sweet new sniper rifle m-107

the army just approved addtional production of the m-107 sniper rifle. The rifle has already seen action in iraq and afghanistan. It shoots 50 cal. rounds in a 10 round clip. It also shoots around 2000 metres.

www.military.com...

Not at all sure about this one. Show me one single sniper that doesn't perfer a side loading bolt action rile. Mechanical action is just too dang loud.

I love the idea of a 50 cal. sniper rifle, but not an auto action.

The M-82 uses the same action and US Snipers have been using it for years.

Not a sniper myself, far too young, but I do see there is equal benefits and disbenefits (if there is such a word) with a semi-auomatic sniper rifle.

Benefits- keeps the strain off your arm form repeated cockings, maybe more accurate. As it said, it could engage more targets faster as well, which is always good. No-one survives a .50 cal round.

Disbenefits- harder to clean and maintain than a simple side bolt action rifle, more moving parts would mean the armourer, or the sniper himself would have to spend more time in general care. Bolt actions can be tossed around a bit without to many repocussions.

Anyway, in conclusio I think it would be a good idea, yet more time consuming. Personally prefer bolt action myself.

Originally posted by bushfriend
the army just approved addtional production of the m-107 sniper rifle. The rifle has already seen action in iraq and afghanistan. It shoots 50 cal. rounds in a 10 round clip. It also shoots around 2000 metres.

www.military.com...

Hmmm ... is that a Barret Design? looks very similar in any case.

Yes, it is simply the Barrett, with the new "M" Army designator. This rifle has been in the system since the late 80's.

For it's applications, a semi-auto is preferable. Many rounds could be fired in short order, and having the recoil impulse stretched out for a longer time is easier on the shooter. A bolt gun has a short, fast recoil for every shot.

As for more parts to clean...nope. The M82/M107 is recoil operated, meaning the barrel moves back for a short distance, transferring momentum to the bolt and loading the mainspring. Two small but very stiff springs return the barrel to battery before the bolt returns under spring pressure to lock. There is no gas or piston system to disassemble or clean.

Here's me and mine:

Are you perfectly sure that that isnt the M-82...

Blah, Blah, Blah.

The worst 'disbenefit' of an SPR is losing the sucker to the other side because some gunho bunch of fools (SEALs come to mind) thinks they can sneak thief their way into the other guy's backyard without being handed their heads. Only to find out (the hard way) that it just ain't so.

OTOH, the ONLY real advantage of the heavy .50 round in antipersonnel missions is that you can take the range out to 2,000m+. At this distance, you don't have to worry about being 'heard' as even acoustic sniper finders have a hard time isolating background from foreground reverb. And being seen is ridiculous so long as you aren't drawing just a huge muzzle plume (dust as much as anything).

Most people's visual acuity bluring everything to a mix of colors-not-shapes at anything over about 50-100m (even back in the 1940s farmboy era it wasn't more than about 400m).

The real tragedy of course is the failure to take this system out of the hands of man altogether. For whether you are disrupting your biomechanical 'lock' of muscle memory. Your scope:eyeline sight picture. (Operating a bolt).

Or simply enduring the recoil of these weapons; the fact remains that any posted or pedestaled mount is going to have inherently 3-4X the steady muzzle point and 5X the recoil dampening ability which translates into orders of magnitude improvements in targeting.

Not least because you can 'take a picture' (think digital video phones) and divide that picture into a gridline before isolating coordinate boxes 22-33, 33-77, 102-48 and 159-69 for rapid engagement based on _perfect_ (memorized) re-slew of the muzzle index.

Pull the butt stock, and most of the forward furniture, the scope and trigger assemblies and fit this puppy to a UAV with the Viper Sniper Finder (IR + Acoustics) look down and you could rapidly make Iraqi sniping of U.S. infantry a thing of the past.

As single round hits from upwards of 3-4,000m slants on a 1 million dollar platform would give you the equivalent of an AC-130 without EVER exposing the weapon to half as much loss risk. Far more valuable than say a Predator/Hellfire combo is, if only because you have 5 times as many shots.

Even in a ground mission and particularly in FIBUA (where overpenetration is a serious worry and there is no real need for extreme range), it simply doesn't make sense to put the weapon and the shooter in coproximity. Because, where shoot and fade tactics rule the enemy doctrine and you can _count on_ any serious ambush to include it's own sniping/anti-sniping support; the likelihood of the sniper taking a hit based on association with his weapon is just too high.

Whereas, if you pedestal it and give him a video screen view from a lateralized 20-50-100m remote operated displacement; you can use the weapon as often as you need to (very high rates) without worrying about whether you need to shift your own position for purposes of survival or pursuit.

This BS they show in movies like _Clear and Present Danger_ ("Sniper at your feet!", yawn, where's the full autofire, artillery and grenades?) over minutes if not hours of close approach is just plain stupid.

No enemy is going to hang around that long. And their likely response is going to be to mask their own position with smoke while /pounding the crap/ out of yours with explosive fires designed to shower the landscape on an area-association basis.

It's time we thought of war, not as a 'struggle of tricks and shennanigans' crap as a replacement for 19th century 'honor and light horse' equivalent crap.

But rather as a strictly criminal/law enforcement type action by which the REMOVAL of man from the loop, not only reduces the number of errors inherent to his own faulty design. But also gives the threat a choice between killing a silicon chip. Or dying as the look-ma-no-hands! victim of one.

It's just too bad that we use our armed forces as an employment opportunity for the 30-40% of our society whose genetic inheritance of hunter-gatherer instinct is still too strong to stand back and take a good long look at how /really/ relevant they are to the preservation of civilization or even the act of warfare as it's own raison d'etre.


KPl.

The light fifty and the new light weight Barrett, the M107, are NOT used as anti-personnel weapons, they are MAINLY Special Application rifles and Anti-Material rifles, it's used mainly to take out soft targets, vehicles and used as a counter-sniper weapon.

I'm sure they shot people with this sucker for the hell of it, but it's definitly not it's main purpose.

This post would have had some meaning 20 years ago.

very sexy

but it does look alot like the other m seiries anti matierieal rifle desined for heavy artilary. dosent' it?