Pyromancer said:
It seems to me that weapon technology has reached the point of "practical damage" for rifles a long time ago. You don't need to make bigger holes to stop the enemy. All that is left for the developers is to enable the soldiers to make this holes quicker, easier and more reliable, and make them even if the enemy wears armor.
Well, yes and no.
I am in no way an expert on smallarms (or artillery, for that matter), however you have forgotten ... or not considered ... several important factors ...
The most obvious is
penetration ... the wearing of body armour has become much more common in modern armies and weapons technology, especially smallarms technology, has had to adapt to that.
I think most people are aware of the enhanced body-armour penetration capacity of the 5.7mm round used in the FN P-90 SMG/PDW and Five SeveN Pistol, compared to similar Pistol/SMG/PDW rounds (able to pierce the older U.S. Army PASGT vest at 300 meters range, and a U.S. Army PASGT helmet at a range of 240 meters).
Note also that Type IIA, II, and IIIA (in ascending order of effectiveness) are all designed to deal with increasingly higher velocity 9mm Parabellum rounds ...
What a lot of people don't know, however, is the story of tank/anti-tank gun rounds over the last 30 years or so since the development of composite armours. Muzzle velocity has gone up, considerably in some cases, but the design of the rounds themselves have had to be changed for each upgrade in the opfor's composite armour which is more important. The guns themselves haven't changed ...
As for the changeover from Battle Rifles (7.62 NATO or equivalent) to Assault Rifles (5.56mm NATO, M43 Soviet or equivalent) the Australian Army's reason for doing so (as it was relayed to me as a Recruit in the CMF way back in 1974-75) was that the emphasis was shifting from individual long range marksmanship (our SLRs ... FN FAL's to the rest of you) were capable of hitting targets at 600 meters without anything more than iron sights (not that *I* ... or most of us ... were
capable of doing that
ourselves, but the weapons were) and were sighted in for, IIRC, 100 meters ... the M-16's we had (and, I understand, tho only second or third hand, the Steyr AUG's) were only expected to be as capable to 250-300 meters and were sighted in to only 50 meters.
The issue was training time ... even tho the RAA is a relatively highly professional army compared to most world armies, the idea of lifetime professional soldiers was well and truly gone, and it was inceasingly accepted that weapons had to be suited to citizen soldiers called up in an emergency where extended weapons training for high levels of long range marksmanship wasn't a realistic option.
I understand that, currently, the Army's thinking has changed and they are possibly looking to replace the AUG with a more SLR-like Battle Rifle, emphasising marksmanship at long range again, so these things may well go in cycles.
The thing is, it depends on what sort of soldiers you expect to be fielding. If it's long service professionals, then you can afford to train them for high levels of long range marksmanship (unless they're specialists other than Infantry, in which case the training time is used for their particular specialties), if, however, they're expected to be relatively short service types, then that's a waste of resources ... weapons choice is probably at least as much affected by that as by cost and availability.
Mercenaries as per the Traveller book? There's no money in it, really, not with the Ticket rules as written. So you won't be attracting high quality long serving professionals, realistically.
I believe that your comments don't fully deal with the complexities of the issue ... but YMMV of course :shock:
Phil
