Auto & Assault Carbines Revisit

[Sir Brad]

Back in 2011 I floated a topic on Auto & Assault Carbines, at the time I was working around technical info that was exacting and screamingly pedantic and incomplete due to some of the sources being privileged information that had to be redacted or conveyed 2nd hand with omissions, the topic got away from me so I let it sit, some time later I came across a relatively simple definition for each and because of reasons I never got around to posting them, going through one of my Trav boxes I found my scribbling from back then and found the definitions and the game stats I was working on, I'll post the definitions now and get around to the game stats when I get around to deciphering my dyslexic scribbles.

Automatic Carbine: A Carbine capable of Fully-automatic Fire, it may or may not but normally is capable of Select Fire.

Assault Carbine: A Select Fire Carbine normally with a Burst Fire Limiter capability.

So M2 Auto Carbine, M4 Assault Carbine

 

[whartung]

Automatic Carbine: A Carbine capable of Fully-automatic Fire, it may or may not but normally is capable of Select Fire.

Assault Carbine: A Select Fire Carbine normally with a Burst Fire Limiter capability.

is the distinction necessary though? From a functional and applicability stand point do these two weapons differ substantially?

Neither is designed for sustained automatic fire like an actual "machine gun" is. I don't see either being different in a suppressive role (one you hold down the trigger, the other you press it several times, burst after burst). But neither really has the ammunition capacity to be very good at it (20 or 30 round magazines).

I honestly don't know if the troops in the field today miss the fully automatic capability of their current rifles.

 

[Diveguy]

Two observations, worth about 2 cents on a good day - like most of mine!

- IRL experience in the units and places I was in (early 90's to mid teens overseas and domestic military small units and law enforcement), full-auto from a personal rifle (M4 carbine variants, occasional MP5 variants at times) was *generally* used solely to conduct break contact actions where a high-volume of fire was desired in a short period of time. In 99% of other situations, it was far more effective to fire single rounds, even if at a rapid pace, and thus have (typically) better accuracy, ammo management and accountability for rounds fired. NOTE - I am not saying this is/should be cannon or doctrine for ALL uses of full auto, simply relating my experience. However, it seemed to be pretty typical for the approach I saw from similar units.

- In game terms, I tend to lean also towards "This is a cosmetic/role playing distinction" more than "This affects the modifiers on a 2D throw" at this point in my life. Much the same as trying to model the 5mm/7mm debate, or the 9mm/.4x caliber argument. At the game scale it really doesn't matter to me, and leads more towards people trying to game bang for the buck and dice minutia rather than playing and having fun.

YMMV

 

[infojunky]

Hum, just from the description alone you describing a couple of variations of the Assault Rifle.

 

[Khan Trav]

Regarding missing full auto. I served in the us marines in the 80s and we were trained to fire aimed shots on semi-auto. We had full auto capability and received some training regarding how to fire using short bursts for suppression fire and in close contact with groups. I recall one marine explaining that if you are being overrun by an enemy who has you outnumbered then full auto is appropriate.

We were comfortable with both abilities and I do not recall fellow marines complaining about full auto one way or the other. Later, I believe 1985 ish? we were issued M16 A-2s which had burst setting and no full auto. It was explained to us that the reason was the army couldn't be trusted with full auto capability. I assumed it was a joke as our instructors loved to point out bad habits and explain that was an army method and we were not to emulate them. Even as young and stupid as I was in the ways of the world I was able to recognize there is no way this was true. It was just a funny teaching technique.

 

[wellis]

The big problem with 3-round bursts, that I've heard, is apparently they give a less consistent trigger pull and are less useful for clearing out rooms, hence why the M4A1 fires in safe, semi, and full-auto instead of the M4's safe, semi, and burst-fire.

 

[Sir Brad]

from what I've seen of the Spechs and talking to professionals you could technically make an Auto Carbine at TL5, but they don't become militarily and commercially viable until early TL6, so experimental tech at TL5 and available at TL6.

Assault Carbines are Experimental at late TL6 but don't become a viable tech till late TL7 and isn't implemented in a wide spreed fashion till TL8.


If you start looking at the technical details most significant differences that could effect game stats come down to Barrel Length, overall Weapon Length, Muzzle Velocity and rates of fire. Assault Carbines are shorter and handier but have lower RoF and Muzzle Velocity so have shorter effective range and significant drop offs in armor penetration and wound potential at longer ranges.

 

[Epee]

I tend to regard the "Assault" parameter as indicating; larger standard magazine capacity, in-line stock to reduce muzzle climb, higher set sights because of the stock, and plenty of attachment points for accessories. Basically, an M16/M4-like weapon.

'Auto", brings up visions of the M2 .30-cal. carbine of WW2 and Korea or the select-fire version of the Ruger Mini-14 with a 20-round magazine.

 

[whartung]

from what I've seen of the Spechs and talking to professionals you could technically make an Auto Carbine at TL5, but they don't become militarily and commercially viable until early TL6, so experimental tech at TL5 and available at TL6.

Assault Carbines are Experimental at late TL6 but don't become a viable tech till late TL7 and isn't implemented in a wide spreed fashion till TL8.

What manufacturing/metallurgical/chemical advances were necessary to bring this about?

Specifically, if I took the plans for an AR-15 back to 1930, what's to stop them from making one? (perhaps using a wood stock instead of the plastic one, if that's an issue.)

How much of modern assault rifle development is simply experience with the platform in the field and applicability, vs an actual technological "we can't make aluminum receivers yet" kind of thing?

How much of modern bullet design is technological innovation vs just 50 years of bullet design?

 

[atpollard]

What manufacturing/metallurgical/chemical advances were necessary to bring this about?

Specifically, if I took the plans for an AR-15 back to 1930, what's to stop them from making one? (perhaps using a wood stock instead of the plastic one, if that's an issue.)

How much of modern assault rifle development is simply experience with the platform in the field and applicability, vs an actual technological "we can't make aluminum receivers yet" kind of thing?

How much of modern bullet design is technological innovation vs just 50 years of bullet design?

In the 1930’s, the .357 Magnum Revolver was manufactured on the frame for the .45 caliber cylinder to provide a strong enough frame and enough metal between the borings on the cylinder. By the late 1950’s, the metallurgy of the frame (heat treating to harden) and the cylinder had improved enough to allow the .357 magnum to be built on the smaller frame of the old .38 special.

 

[Sir Brad]

on why why you have to wait for an Auto Carbine, Metallurgy with the right characteristics and with the right quality control wasn't around till TL6, as for the Machine Tools the right ones don't show up till TL6, TL5 Smokeless Powder wasn't "clean" enough for sustained fire in this style of weapon, then there is the Lube.

you could produce a TL5 Knock-off or prototype, but you are going to get so many stoppages for so many reasons, Heat Expansion, busted springs and other internal parts, fouled lube from contamination and cooking, fouling from powder.

trying to make a Assault Carbine at TL6 and early TL7 you are normally hacking off stocks and cutting down barrels and turning out something closer to a SMG, you will spend most of TL7 tinkering trying to get the weapon right.

 

[Timerover51]

In the 1930’s, the .357 Magnum Revolver was manufactured on the frame for the .45 caliber cylinder to provide a strong enough frame and enough metal between the borings on the cylinder. By the late 1950’s, the metallurgy of the frame (heat treating to harden) and the cylinder had improved enough to allow the .357 magnum to be built on the smaller frame of the old .38 special.

Heat treating to harden metal has been around a lot longer than the 1930s. The key was the willingness of buyers to pay the higher price for the revolver. As for making the .357 lighter, I have mixed feelings about that, as that makes the recoil much more noticeable and it takes longer to get the gun back on target for another shot. I would prefer a bit heavier gun. Note, my favorite handgun is still the .45 1911A1 automatic. I would not sneer at a modern .45 Colt revolver either. I just have not fired one enough to convert to it.

 

[whartung]

In the 1930’s, the .357 Magnum Revolver was manufactured on the frame for the .45 caliber cylinder to provide a strong enough frame and enough metal between the borings on the cylinder. By the late 1950’s, the metallurgy of the frame (heat treating to harden) and the cylinder had improved enough to allow the .357 magnum to be built on the smaller frame of the old .38 special.

Yea, if you took that knowledge of metallurgy back, could they replicate it. Much of technology is "we know better" as much as actual technique.

But, for example, if the machining necessary for the rifle is simply to too tight of tolerances not really available in the 30s, (i.e. without, say, a CPU controlled milling machine), then that would certainly prevent it. But I don't think that's the case with something like the AR-15 (or most modern rifles for that matter).

Or, even, the precision was available, but simply not on a large scale. An expert machinist, with "modern" equipment could make one, but at a mass manufacturing scale, it just isn't practical as it required too much skill.

I am not a machinist. But I watched a video once of a guy making an AR-15 lower out of beer cans on YouTube once. Whether he could have made the bolt, chamber, or barrel from raw parts -- I dunno.

 

[infojunky]

What manufacturing/metallurgical/chemical advances were necessary to bring this about?

Specifically, if I took the plans for an AR-15 back to 1930, what's to stop them from making one? (perhaps using a wood stock instead of the plastic one, if that's an issue.)

Well a couple points, one is the M1 Johnson, thematic precursor to the AR-15 family of weapons did exist and see limited service in the pacific with the Marines.

Couple that with the proto Assault rifle in the German StG 44, which saw service in WW2 also.

The biggest issue is the willingness to adopt lighter cartridges in a combat rifle.

How much of modern assault rifle development is simply experience with the platform in the field and applicability, vs an actual technological "we can't make aluminum receivers yet" kind of thing?

How much of modern bullet design is technological innovation vs just 50 years of bullet design?

See that is the real question whether it's innovation or refinement.

 

[atpollard]

Heat treating to harden metal has been around a lot longer than the 1930s. The key was the willingness of buyers to pay the higher price for the revolver. As for making the .357 lighter, I have mixed feelings about that, as that makes the recoil much more noticeable and it takes longer to get the gun back on target for another shot. I would prefer a bit heavier gun. Note, my favorite handgun is still the .45 1911A1 automatic. I would not sneer at a modern .45 Colt revolver either. I just have not fired one enough to convert to it.

Respectfully, that was not the limiting factor in the 1930's. The gangsters of the era were employing early ballistic cloth and the standard issue .38 Special that the Police were using would not penetrate an automobile door. There was a desperate need for a more powerful Police Service round by virtually all Law enforfcement agencies. Smith and Wesson was unable to construct a .357 Magnum revolver on the frame and cylinder used for the .38 special without reducing the number of rounds in the cylinder and stretching the frame under extended use like a police service arm experienced. The solution was to use the larger and heavier frame and cylinder from the old .41 and .45 caliber revolver to handle the power of the .357 Magnum round with 1930's technology.

Metal alloys and heat treatments HAVE improved over time. While heat treated steel goes back to the middle ages, it has become both stronger and more uniform as time and technology have progressed. The lighter, smaller frame and cylinder capable of firing a .38 Special round in the 1930's was capable of firing a .357 Magnum round in the 1960's. That is a real improvement in material technology for a basic firearm design (the .36 caliber revolver) that remained substantially unchanged for over 100 years.

The application to the question about assault weapons, was that they could probably be made at earlier TLs, but would require heavier frames and recievers and internal parts to compensate for inferior metals.

I also do not believe that smokeless powder mixtures and grain sizes and shapes have gone without improvement over the last century as well. Modern ammo made using 1920's technology would likely be weaker than its modern counterpart.

 

[whartung]

The application to the question about assault weapons, was that they could probably be made at earlier TLs, but would require heavier frames and recievers and internal parts to compensate for inferior metals.

The question is whether or not the the rifle could be made at the earlier tech levels if the people making them "knew what to do".

We can say that it took 25 years from the M1 Garand to the AR-15. The question is could someone Sufficiently Knowledgeable go back to 1930 and build one, and tool up a factory to do it efficiently. Or do they need to create entire industries (like, say, plastics) to support the efficient manufacture. (That's one reason I qualified earlier about the use of wood furniture for the rifle vs the composites of the actual rifle.)

Do they need entire new processes to perform any metallurgy, or could they take the knowledge of the "future" metallurgy and get the same results with current tooling by adapting processes. "Oh, you mean if we heat it for 10 more minutes and mix in these chemicals, we get better material? Heck, we can do that...we have clocks, mixers, AND chemicals!"

And, yea, I appreciate how this is not an easy question. But it does come down to the root of what TL means, not so much in an isolated realm, but in a universe where there are readily available higher technologies and the knowledge behind them.

An example is Aluminum. There wasn't a really good, industrial process for its extraction until the late 1800s. But seems that with the knowledge of that, you could take that back quite some time and get aluminum quite early.

 

[Carlobrand]

There are a lot of different variables here - not just the metals and propellants themselves. Given a group of artisan-level gunsmiths supported by artisan-level metal-workers, you could likely come up with a quite serviceable assault rifle at an earlier tech level. Heck, if you went back in time with the know-how, the kind of people who could manufacture blued, etched, and trimmed royal armor might have had the discipline needed for you to teach them to make the tools you'd need to pull a Connecticut Yankee. Or maybe the tools needed to make the tools needed to ... well, you get the point.

Whether you could do something on a production scale at a tech level earlier, given greater variation in the quality of the metals, greater variation in the quality of the tools used to machine them, greater variation in the quality of the workers doing the tooling and assembly, and so on, and so forth, would be very much another issue. Assault rifles in an earlier era wouldn't have tended to catch on if they were jamming, misfiring, or blowing up on an unacceptably high percentage of the people who tried to use them - and when your life depends on the weapon, quite a small number can still be unacceptably high.

Some of our modern advances are possible because of improvements in management, in quality control, and in the skills, education, and reliability of the workforce.

 

[Sir Brad]

Ok stat time, I'm only going to post Auto's since I've looked at the stats for the Assult I did back in the day and something isn't siting right so I want to go over them again before posting.

Automatic Carbine C -4/-4 S +1/+1 M 0/+2 L -1/+1 V -3/-2 Dam 3D
N +2/+4 J +2/+4 M 0/+2 C -3/-1 R +2/+4 A -1/+1 Cbt -5/-3

 

[atpollard]

An example is Aluminum. There wasn't a really good, industrial process for its extraction until the late 1800s. But seems that with the knowledge of that, you could take that back quite some time and get aluminum quite early.

There comes a point when you have simply boosted the TL. Ancient Rome had a network of roads, and knowledge of gears to convert mechanical energy into motion (used in stone sawmills) and the Greek steam toys, and mining cars on wooden tracks to move ore out of the tunnels ... so Ancient Rome had everything it needed to build a Railroad (except a reason to build one). However, if Rome builds a Railroad and then begins employing steam engines for other tasks as well, then they will need large scale coal mines and they will give birth to an industrial revolution and we will no longer have trains at TL 1-2, we will have an Ancient Rome at TL 4.

Your Aluminum is the same way. If you move the electricity and industrialization needed for large scale Aluminum extraction back in time, you will move all the rest of the social changes linked to industrialization with it and you have changed the base TL of the era.

With respect to smaller caliber selective fire carbines, they could certainly have been made earlier since smaller ammo and machine guns both already existed, however the specific details of the AR-15 (like its weight and muzzle velocity) required its TL to create. The earlier you create one, the more you will need to give up something ... weight, bulk, reliability, capacity ... because the TL (all of the supporting technologies like better tools and better powders and better control of the heating temperatures) simply doesn’t exist yet. If you bring ALL that technology back with you, then you have raised the TL.

 

[Condottiere]

Assault rifles have pretty much morphed into carbine sizes, and if you make them in a bullpup configuration, possibly even shorter.

Carbines are by definition rifle (or musket) lite, favoured by mounted troops.

You could say that the intermediate cartridge would essentially have turned the standard smallarm into a carbine, the shorter barrel length definitely does.

At short range, what you do not want is accuracy at full automatic, since you want the bullets to scatter everywhere.