LSAT (cont.)
Invitation To AAI
Further inquiries were rewarded with an invitation for the author to visit AAI’s Hunt Valley, Md., headquarters for an exclusive LSAT status briefing in December 2007. This also included the opportunity to formally interview Spiegel and the program’s other top official, AAI’s Paul Shipley, who heads the corporation’s team of industry partners.
I was brought up to date on the series of successful demonstrations for senior officers and others in the military community that followed LSAT’s public debut seven months earlier. All have included the opportunity to handle and shoot the CT serial number 1 prototype with “Spiral 2” (second generation) cased telescoped ammunition on military ranges with pop-up targets positioned from 100 to 800 meters.
These demonstrations allow decision makers to assess the system’s combat potential. “Results have been very positive,” Spiegel said, “particularly in favorable comments on the design’s light weight, mild recoil and accuracy—all measurably superior to the current squad automatic weapon.” Live fire video clips of this arm in action are available for viewing at www.americanrifleman.org.
Shipley told us that the test and demonstration prototype CT SN1 has received a pretty good workout along the way. “We’ve fired about 5,000 rounds in that weapon,” he said, “in temperature conditions from very cold to very hot.”
So, what’s next? LSAT fact sheets predict the gun and ammunition being transitioned to Program Manager Soldier Weapons (PMSW) in 2010. Why two more years? Spiegel replied this date was a guideline and there are compelling reasons to keep it in “Technology Base” for a bit longer. “It’s more about the best solution,” she explained. “Cased Telescoped [ammunition] is out in front, time-wise—probably between six months to a year ahead of where we are with caseless. We could transition that package tomorrow and PMSW could continue to develop it and then field it in a few years. But we think there’s more potential there and we should work more on the caseless, or in developing other types of weapons, and really find the right fit for our user before ... transition.”
Indeed, as I saw a bit later that day in a visit to AAI’s subterranean small-arms test range, engineers from ARES, the weapon design partner, were working with counterparts from AAI in conducting live-fire experiments with the updated CT SN2 weapon. I received a close look at ATK’s latest caseless ammunition, but the test fixture that fires it—said to be significantly different in mechanical function from that of CT—was literally under wraps for security purposes.
I asked about “thermal management,” the vexing problem of keeping the LSAT from prematurely overheating. Shipley corrected the misconception that this is particularly challenging in both CT and CL because there is no brass case that ejects along with most of the heat generated on firing. Brass transfers a lot of heat to the chamber, he said, but the CT’s polymer case is an insulator.
The CT’s “combination of a separate chamber and polymer case results in considerable heat isolation,” Shipley explained. “You can fire to the point where the barrel is too hot to touch yet the chamber is only slightly warm.” And Spiegel said that the high-temperature steel used in the barrel was nothing unusual.
“There’s no ‘unobtanium’ [miraculous metal] in the weapon itself,” she said. “The only thing we haven’t made a determination on yet is the chamber for the caseless weapon,” she offered. “We are looking at everything including ceramics, approaching it from all angles. We want to find the optimum combination and that will probably be some kind of ‘sandwich,’ but we don’t know yet.”