Light Assault Gun

[DrSkull]

I always wondereed if there was a real-world counterpart to the Traveller Light Assault Gun. I finally did find a 20mm rifle, but man is it freaking huge (26 kg, 1.7m long).

Here's the link: http://club.guns.ru/eng/ntw20.html



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Dave "Dr. Skull" Nelson

 

[phydaux]

there really isn't one. the preferance is for small caliber, high rate of fire weapons.

the .50 cal sniper rifle is the closest thing.

 

[Christopher Jennings]

It's more of a case of there WERE some 20mm weapons that could fall into LAG territory, the Swiss Solothurn being the best of the bunch. All were designed as man-portible anti-tank rifles, being used later as anti-sniping weapons after newer tanks became immune to them. Today's .50 cal rifles infact take the .50 cal cartridge back to it's origins as a large-bore, man-portable munition. The Barrett of todays owes much to the German designers that came up with it tword the end of WW1. It took the genius of John Browning to think of designing a machine gun to use this beast of a cartridge. The larger Russian round followed pretty nuch the same path.
So if Traveller erred at all with the LAG concept it was by not placing them early enough. It can still have a role in the post RAM/Bazooka eras, just very different from what their designers might have had in mind.

 

[Shadow Bear]

While rather large the Germans in WWII had a 20mm anti tank rifle that had a scope and was magazine fed semi automatic. It was asid it had a very nice finish similar to a well blued revolver. It was shoulder fired with a bipod. The accuracy was excellent out to at least 1000 meters.

 

[Uncle Bob]

When Book 4 came out the current generation of heavy sniper/antimaterial rifles like the Barrett and Steyr had not been developed.

There was a generation of anti-tank rifles designed before WWII that had similar performance, although they were a lot heavier. Worth considering are the .55 Boys and the 20mm Lahti M39. The Lahti was used in the 1960s on boats by the anti-Castro guerillas and some by the Viet Cong.

Barrett M82 12.7x99mm, 12.9 Kg
Steyr AMR 15.2mm APFDS 19.9 Kg
Russian V94 12.7x108mm, 11 kg
NTWE-20 20x83.5, 26 Kg
RT-20 20mm
Gepard M3 14.5x114mm, 20 Kg