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It’s silly. Very silly indeed.

Very very cool in its way.

But also silly!

Its interesting, so far only the Neopup PAW-2 has worked I think out of the various semi auto grenade launchers (the rest tried to be clever with airburst stuff), but its a small round. What is the advantage of this larger round that still isn't 40mm, does the ability to fire more make it viable?

Like, at a guess?

Probably a more direct-trajectory round combined with the 5+1 to try sell it as a squad-level support weapon. Lighter ammo, easier to engage, more rapid follow up.

Whether or not anyone bites is a different matter, probably just an expensive toy that gets a handful of trials.

I remember recently seeing something about China leaning into this kind of system. Is this a case of "look, they seem to think its important" rather than having a solid doctrinal need for it?

Almost definitely. It is also just the job of weapons manufacturers to try sell guns - it's a super hard sell to upgrade most of what the west uses for small arms, so new guns is sort of it.

Is it cool? Hell yeah. Is it practical? No, probably not. Like, what does this contribute that a 7.62mm GPMG doesn't? More to the point, what does it contribute that makes it worth the purchase, logistics, training, and WEIGHT to a soldier?

There's going to be a bunch of officers who will never have to carry it convinced it's the best thing since sliced bread, but I don't think there's any gaping hole this thing will fill.

I read something about it years ago. Has to do with modern combat changing and shifting attention more to insurgents and in-city fighting.

If they combine it with some simple airburst proximity ammunition it could have a future as an anti-drone weapon.

It is highly likely that every squad is going to have to devote one guy to be the anti-drone guy. Which right now basically means shotguns. If you can swap a shotgun for something that has a little more range as well as utility vs ground targets it might be an option. As it stands, mr shotgun is also going to have to carry an M4 and that is heavy.

I could see a future drone protection position in every squad who is armed with a grenade launcher that primarily has airburst proximity fuse ammo, but also has regular grenades for ground and armor targets as well. This could potentially be useful enough to allow the guy to ditch the service rifle entirely and just focus on the grenade launcher.

Maybe 2/3 of the load is simple proximity fuse warheads and 1/3 is regular impact grenades. maybe with a few heat warheads for anti-tank duties. You could have a programmable multi-purpose warhead that could be used against infantry and drones, but that would be more expensive.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Flinty wrote:
I remember recently seeing something about China leaning into this kind of system. Is this a case of "look, they seem to think its important" rather than having a solid doctrinal need for it?

yeah, they have a grenade launcher "DMR" type monstrosity.




Its basically China admitting they don't have the capability to mass produce grenades to the point they can have an automatic grenade launcher so they compensate by making it longer ranged and, allegedly' more accurate. The issue is its not really that much more accurate and it clearly gives anyone using it a black eye each time its fired. So it likely will not be any more accurate than a Mk19 in actual battle conditions while being harder to use.

On the accuracy thing?

How accurate do you need a grenade round to be?

Against armour, there’s a fairly large target. Against infantry, lobbing a few frag rounds in their general direction may not need hurt anyone to prove effective?

Pleas note the question mark, yeah.

There's never a time when less accurate is better, but take your point.

Infantry are the easy bit - even running, they're not that fast, they're squishy, and you don't need a direct hit because shrapnel does it fine.

Armour, different matter - it's a big target, although not really that big, possibly moving, possibly suppressing you, and you need to score direct hits for a HEAT charge to do anything.

Bigger, slower rounds suffer more from windage, suffer from needing your soldiers to compensate for their arcing fire - add stress, and it's messy.

If you fire at something 100m away, and you're 1 degree off due to stress, movement, suboptimal optic, anything - you're going to miss your point of aim by 1.8m.

I think that grenade launcher has nice potential. I see it as a modern version of the M-79 "Blooper". The magazine design means that it's capacity can vary due to magazines being able to be designed to hold various numbers of rounds with a different configuration of the magazine. Think of a current 30 round Glock magazine adapted to this platform. I like it.

William

Its important when you are, say, trying to plop the round through a window or into a foxhole. Even the propaganda piece china put out on their launcher was not particularly impressive. It was hitting 8 foot sheets of plywood at 100 meters and it was all over the place on that target.

Far from useless, but it wasn't exactly screaming precision. Precision would be putting the grenades through an 8" square at 100 meters repeatedly. That would be useful for plonking into foxholes and windows or specific weak spots on vehicles.