It's overdue. The cartridge is perhaps a bit cute, but I'm sure they'll have plenty of time to work out any kinks and the larger projectile and much higher pressures offer a ton of room of interesting developments. I wouldn't be surprised to see some people move from 6.5 CM to .277 Fury. The high pressure is probably going to eat barrels though, and reloading is iffy at best (is it even possible to reuse the hybrid case? Can brass cases be reliably reloaded more than once at 80k psi?)mikeylikey wrote: ↑Mon May 09, 2022 3:41 pm Would be interesting to see opinions here on the army apparently moving back to a relatively big heavy rifle shooting a big heavy bullet.
It'll hit a lot harder though, and with the flat shooting + integrated optics should improve hit percent. Will be more effective vs armor and turn a good amount of questionable cover into concealment. Based on interviews on youtube and other places with a wide variety of people who served with 5.56 and had chances to use more powerful cartridges I can't recall a single person with significant experience who didn't prefer the more powerful cartridges.
I'd also note that one of the concerns during the previous rifle selection was loading up the poor infantry with too much gear. March loads vs fighting loads vs what people actually march with vs what people actually fight with is a controversial topic, but a larger (heavier) round seems to be a damn good trade off given the just silly weights people are carrying anyway.
The interoperability of machine gun vs rifle rounds, meh idk on this factor. It seems nice, but there are still going to be plenty of 7.62 use cases and I wouldn't be surprised if the machine gun use of .277 Fury faded away, or in the alternative in 10-15 years an updated .308 Winchester +P+ or something came along and we were back to rifle rounds and machine gun rounds. This really depends on developments in hybrid ammunition cases paired with improved barrel techs, but sooner or later someone is going to be fielding cobalt barrels and you'll see machine gun pressures climb a ton when that happens.