If we don't have these guys train, I'm thinking we can have A assigned to the 40mm, B to the 40mm shells, C to the Landshark, and D can try to make a singular up to 300pp factory to help provide meta data about what a single engineer can build.
Or we could have D build a classroom.
Im thinking some form of polygon.
An n-gon, for n --> infinity. In other words, it makes no difference in the limit
I would say that 10x60mmR is likely to be both gross overkill and horrendously effective in the light antipersonnel role. It makes a great HMG round, but if we're firing it from service rifles, we probably want to at least design a muzzle brake and some kind of weight-reducing protocol.
Actually a proposal might be to keep the current rifle as a designated marksman's weapon, then design a rapid-firing, lightweight "Carbine" firing some sort of intermediate, or at least comparatively lightweight (See Italian and Japanese development in the 1890s/1910s) cartridge as our new service rifle.
Agreed. Since experience from WW2 seems to imply that most infantry fights occur at under 400 metres, power and range of the rifles are less important than reduced recoil and firing rate. This makes our 10mm rifle rounds too heavy (large recoil, weight and range). In comparison, a smaller round seems to be useful.
Our enemies have chosen a 7.62x51mm (the later 7.62mm NATO) round, which they use both in their main infantry rifle and machine guns.
I'd suggest we choose a new round which is definitely less powerful than our 10mm round (keeping it for anti-materiel and sniper duties and for the HMGs). This new round should be usable with both our main infantry rifle and with a light machine gun once we design it. There are a few sizes we could choose: Close to 7.62 (possibly even adapting the enemy round), or a 6.5mm round like the
Swedish/Norwegian 6.5x55mm. The latter also gives us examples both as a
bolt-action rifle,
semi-automatic rifle and several machine guns.
I like that idea, though we're going to need several more factories to accommodate the additional necessary production (which is something we planned on anyway, so no loss). I'm thinking we can refine or redesign the Revolving Rifle to use a detachable magazine and either be gas operated or use a bolt action. When we introduce optics, we can do a minor refinement to make the firearm better able to fit the scope. Muzzle brakes apparently make sabot rounds develop a tendency to explode at the muzzle brake, so we might want to keep that round for the Carbine.
I think that this redesign for the Revolving Rifle would probably be a completely new design. Still, probably worth it in a few turns.
The BAR was apparently selective fire, so we could start our carbine off as an attempt for a gas operated select fire light infantry weapon. We'll probably want to delay Revolving Rifle redesigns to focus all of our specialists on the Carbine if we do want to go for such a design, as we'd be basically aiming for a lighter, smaller BAR.
Hm. It's a difficult decision - on the one hand, the select-fire capability is useful (there is a BAR 6.5mm variant, though we might also use the
Feodorov Avtomat as an example). However, this will probably be fairly expensive, maybe between 1 and 2PP per rifle. A bolt-action design, while less effective, should be buildable for about 0.5PP per rifle; a semi-auto design probably between those two. This means we might think about developing the semi-auto design first, for replacing all of our blackpowder weaponry, followed by the more expensive select-fire weapon.