
The Army May Have Found Its Next Rifle in a Colorado Garage - SQL2219
https://taskandpurpose.com/army-rifle-ribbon-gun/
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dasm
Hey, this is my niche! This article is not very good - think of the last
article you read about the internet betting a series of tubes, and your Steve
Jobs is a brilliant coder.

The rifle design objectives are pretty poor, but there's some interesting
innovations in there nonetheless. Unfortunately, it's mostly academic; modern
symmetric warfare places less emphasis on small arms than ever before, and
asymmetric warfare suffers huge diminishing returns from small arms
investment.

In short, the AR15/M16 family will be around for a while, and that's fine.

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Hextinium
This like many "this is the future of weaponry" articles doesn't say what
specific this is to fix. There is no problem it is trying to solve it seems
like. It is designed to be different without a clear overarching purpose. What
is the purpose of having a 4 barrels? This was touched on but never fully
examined or defined. I feel like this is slated to just disappear into the
annals of "weapons that solved no problem".

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audiometry
Yeah this can be an episode of “Forgotten Weapons” in a couple decades.

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paulddraper
This is nothing other than a novelty.

If you want portable bullet count, you use an automatic M4 (750+ rounds per
minute).

If you want less portable bullet count, you use a M134 Minigun (2,000+ rounds
per minute).

If you want single-shot spread, you use a M500 shotgun.

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Compare Metal Storm's prototypes, which used stacked charges to increase
bullet count (but decades later have yet to see practical implementation).

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Fjolsvith
Single-shot spread with sniper range.

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paulddraper
Maybe. I'm skeptical that multiple simultaneous discharges wouldn't adversely
affect the accuracy.

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dasm
This is way too detailed, but describes how barrels behave while a shot is
being fired: [http://www.the-long-
family.com/shock%20wave%20theory%20summa...](http://www.the-long-
family.com/shock%20wave%20theory%20summary%20explanation.pdf)

Based on this, it seems like multiple barrels probably wouldn't affect each
other in different ways, leading to shot consistency as long as there aren't
significant differences in ignition time or velocity.

