Why has there been no significant advancement in firearms technology

There have been plenty of incremental upgrades in ergonomics, reliability, ballistics and metallurgy. There hace been developments like airburst and caseless ammo, too.
Thing is that anything too radical will take a while in getting adopted or even considered.

>>34859921
There's no real radical change you can make to guns themselves at this point. Caseless and telescoping ammo are the hot ideas right now but until portable railguns become a thing we'll be using ARs.

>>34859921
>cheap, light scopes for everyone isn't an advancement
Haha what the fuck

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>>34859994
>>34860099
Sorry, should have been clearer. I mean no real changes to the fundamental function of the rifle, such as the action. Yeah the thing can be almost entirely revamped (look at the finnish M39) but at the end of the day this is still equal to this

>>34859921
You don't want major improvement right away, you want gradual small changes so that you don't wake up and find "EVERY GUN I OWN IS WOEFULLY UNDERPERFORMING AND OBSOLETE" also you don't want the government going full republic commando while you're stuck using some shitty SKS

>>34859921
>If I skip over 750 years of firearm existence where advancements were slow and incremental and focus entirely on approximately 60 years of rapid development, and include developments that predate that time period in it, how come the current roughly 60 year period has incremental advances?

To put firearms development in perspective, it took something like 175 years for people to figure out the concept of a matchlock, which is literally just a lever attached to the gun that holds the match.

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>>34859921
> Implying something

>>34859921
because we haven't had a world war.

>>34860298
>34860298
yeeash ... we need all of /k/ to pool together and then ask HK to make us a 1000 or so g11...

>>34860115
Germany's reunification killed the G11, but part of the research lives on with the LSAT. You won't see anything too different because Everytime a contest for a replacement comes up, the military wants 200% improvements in accuracy or some other unreasonable request. Super fast bursts, flechettes, many things have been tried. There's only so much you ican achieve designing something to be used by the dumbest possible GI and built by the lowest bidder.

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>>34859921
Dragon rounds?

>>34860337
Sure we have. But modern warfighting isn't total war. The US has a finger in everyone's pie and a base on or near every rock on earth

>>34860828
what is your point? technology as a whole made huge leaps from the turn of the century and slowed down around the 70s because the two world wars compelled it to, all of it culminating with the hydrogen bomb.
fighting sand monkeys using WWII sticks and toyotas doesn't exactly necessitate an arms race, which is why we now only see slow and steady improvements on tech. if another world war broke out (assuming we don't use the bomb), then we'd start to see crazy new shit get developed. for now, it's simply not necessary.

>>34860958
Pretty much all development from the turn of the century to the post-war era was basically people trying to figure out a more reliable and efficient way to chamber and fire a centerfire cartridge. Most of the "huge leaps" in technology were dead ends.

>>34859921
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mature_technology

>>34861139
you're thinking only of weapons. look at the development of mechanical engineering and biotechnology. huge leaps, my dude.

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>>34859921

>>34860127
It isn't about
>how to make x thing
It is about
>how to make x thing fast, reliable, cheap and in large quantities
While still having a non standardized military

>>34860083
>>34862843

>>34860127
^this.
>>34862843
this is cool, too but there is something else we never seem to talk about.

progress in firearms science exploded around 1900 just like progress in every other macro scale engineering discipline did, at the same time. why?

from the 1860's on to the 1900's chemistry, electricity, and physics were progressing rapidly, albeit linearly. advances were coming at a breathtaking pace. periodicity was discovered. reliable electric generation was developed. Bessemer process steel was invented. these were the advances needed for most of the tech developed for the first half of the twentieth century.

engineering always follows science, and it can sometimes take decades to fully understand the ramifications and potential of new science. which is why the 1950's were the end of the rapid advancement in classically engineered systems.

The only way forward was by harnessing the science developed/discovered post 1900. The issue is, other than some relevant chemistry such as the Haber process, most of the advancements in hard sciences have been in the quantum world, which is only useful for strategic weaponry, and materials science which leads to the slow pace of weapon advancements just like the hundreds of years pre 1880.

we have fairly well maxed out in the mechanical engineering world, and most of the possible internal combustion designs have already been built. we are doomed to see a hundred years of slow improvement (exotic carbon materials, telescoping ammunition, electronic ignition, and solenoid actuated bolts, etc.) until hand-held directed energy weapons come on line.

>>34863000
I neglected to mention computers, which are made possible because of quantum mechanical processes, but adding chips to rifles is so far a politically hazardous undertaking, best left to a time when confiscation is no longer a serious worry.

>>34863000
>gets
>wasted

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>>34863029
>>34863000
(checked)
So, we're kinda like at the end of the exponential growth cyclus and are beginning a new one in Nano- and Biotech?

>>34863105
that's exactly right.
I wish more /k/ubists were interested in other weaponizable technologies, but sadly there aren't enough of us here to even warrant a general.

>if only infinity chan wasn't so goddamn slow.

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>>34863126
>Nano projectiles that you won't even feel penetrating your layers of skin and will turn your internal organs into a grey, thick, sticky brew.

>>34863165
>infectious nano bot/virus that hijacks your brain like those wasps that lay eggs inside spiders.

>>34863418
>dude gets shot
>starts shooting the rest of his squad

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>>34863452
das it mayne.

>>34859921
>Why has there been no significant advancement in firearms technology since [...]
Oh look, it's THIS thread again.

>>34859921
Because every technology eventually reaches a point where it's 95% as good as it's ever going to be, and from there on you'll only get small incremental improvements.The 55 years from the Wright Flyer to the 707 saw exponential increases in aircraft technology, but the differences between the 707 your grandmother would have flown on in 1958 and the 787 you'd get on are minimal in comparison - the 787 doesn't really fly any higher or faster than the 707, and most of the improvements in safety come from better crew training. Yes, the 787 is a better airplane - it's far more efficient than the 707 - but it's not quantumly so. If someone put a modern-looking interior into a 707 and swapped it in for your next flight to Paris, you'd barely notice. That's how technology goes, anon.

>>34860119
This is a good point, too. Back in the 90s, the pace of advancement of computers was so fast that an 18-month-old computer was obsolete, and a three-year-old computer was a doorstop. I have a lot of nostalgia for the age of Grunge, but that's one part of the 90s I don't miss at all.

>>34859921
Optics have improved drastically in the last century, especially NVG compatible and Thermal imaging. Eventually I expect to see digital optics replace traditional lens.
Can have digital displays, adjust brightness, contrast or even color spectrums. Digital recording. Personally I hate battery powered things but I see it happening.

>>34863126
>>34863165

I'm in nanotechnology.

I can make scales that can weigh the mass of a virus, but what you're asking...give me 10 years and a DARPA grant.

Give me 20 and I'll make it tailored genetically.

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>>34859921
I just want to know when we'll see Gen 2+ and Gen 3 NODs become under $1000

>>34863000
Don't forget the legal retardation around weapons development since the 30s.

It's impractical for an inventor such as JMB to work on designs at home due to restrictions on firearms and manufacturing. The individual or small group are usually the ones that makes radical advances, rather than committee designing.

>>34865297
that's true. very few inventors can pony up the cash and suffer through the wait for a research and development FFL.

>>34860434
Is East Germany of any use?