing prototype, I can't tell for sure if they would. For example, all of my weapons that I came up with. I couldn't tell if they were ergonomic or not, let alone if they would fire accurately. So this whole thing is just going to be theories that nobody can prove, unless one of us is secretly a filthy rich b*****d who can afford to make prototypes to test what we put here (Suicide, I'm looking at you).

Mm-kay, I've decided that Gauss guns are probably out of the picture. 1 kilogram of lithium ion has roughly around 1 mega joule of energy.

The efficiency of a Gauss gun is around 2-3% on average. The minimum level of joules required for something, say, an assault rifle, would be around 650 joules.

If we take 1 million, multiply it by .02, and then divide that be 650, we get that 1 kilogram of lithium ion, on it's first charge, has enough energy for around 30 shots. :/

Not exactly what you want for an assault rifle intended to fire hundreds, if not thousands of rounds of ammunition.



EDIT: Hold da phone, I may have just disproved this...