Forgotten Weapons
3 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2019
31:58 · 10M views · Dec 25, 2018
Forgotten Weapons examines the Heckler & Koch G11, a West German experimental rifle built around a caseless cartridge. The video covers the G11K2 and its unusual technology before its cancellation for political and economic reasons.
Cited as an example of overly ambitious engineering, such as brittle caseless ammunition and heat-ejection problems.
3 comments from Hacker News
One important difference is heat management. Electric weapons are super neat. Their specs can put the projectile very kenetic, they can uitilize more exotic energy sources, etc. However, in terms of a man portable gun, they just really don't have the specs needed. Sure, we can make them more ruggeded and more effective at lower KE output. But a major issue for a man portable gun is heat. Heat causes expansions and affects ductility, ductility and expansion cause jams. Jams mean you're dead. It turns out that the brass cartridge is really really good at getting hot and then taking that heat with it as it is ejected. The HK-G11 is a good example of the issues that the lack of heat ejection can cause [0]. As we do not have super-conducting materials that can be man portable and at room temperature, there is significant heat build up in the copper rails of the rail gun. With catridges you can throw that heat away easily, with rails, you have to have a cooling system in them to continue to use the gun. Either that or you have to stop the warfighter from using the gun until it cools. This, especially when lives are on the line, is non ideal. Hence, railguns are mostly used in much larger applications like ships. There you can have the cooling equipment to keep the gun functional and operating and you can use the ocean as a heat sink. Your heat issues are still present though. More exotic materials than cooper are used for the rails, things that need to be at LN2 temperatures. But o
In a similar vein the H&K G11 also had ambitious objectives and was shock-full of clever ideas, however such beasts make the KISS principle (rather decisive for a weapon) difficult to follow. this video
Yep, the G11. Turns out with all its other problems caseless ammo is brittle, so if you drop a round it breaks. Not super practical in the field. this video