Caseless ammo

The caseless design also greatly reduced the amount of brass that was needed for ammo which also reduced costs. Ammo could be made smaller with more compact types of propellent. This made higher velocities possible though at the cost of barrel wear.

In a way the BG-15 and GP-25 and GP-30 40mm underbarrel grenade launchers are already caseless ammo, though they act like grenade mortar in the sense that the entire round if fired leaving no stub cartridge case to be ejected.

This site has good info on the G11 http://www.hkpro.com/contents.htm
http://www.hkpro.com/g11.htm

The main concerns with caseless ammo are that it is more fragile, vulnerable to atmospheric changes (humidity) and more likely to heat up and cook off in a hot chamber. However, it seems that HK and DN between them either solved these problems or reduced them to an acceptable level.

The main practical difficulty is that it requires an entirely different type of gun design – you can’t just rechamber existing weapons, or even use the experience you’ve gained in working on conventional weapons. You have to start from scratch.

TW

Caseless ammo

Thanks guys.

It seems that with the advantages of the caseless ammo more delelopment would be put into it, possibly using it in the next-gen weapons, unless there are any disadvantages such as less accuracy, muzzle velocity etc, anyone know details?

It was a German fate that. They are specialized in developing fance stuff, but not fielding it for political or leftist or do-gooders reasons. You pick it.

Couple of links
http://aster.iespana.es/aster/Library/g11.htm
http://www.waffenhq.de/infanterie/g11pics.htm
http://remtek.com/arms/hk/mil/g11/caseless.htm
http://remtek.com/arms/hk/mil/g11/g11.htm

The end of the Cold War and German Reunification happened. Spending on military equipment was drastically cut and the G11 was one of the casualties.

Tony Williams: Military gun and ammunition website and Discussion forum

So what happened to the G11? Last I remember reading about it was in a technothriller by Craig Thomas where the SAS are equipped with G11’s and (predictably) stop an entire unit of Russians cold. 🙂

There are various types of caseless ammo, but the HK G11 buried the bullet in a solid, square-section block of propellant with the primer stuck on the back (the primer burned up on ignition). The propellant was carefully prepared by Dynamit Nobel to have a very high ignition point to minimise the cook-off risk. The cartridges were kept protected inside a plastic 50-round magazine which was placed on top of the gun.

Advantages of the caseless ammo included much less weight, a smaller round which could be packed tightly, and no case extraction problems (one of the biggest causes of unreliability).

HK were bought by BAe in the early 1990s – and did the very thorough reworking of the SA80 – but were bought back into German hands in 2002 IIRC.

Tony Williams: Military gun and ammunition website and discussion
forum