Future of Firearms?

[frigidmagi]

Got into a discussion with a friend today about firearms vs body armor. These days body armor is improving quickly. Ceramic inserts can take a hit from an AK47 at point blank range and the wearer gets nothing more then a bruise. The next generation of body armor is already being worked out.

When armor improves, weapons adapt to break through the armor. So the question is what adaptions will firearms make to get peneration on armor

[B4UTRUST]

standard armor penetrators will get more powder to boost penetration ability and probably in larger calibers as well. Though next generation weaponry will most likely render body armor useless from all the ideas being through about now that are apparently plausible.

[Batman]

There's an upper limit to how much power you can engineer into bullets thanks to that pesky recoil issue (7.62 NATO is ALREADY effectively uncontrollable on burst leave alone auto). If there's been succesful programs to deal with recoil I have missed them. SABOT rounds might be an answer, as might be large caliber low-velocity non-kinetic ones (HE rounds, miniature HEAT, rocket bullets). Or they might not.
And as long as CoM/CoE and armour weight remain considerations body armour can do only so much.

[Josh]

Sabot is the answer I'm thinking off the top of my head.

In a strange way, though, we may be seeing a return to a form of feudal knights. When you consider the factors at hand: the armor is distributed to smaller numbers of heavily trained troops deployed against larger numbers of more poorly equipped and typically more poorly trained opponents.

Obviously it's not a perfect parallel, but there are points of similarity. Add the combat record of the Abrams into the mix and you really start to see it.