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Why Not The .243?

Gratuitous Gun Pics, Military, The Gun Thing

I was sucked into the Forgotten Weapons Matrix a little while ago, and during Ian McCollum’s dissertation on the Sig-Manhurin 542 rifle, my train of thought went off down a branch line — I’m an old guy, it happens — and I ended up wondering:  why was the .243 Win never adopted as a military cartridge?

(In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out here that I am a HUGE fan of the .243 Win, especially when loaded with a 90gr bullet.)

Run with me on this one.  The .243 Win is based on a necked-down .308 Win casing so that it can shoot a smaller 6mm (.243″) bullet. Here’s the side-by-side comparison:

That’s a lot of powder (assuming that it stays the same amount as in a .308 Win cartridge) to send a much-smaller bullet downrange, which means of course that there’s a lot of velocity involved — and, as a welcome side-benefit, because there’s less inertia to overcome to get a smaller bullet moving than a bigger one, less recoil.

The latter was given as being one of the reasons that the 5.56mm NATO was adopted, by the way (that and the reduced weight of the cartridges themselves), but it came at the expense of knockdown power.  Also of interest is that the 5.56 NATO generally uses a 55gr bullet — but, for that matter, the .243 can handle a 55gr bullet as well, and it really races out of the barrel.  Once again, a comparison:

The only problem with the 5.56 NATO is that if you try to increase the knockdown power of the poodleshooter by shooting a heavier bullet like (say) one of 90gr, that little casing can’t hold more powder to make up for the severe loss in velocity — whereas in a larger casing like the .308 Win, bullet weight could even be doubled to 110gr without too much effect on velocity, or recoil.

So just as an intellectual question, I ask myself:  why would the .dotmil settle for a hot .22 cartridge when a downloaded .308 would do the same job (at worst), and could easily do a lot more with only a modest increase in bullet weight (say, from 55gr to 75gr)?

If we accept the fact that the earlier .30-06/.308 Win battle cartridges were just Too Much Muscle (or required too much muscle) for our soldiers (as suggested by the military brass), and we ended up adopting a vastly inferior cartridge (the poodleshooter .223);  then why should we not have compromised and used instead a 6x52mm / .243 Win cartridge?  (Of course, I am still of the opinion that the British suggestion of a .276″/6.5mm chambering was the best of all, but let’s not revisit that old story.)

Frankly, I think we missed a good opportunity here, and I think that had we adopted the .243 Win chambering in something like the aforementioned SIG-Manhurin 542 (essentially, a higher-quality AK-47 design) as our mail battle rifle, we would have been a lot better off.

For that matter, the AR-10 (suitably barreled) would have been just as good a choice, if the thought of dumping Eugene Stoner’s rifle for Sergei Kalashnikov’s gives one the vapors.

Either way, the question is this:

Very Brief Encounter

Legal Stuff, Men & Women

We’re all familiar with the story of the classic 1940s movie Brief Encounter, where Trevor Howard and the exquisite Celia Johnson meet by chance at a railway station, and over a period of time are increasingly tempted to have a little extramarital fling.  (They don’t, of course, because morality and conscience and also because it wasn’t in the script.)

Nowadays, it appears, people seem to have little time for morality or anything other than a quick knee-trembler under similar circumstances:

Kate Jackson has also been handed a 12 month community order after the ‘al fresco’ romp in front of shoppers at 3.43pm. Jackson, 40, was waiting for a train home in Stalybridge, Greater Manchester on August 10 when she realised the train was delayed.
While waiting she got chatting with a stranger before passers-by saw her having intercourse with 44-year old Jonathon Pisani shortly after.
The pair both admitted outraging public decency, with Pisani due to appear in court for sentencing in December.

This being Manchester, of course, one should not be surprised and doubly so, considering the appearance of the coupling commuters.  [barf bag may be necessary:  follow link at own risk]

I do have a random thought arising from this, though:  if the woman has already been sentenced, why should it take more than another month to pass sentence on the man?

Perhaps my Brit Readers can cast light on the topic, once they’re done being violently ill.

Also, I need to make a note of the term al fresco romp, just for future reference when talking about coupling en plain air.

Fresh Fruit

Men & Women

I’m told that this is the new term for underage sex partners, although given that I’m at the “wrinkled prune” stage of life myself, I fail to see what I’m supposed to do with this information.

Anyway, here’s a sample of the above, this time from Strylia:

A former Tiger Air flight attendant who had sex with a 15-year-old boy has been released on bail after spending only one week in jail.
Melissa Nosti, from North Ryde in northern Sydney, had sex with a student at the school she used to work at as an attendance officer back in 2010.

You have to applaud her willingness to go the extra mile just to get the little scrote to stay in school — the parallel thought being that I bet that attendance among the other little scrotes was sky-high if she was spreading the love, so to speak.  And if her pictures are anything to go by, she probably was.

The only reason I noticed this at all is that the suburb where all this fresh fruit was being plucked is right next door to where the Sydney branch of my adopted family now lives.  (New Wife’s two sons and their wives live in Oz and Seffrica, respectively.)

Yesterday

Bad News

The day started off ungood, in that I woke up at 3.30am (no reason) and couldn’t get back to sleep.  So I got up, made coffee and a piece of toast, and read the papers (which only pushed my mood of morning irritation to anger).

Then it was time to get out of the chair to make New Wife her morning cup of tea and prepare her sack lunch (all stuff I do every day of the work week), only I first managed to knock the breadcrumb-loaded plate off the side table, which meant calling on Mr. Dust Bug to come out to play.

Did all the Wife Spoilage things, but dropped my second piece of toast onto the kitchen floor — and proved the Jam Side Law yet again.  Mopped up, made a fresh cup of coffee without further incident.

Saw Wife off to her day at the salt mines  school, went back to the news, which just kept the bad mood simmering.  However, what stopped me from rage, RCOB etc. was the prospect of range time looming at 10am (their opening hour).

It was going to be SHTF Rifle (AK and M1 Carbine) Day, so off I went to Rifle Gear Indoors.

You know how some people say that the worst day at the range is better than the best day of the office?  Well, “some people” are fucking morons.  To whit:

  • For some reason, the Carbine liketh not the expensive Hornady hollowpoints — won’t chamber the round out of the mag, won’t close the chamber even when I slam the bolt.  So I give up on that.  Had a dozen or so rounds of Korean mil-surp, which works fine in all the mags (I was also testing the mags to make sure they were still fit for purpose).
  • So I pull out a couple boxes of Wolf Black Box — beeeeep!  — range master informs me that the Wolf ammo is persona non grata  at their precious range because bimetallic boolets can spark and set fire to the backstop.  Range policy (which I know about — I just didn’t know that the Wolf .30 ammo was The Wrong Stuff).  So:  no more M1 Carbine practice for Kimmy, then.  (Longterm problem:  I have a shitload of Wolf .30 ammo because of a good deal some time ago;  not much other .30 boolets because I have so much Wolf — you all know the situation — which means I have to find non-Wolf replacement ammo, in this, the Time Of The Great Ammo Drought Of 2020.  Aaaaargh.)
  • “Never mind,” says I, “I have the AK in the car.  Let me fetch it,” and I do.  You know what’s coming, right?  Five mags and 200 extra rounds of… Wolf 7.62×39.
  • End of range session.

That’s not the end of it.  I’m driving home, and I always try to avoid taking the 121 toll road because of road-widening construction — the day they opened the 121 tollway it was two lanes too narrow, a rant for another time — and I’m chugging along surface streets.  This is no great hardship;  it’s a lovely day, I have David Allan Coe playing at 11, I’m starting to forget all about the range fiasco, when… orange cones in the road because MOAR ROAD REPAIRS, and the normally-ample three-lane Headquarters Drive is down to a single lane.

Which is when a fucking MAMIL (middle-aged man in Lycra) cyclist gets in front of me, on the uphill, which means I’m screaming along at 5mph, if that.  But I bite my tongue, and follow this two-wheeled twat as he crawls up the hill.  (There’s pretty much only one hill in the whole of Plano, and this is it.)  Fortunately, he turns right just before Legacy West where, surprise surprise, the road is still only one lane wide because there’s construction of yet another block of overpriced apartments/stores at the 80% completed stage.  Still, the lights at both intersections are green, so with Bike Boy gone, I accelerate…

…whereupon an oncoming car makes a left turn right across my lane.  Too late, he sees me and slams on the brakes, stopping halfway across the street.  Fortunately, there’s nobody coming up behind me on the right, so I can make a little jink around the stopped car and carry on.

I should probably say at this point that this being Plano, the car I nearly hit was a black Rolls Royce, which figures.  Only later do I realize that I should just have run into the moron, so as to get a new car from his insurance.

I’m still shaking when I get home.

Only one thing to fix that:  gin.

As I’m sucking it down, I think that the day is a total fuck-up of a day, and the only thing I need to do now is embark on a totally fruitless search for inexpensive .30 Carbine ammo, just to round things off, so to speak.

And wouldn’t you know it?  Two thousand rounds of cheap, clean-burning  Korean FMJ mil-surp at J&G Sales, at a bulk discount price, even.  (I know, I should have waited until National Ammo Day, but who the hell’s going to risk that, in these times?)

All I had to do for the rest of the day was try not to burn the apartment building down, or similar.  So I watched a combination of Jay Leno’s Garage, Jeremy Clarkson and Ian McCallum’s Forgotten Weapons.

I finished the day in something approaching a decent mood, in that I might only have winged a passing BLM rioter instead of blowing his fucking head off with my 16ga.

Anyone up here in N. Texas know of a decent outdoor range where I can shoot off all that verboten  ammo?