QTS-11 OICW. 5.8 mm Heavy and 20 mm Air Burst.

This is also an interesting chart:



It explains why Russian 30mm and Chinese 35mm outperform their American 40mm counterparts. The Russian 30mm and Chinese 35mm grenades are heavier than American 40mm grenades when it comes to projectiles. In the Chinese case, they plain sacrifice range for projectile weight, going only to 1800 meters, while in the Russian case, it appears they use the lower drag of 30mm to deliver a heavier projectile a longer distance.

@TE: I think the real deal is what the 20mm projectile's explosive / fragmentation ratio is. It needs to achieve at least 3 kJ at point blank range per fragment to penetrate soft armor. If it can reach this figure, and hopefully surpass it by a bit to create a significant lethal radius, it's dangerous to NATO armored troops. If it can't, someone at NORINCO needs to get fired.

At 85 grams, though, if you assume 1:1 explosive / fragmentation ratio (charitable), then assume at least 20 fragments (charitable again), then you get 10 kJ. If you assume 50 fragments instead (more realistic), it drops to 4 kJ. If you assume a .67 explosive / fragmentation ratio, you get a bouncy 1845 joules figure at 50 fragments and 4600 joules at 20 fragments. If you assume a 2:1 explosive / fragmentation ratio (more charitable, but believable if the electronics and casing is all the Chinese have for fragmentation), you get 4000 joules at 50 fragments and 10 kJ at 20 fragments.

In either case, your point about the grenade being rather underpowered is on point, however, to the extent that multiple 20mm grenades have to be fired to approximate the lethality of a 40mm grenade, even if the 20mms are engineered to provide good armor-piercing capability. When you consider than the M441 has a projectile weight of 230 grams, you'd need at least 3 20mm grenades to generate similar firepower, and the QTS-11 is not semi-automatic, meaning that you'd need a complete squad to fire multiple rounds to achieve the desired lethality.

Also, check this out:



It's interesting in that it shows that even the most recent US underslung grenades use an obsolete design, given that they're from the bloody 1970s. As I've said before, the US does not prioritize infantry as the destroying arm of its military, and it shows. That said, given that the US is required to minimize collateral damage in urban warfare, where infantry and grenades are most powerful, it's understandable why the US does not prefer to increase the armament of its soldiers.

Well inst, I have to give you Something as well. I was also off.
ZH05 9.4 lbs, 11 lbs loaded with a full 5.8mm magazine and a grenade
I have been crunching the numbers. A M4A1 ( 7.74 pounds) with 30 rounds of M855A1 ( 62 grains works to .008 lbs) A M320 grenade launcher (3.3 pounds empty and without stock), Range finder 11.5oz (.71) Aimpoint Comp 5 ( I am being generous but the Comp 4 is not that much more.32lbs ) Riser mount (.09lbs) battery (.01) and 1 40mm round which is around .5 of a pound. so about 12.91 pounds, almost 2 pounds more than the Zh05.

If it ain't broke, also you have to consider the longer range rounds were not really an option until the choice to start phasing out the M203. M203 and it's variants have a fixed length of opening for the breach. M72 and M320 don't This has limited the length of shells. Also the list is rather old.

in 2002 the Us Added the M1060 Thermobaric round and it's not there. neither is the M781E1 training round. And it's likely that the round used today have had minor changes introduced over time.

@Terran Empire: Yes, but that's basically Chinese doctrine. Imagine if the Chinese actually did have to advance with light infantry. Sure, in a situation where infantry dominates, it'd be advantageous, but in practice, plopping grenades all day, especially grenades that ignore cover, are a recipe for civilian casualties, and exposing your light infantry without organic support will get you quite a few body bags. On the other hand, I do rate Chinese infantry well, given that they've been an infantry-centric army for most of their history.

As to 20mm penetration, it depends on how they manage their shrapnel. If you assume the 20mm breaks into the same number of pieces as a 40mm or 35mm, actually, you get penetration issues because each individual fragment becomes a lot smaller, and thus less energetic. With 20mm fragments, you'd need around half your mass to be in explosives to penetrate armor, either that, or redesign your grenade to feature larger fragments. Compare the M441, which only uses about 17% of its mass in explosives. Then you'd get 40 grams of fragmentation per explosive, versus 200 grams of fragmentation per explosive.

With the reported propellant charge (1.2 grams), hopefully for the AHEAD round, you'd only get masses that'd bounce off soft body armor. However, theoretically, in terms of ammunition design, you can penetrate soft body armor by using larger charges relative to the round itself as well as designing for larger fragments.

IT wouldn't bounce off, That's not how body armor works. Even Hard plate, It works more like the crumple zones in a car. as the fragments push farther in the material stretches and slows the projectile down until it hits a dead stop.

True, but it wouldn't penetrate and it wouldn't deal as much damage. By the way, I decided to count your XM1018 picture. That grenade generated 274 pieces of shrapnel. For a 90 gram grenade, each piece of shrapnel would weigh less than 0.32 grams. And that figure is assuming the grenade is 100% fragmentation, not explosive. It's obvious why the XM1018 got canned.

Maybe you're right about this entire thing; for instance, I calculated the fragmentation of WW2-era grenades. Each fragment was about half a gram, delivering an effective energy of 300 joules at point blank distance; i.e, .22 LR level energies that would be stopped by soft armor. The estimate I had for the M67, seemed to suggest it created 100 fragments of 1 gram, which would be enough to penetrate soft armor.

Well, I did do a size comparison. The smallest fragment I've seen in a picture of M67 debris is 6 mm. (see: )The largest fragment on your XM1018 display is about 5.9 mm. Assuming that the typical size is closer to 10mm, and calculating that a M67 has an area of 126 square cm, you'd get about 126 fragments over 205, giving you an average weight of about 1.6 grams. Using the M67's coefficient, you'd get an average energy of 3913 Joules, which is enough to penetrate at 0 meters. At 20 meters, this would drop off to 1917 Joules.

So, I guess the answer of whether soft body armor can stop grenade fire depends on the grenade. We'd need to get estimated fragment weight and energies for the 20mm grenade to figure out whether or not it'd break through soft body armor.

Okay, here's some more fun: if you assume about 100 fragments with a M67, you'd get about 7 meters distance between each fragment at 20 meters. With 400 fragments, it'd be 3.5 meters distance. Using the standard lethal distance of 15 meters, you'd get 5 meters distance between each fragment with 100 fragments, and 2.65 meters distance with 400 fragments.

With the QTS-11's fragments, you'd get 4.31 meters distance between each fragment with 40 fragments and 7.7 meters "casualty radius". With 100 fragments, i.e, will not penetrate, the distance would be about 2.72 meters between them. Using the XM1018's figures, the distance between fragments comes out to 1.64 meters.

Probabilistically, if the goal is to actually wound someone at an extended radius, the multiple shots approach of the QTS-11 is still better since multiple rounds minimize the odds of dodging all fragments. If a typical living room is about 5 meters in diameter, you'd need 2.5 meters radius to cover it. Then a 40 fragment approach would hit 1.4 meters distance between shrapnel at the outskirts. A 276 fragment approach would provide only 18 inches distance between fragments, i.e, you're not going to be able to dodge it.

So, um, doing some math, it looks like the M67 drops to 2.2 kJ at 15 meters, its stated killing radius, with 125 projectiles of about 1.6 grams. Going over the thread, the QTS-11 grenade seems to have about 54% of its volume occupied by warheads. Using the figures from the M441, I can get an estimate of about .82 as a ratio between grenade and payload. That means that a .62 gram fragment, at 7.7 meters distance, has the 2.2 kJ needed to penetrate soft armor. With an estimated 47 grams of shrapnel, the QTS-11 grenade can get 75 fragments if the goal is to penetrate soft armor at 7.7 meters.

This gives us a dispersal of 3.15 meters distance between fragments at 7.7 meters with 75 fragments.