[Peregrino]

Originally Posted by 35NCO

Yes. DI weapon systems are the worst weapon systems to suppress in modern weapon design and suppressor design.

The weapon has a natural balance of careful mass, kinetic energies, and very specific dwell times. All tailored to various barrel lengths and gas port sizes. Some cartridges can effect the overall pressures as well. The issue is that the suppressors screws with the dwell time which results in increased back pressure porting a bunch of carbon back into the action and increasing cyclic speed. The pressure with certain blast baffle geometries is so intensive it can be blinding and difficult to deal with on rapid fire.

This dramatically increases the need for cleaning the weapon. It gets pretty gummy real quick with carbon. Worn out m4s with fairly loose border line tolerance can function longer but newer weapons tend to not deal with it well. Running dryer on oils and some coatings help here, but it does not address just fixing why it happens in the first place.

For it to work with a stoner designed weapon efficiently it must have little to no back pressure. There are significant engineering problems with that. Its not as simple as the command may like brand X so all brand X suppressors that are 7.62 go on all the different 7.62 weapons. This is also true for barrel lengths with the various gas port sizes and buffer mass differences. Ideally each weapon would have a unique suppressor device.

Piston guns are a little better, but you are trading some problems for another.

There are also harmonic stabilities in relation to bore. We are starting to free float more weapons today, which is great, but the harmonic stability can be influenced by increased mass and dwell imposed by a suppressor. Especially devices with a dissimilar resonance that is not sympathetic to the weapons natural oscillations. So there is durability and accuracy problems associated there for long term barrel life and consistency. Especially in hard use and especially in regards to frequent follow on shots.

As far as made minutes go, that is a tremendous problem with this proposal. There needs to be a vast relook at how we apply metallurgical science to the first few baffles in the stacks. Erosion will be quick in conventional infantry forces of these devices as in the OPTEMPO of early Iraq and AFG.

Again, it would be better as some sort of integral device that is similar to barrel life that PFC Snuffy cant lose or mess up.

We can use off the shelf stuff now. But we will have what I describe here. It is going to be very expensive with massive trade-offs that may not make it appropriate at this time. Or perhaps for only short duration fieldings with very specific applications to weapons that have been tested with the device by various reputable weapons engineers.

With a few spelling and grammar corrections this would almost rise to the level of a worthy contribution to TR's carbine primer thread. Very few amateur gun plumbers have any understanding of how delicate the balance of forces are in a reliable AR - or the compromises that must be entered into when changing components/ammo while attempting to personalize one. The Marines do a better than average job WRT addressing the needs of the rifleman but I think over the long run even they will have problems with the 2nd and 3rd order effects of this initiative.