XM913 chain gun
The XM913 chain gun is an autocannon designed for the US military, that fires a variety of munitions with a diameter of 50mm.[1][2][3][4]
The weapon is a scaled up version of the 25mm bushmaster autocannon, used on the Bradley fighting vehicle, a variety of armored cars.[1] A navalized version of the autocannon serves as the main armament of a variety of smaller vessels, as well as serving as a secondary armament on some larger vessels.
A chain gun is the name given to autocannons that rely on an external power source to cycle munition through the weapon. This is unlike man-portable firearms, and most other autocannons, which tap some of the expanding gases of each round to power the weapon cycling through to the next round. Chain guns allow the gunner to control the rate at which the gun fires. In addition more traditional autocannons stop when they try to fire a defective "dud" round. Externally powered chain guns skip past duds, and keep firing.
While the 50mm XM913 fires a larger round than its 25mm predecessor, the gun is only slightly larger, meaning that many of the exising vehicles that mounted a 25mm cannon can have it replaced with the slightly larger but much more powerful weapon.[1]
The maximum range of the cannon is believed to be 7 kilometres.[1]
Ammunition
The autocannon fires three different kinds of color-coded ammunition.[1] Ammunition with a blue warhead are training rounds, which fire an inert warheard.
A round with a black warhead is the XM1203 a kinetic energy penetrator, where a thin dense subcaliber rod is surrounded a "sabot", that fits within the cannons rifled grooves to provide spin.[1] This munition is an example of "Armor Piercing Fin Stabilized Discarding Sabot" (APFSDS). A cannon can accelerate a long thin rod, in the center of an APFSDS munition to a much greater velocity than a full size kinetic round.
A round with a yellow warhead is the XM1204, a programmable high explosive munition capable of an air burst mode.[1] When a gunner selects the air burst mode of operation he first depresses the trigger halfway, which tells the aiming mechanism to determine the range to the target. Once the range is acquired he adjusts his point of aim to just above, or just beside the target, and fully depresses the trigger. Once fired the munition travels to just past the range of the target and then explodes. This mode is used when an enemy is behind a relatively inpenetrable obstacle, like a wall. The munition's shrapnel and blast can kill or wound enemies behind obstacles, without having to penetrate those obstacles.
References
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Jay Bell (March/April 2021). "Advanced 50mm Cannon Caliber Weapons and Ammunition" (PDF). Small Arms Defense Journal. Vol. 13, no. 2. pp. 30–34. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2021-08-12. Retrieved 2022-03-02.
These cannons are capable of firing nearly 7000 meters, however, it is not clear if this is effective or maximum distance.
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Ed Lopez (2020-07-09). "Army engineers develop greater lethality, speed to support future combat vehicle". Archived from the original on 2020-10-17. Retrieved 2020-10-23.
Integrated into the design are the 50mm auto cannon, known as the XM913, capable of firing both XM1204 High Explosive Airburst with Trace (HEAB-T), and XM1203 Armor Piercing Fin Stabilized Discarding Sabot with Trace (APFSDS-T) munitions. The HEAB-T and APFSDS-T cartridges were designed and developed by Picatinny engineers and manufactured by General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems.
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Chuck Hill (2019-04-21). "50mm Chain Gun, More Detail". Chuck Hill's blog. Archived from the original on 2020-10-23. Retrieved 2020-10-23.
Comparison of 50mm Bushmaster III with the 30mm Bushmaster II. By comparison the 25mm’s length over all is 105.2 in (2.672 m) and its barrel length is 85.6 in (2.175 m).
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Brian Wang (2016-09-17). "US Army projects developing more accurate and lethal 30mm and 50mm guns". Next Big Future. Retrieved 2020-10-22.
In 2017, will validate PABM fuze technology and warhead lethality data, iterating and improving as necessary; using a commercially developed barrel, demonstrate PABM and AP effectiveness against personnel and materiel targets; design and fabricate 50mm weapon and ammunition handling system (AHS) prototypes; exploit advances in advanced Fire Control hardware to improve system performance; mature Fire Control software