Talk:Special Purpose Individual Weapon

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Military history: Technology / Weaponry / North America / United States

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Fake Pic?

Maybe it's just me, but the pic used in this article looks fake as hell, both the gun itself and the text below it (it's 2D, a perfect rectangle, not a trapezoid), which in turn makes me doubt the article as a whole. Can anyone confirm this? Mzyxptlk (talk) 01:39, 17 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The SPIW prototype shown is real. It is the second-generation Springfield model. All of the SPIW prototypes have a busy look about them, particularly with their 3-shot grenade launchers attached. D.E. Watters (talk) 01:58, 17 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Could we be looking at a poster and not the firearm itself? No, looked at it again. That looks like the actual prototype. The SPIW was an example of many such products over the years especially the OICW. Too busy, too complex. Soldiers prefer simple, rugged, and reliable. --Asams10 (talk) 02:26, 17 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I took that photo and I assure you that it's not fake or Photoshopped. I was on holiday in Maryland (I'm British) and we went to the Aberdeen Proving Ground Museum. (A great museum, by the way.) It was in a glass case and I took a photo. Much later I found the article and I was surprised to see - given the number of gun enthusiasts in the US - that there wasn't a photo. (There had been photos but they had been removed due to copyright violation.) So I donated my photo to the public domain. Blaise (talk) 19:09, 19 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Americans don't take Holidays, we take vacations. I'll have to vacation at Aberdeen soon. I'd love to see some of this stuff. Remington museum, Aberdeen, Springfield Armory, and I'd love to add some more museums to the list as well. --Asams10 (talk) 21:01, 19 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

No. of rounds fired per hit??

A citation is most definitely required for that statement!! Oceanic84 (talk) 11:55, 30 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I noticed as such. I don't know a readily available source for the statement, but what I do know is this is a clumsily stated or even misinterpretation of conclusions made by studying WW2 infantry combat data. It's not so much that an individual soldier would expend 10000 rounds of ammunition per kill on average, as much as it was a figure arrived at from weighing the total amount of ammunition expended in a combat engagement, including all kinds of suppressive fire and anti-air fire, versus achieved casualties and/or kills, and then calculating the averages of all these encounters.

This obviously does not present a particularly accurate picture of individual expenditure (the machinegunner can be expected to expend a LOT of ammunition through frequent suppressing, achieving few if any hits doing this), and this is perhaps more informative in a logistical or economical sense. I'm sure someone must have calculated the average individual expenditure of riflemen and other regular grunts, but I don't know if this information was ever published somewhere, you could expect to spend a lot of ammunition on suppressing or just not hitting, but I don't think it was outright as high as 10000 per individual soldiers on average.

A more substantial thing learned from studying this data was that whichever side had the most ammunition in an engagement would usually have the upper hand and be more likely to win, which is one of the multiple factors influencing the gradual transition towards 'medium' powered intermediate rifle cartridges during the Cold War. The idea of increasing hit probability through a high volume of fire as in Niblick, SPIW, and ACR, probably ran contrary to this factor, at least in a number of the attempted implementations. 81.227.20.48 (talk) 16:19, 29 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]