What do you think are going to be the advancments in firearms in the near future?
 

I don't see gun desighn changing much, i see ammo construction being the biggest changes. There will be cool new ammuntion.

I see some gun ideas that may come up though:

The ruger LCR is popular, selling like hotcakes and apparently the polymer REDUCES recoil. I think ruger will make larger polymer frame revolvers.

Smith and wesson will probably finally yield and drop the internal lock.

The trend for pocket guns and lighweight carry will continue with more companies making small guns.

Yet another company will introduce a 1911 and ar-15.

I hope for more development in caseless ammo firing weapons.

I think electric priming will make a reappearance. It's actually a great idea, Remington tried it I think 15 years back but botched the execution / marketing.

Didn't H&K made working prototypes of caseless firing rifles? The G11 right. I think it was because it's too expensive to produce

I know the original G11 project was canceled when East Germany collapsed and the West German government needed the funds to put the country back together.

A modified version, the G11K3, was entered into the US Advanced Combat Rifle trials, but I heard it had issues with frequent cook-offs.

I don't anticipate a whole lot of big new trends that amount to anything besides accessories. Modularity and accessory rails have been just about the only major trend in firearms design for the last 10 years (and personally, the extent to which people are going crazy with "ridicularizing" their guns makes me nostalgic for the days when nobody could even pronounce "Picatinny"). I expect that we'll probably see some more advanced sighting systems (including cheap, affordable computerized rangefinders) and stuff like that, but not a lot else.

It's possible we'll see a trend of more handguns firing PDW ammo like the 5.7x28mm, but so far, that hasn't happened, even though the Five-Seven pistol has been around for over 10 years (and the P90 for almost 20). Then again, it might take some time; look how long it took before Wonder Nines caught on (the Browning HP was designed in the 1930s, but it wasn't until the 1980s that Beretta/Glock/SIG-Sauer pistols started to eclipse revolvers amongst civilian and LE/military shooters).

Even if German re-unification hadn't got in the way, I'm pretty sure that the G11 wouldn't have been adopted. Caseless ammunition is, fundamentally, still very shaky tech. H&K solved a lot of the issues with cook-off in the G11, but the other problem was the fact that mechanically, the G11 was just way more difficult to produce and maintain than a traditional assault rifle.

During the ACR trials, the U.S. Army reached pretty much the same conclusion as the Bundeswehr. And this was back in the days when the Cold War was just ending and the DoD had more flexibility to allocate its budget to R&D. If the G11 had any chance of being adopted, it was with us, not the Germans. And even we didn't want it.

It's also pretty a pretty fugly weapon system

Yeah, but lots of "ugly" ducklings turn out to be swans in military service (like the A-10, my personal favorite).

It'll be interesting to see if caseless ammo makes a return in the future, but I doubt it. Western and Eastern Bloc armies spent 30 years trying to make it work, and no go.

Does caseless ammo even present a real advantage?

I hope companies will keep making metal framed pistols. I don't like polymer pistols at all (The FNP is O.K, but I would like it more if their was a metal framed model)

I don't find the A-10's ugly. They're awesome beasts

And that 30mm cannon eats tanks like beer cans... :cool:

I have mixed feelings about polymer frames. But I don't think the market for metal-framed pistols will ever disappear completely, especially as long as the 1911 remains popular (which is pretty much forever). Plus, the military and federal law enforcement agencies in this country overwhelmingly prefer SIG's metal-framed pistols (namely, the 226 and 229).

Having shot anything that I could for the past 18 years and having played a game that involves lots of caseless firearms for about the past 5. In theory they are great because they have only two openings insted of three and they don't leave piles of brass around.

My take on them is that they don't do anything that can't be done with a cased system and a cased system can be made much simpler than a caseless system.

Well, you're in the minority. When the A-10 was introduced, everyone thought it was hideous-looking, including those who flew them. It's been said that the reason the A-10 stays in the air is because the runway doesn't want it back. :D

But the A-10 is still the best CAS aircraft we've got, way better than the overrated (but admittedly cooler-looking) AH-64.

It might not be so bad if the operation was simpler. The G11 had a feed system which made the P90's look simple (and the P90 has feeding issues when the magazines get banged around).

Also, I believe that in the 1960s, S&W developed some type of submachine gun (based on the M76) that fired caseless ammo. I think it was battery operated.

There have been several tries at caseless or rounds where the cartrige is the projectile and so far none of them have worked very well. If i remember Bernadelli was the third company to try and make something like that work.

the real issue is that caseless rounds have so far been much more expensive than conventional rounds with no improvment on overall performance.

That was true back in the days of armored divisions, but the game has changed. When we call for CAS, and when we do it's usually American assets, we want Reaper, Predator and the Kiowa, in that order.