RE: Rail guns (was: US SOCOM desires...)

["Robert J. Hansen" <rjhansen@xxxxxxxx>]

> That's lasers...not optics. That's kind of like

It's called a parable, Mike.  By showing how other "great technologies which
improve range scores" have failed to be cooler-than-sliced-bread in the
field, it's hoped that people will acknowledge that maybe, just -maybe-, the
technology they're drooling over might not turn out to be
cooler-than-sliced-bread in the field, either.

> to make reloading faster. Simple optics improve the
> marksmanship of joe infantry. I don't think anyone
> disagrees with that.

I do.  Many shooters I know also disagree with it.  Optics tends to make
good shooters better, and lets a bad shooter miss with more certainty.  If
you want to improve the marksmanship of Joe Infantry, spend the money on
training Joe Infantry, not on giving him a nifty scope.

> Hmm...I would say that they are useful in 99% of
> situations. Even a 30 round box magazine is a pain 1%

50% at most.  The other 50% of the time, it's dark.  Nowhere near 99%--and I
wouldn't even agree that it's 50%.

When you're stuck in the sharp end, it's raining cats and dogs, you're
trying to stop bleeding, you dropped your rifle in a puddle a minute ago
when you took shrapnel in your hand, and you haven't had time to clean your
optics off yet... optics aren't much use when everything's coming down
around your ears (as tends to happen quite a bit in the sharp end).
Marksmanship skills are with you for as long as you've got eyes and a
trigger finger.

> Even the assault rifle hasn't really changed infantry
> tactics in a revolutionary manner. Neither did rifles

Certainly it has.  In Vietnam, we were firing off 50,000 rounds of
ammunition for each kill.  We were, more often than not, firing stark blind
against unseen adversaries, trying to kill them by sheer volume of fire.
That was simply not possible for an infantry unit before the advent of
assault and battle rifles.

Note that I'm not saying the wall-of-lead approach is a particularly good
one.  But claiming that the assault rifle didn't revolutionize the way
battles are fought strikes me as pretty specious.

> Hang on... optics are as much a revolution as rifled
> barrels. And cased rounds were very evolutionary,

I don't buy it.  Before I buy that optics are as much of a revolution as
rifled barrels, I'm going to have to see historical evidence.  When the
Gatling gun was introduced, it changed things utterly--at the Prah River in
1874, at the end of the Ashanti War, a group of British soldiers fired a
Gatling for the benefit of Ashanti diplomats.  The Ashanti, who up until
that time had been fairly belligerent, immediately sued for peace.  One of
the diplomats was so terrified that he committed suicide a few days later,
after telling others that he could not stomach the idea of falling into the
hands of enemies equipped with so terrible a weapon.

Are you really claiming optics are going to drive high-ranking diplomats in
belligerent nations to commit suicide?

Re: cased cartridges.  They allowed about a fivefold increase in rate of
fire and made ammunition very resistant to the elements.  Look at the US
Civil War, where Union troops equipped with Sharp's rifles (breechloaders in
.45-70) made hamburger out of Confederate troops equipped with
muzzleloaders.  The Sharp's rifles had higher velocity, better accuracy,
higher rate of fire and a more potent cartridge.  It wasn't possible with
conventional muzzleloaders.

> That's not really applicable. Would you turn down
> every Infantry M-16 in US inventories having SUSAT?

I'd rather save the $300 per SUSAT (or whatever they run), and invest it on
soldiers on the firing range.  Would I turn it down?  Darn straight I would.
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.  Whatever you get in this world,
you have to pay for one way or another.  It behooves us to get the things we
need first and foremost, followed then by the things we want, because if we
get the things we want first, we might not have enough leftover to get the
things we need.  Good marksmanship is a necessity; optics are a luxury.