Sean the flying kangaroo
Active member
84RFK..."88's" on the battlefront were still feared by many though.....EXTREME velocity and accuracy
The M-1 carbine cartridge was an existing Winchester in .32 that the Army insisted on being changed to .30, best I recall.6.2 million of the M1 carbine were produced and it was an underachiever. It would have been much better had it been produced either for a lengthened .38 super auto cartridge or for a shortened 30.06 case 1.5" long and firing a 130 gr bullet. But the low velocity, low sectional density bullet of the .30 carbine has poor stopping power at short range and poor ballistics and much worse stopping power at 200 m.
1) You make 4 loads with increasing powder charges (of course, you have to have some experience to know what kind of powder has the right burning speed for the type of case you're using). This takes a few minutes.
2) You start with the lightest load and look for signs of excess pressure in the primer (flattened radius), if there is none, you fire the next load and so on. Until you find some signs of high pressure, then you reduce the load a half grain and try again.
Actually it was a little more work to develop the new .30 carbine than to use the old .32 Win. The combination of being of being super sonic and a low sectional density is the best way to ensure that you cannot use a silencer and that you lose a lot of energy in the first 100 m (by which time you are subsonic and have a low retained energy). By the way, the ojive of the .30 carbine is hardly suited for super sonic flight.
You have it all the way around, it is far more difficult for an amateur to make a wildcat than for a large factory to make the tooling in a large, well equipped shop.
People who don't know the first thing about ballistics assume that it is incredibly complex and that it requires a lot of testing and equipment. When you know what you're doing it is incredibly simple to design and make a new cartridge with excellent characteristics.
Among the best cartridge designers in history were Newton (.22 Newton) and Ackley who made many much better cartridges than those made by the armies or the big manfacturers using very limited resources.
Regarding guns, Maxim, Brownng, Kalashnikov, etc, all started as amateurs, but knew what they were doing and built their prototypes in a short time and in primitive shops. A little like the Wright brothers. If you know what you're doing it doesn't take comittees, generals and all the BS that usually produce complicated, expensive, unreliable weapons, which are often chosen because of bribes.
Although the 8 mm Kurz was designed in 1938, it was not used until the expensive assault rifle entered mass production in 1943. Had the Germans made some MG-34 for this caliber, it would have been ideal for assault troops that could run with a lot more of these lighter cartridges, under cover from a conventional MG-34 a few hundred meters back.
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