Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at HK's Grey Room in Ashburn, Virginia, taking a look at one of the most interesting guns that we've ever taken a look at here, and probably one of the most requested. This is the HK G11. This is a caseless ammunition firing prototype assault rifle that was supposed to equip the entire German army, but didn't. This was also tested by the US, and not adopted. And this program actually probably
goes back further than most people think. ... Development of this rifle and it's
ammunition (and it's important to remember that as a caseless ammunition rifle, the ammo
is basically as important, it requires as much technological development as the firearm itself), and
development of this began all the way back in 1967. This was, basically, a joint project between HK for
the rifle, and Dynamit Nobel for the ammunition. And they did this, kind of on the
understanding that the German government was interested in pursuing a more
high-tech small calibre rifle to replace the G3. Despite the fact that the G3 had
barely been adopted by that point. This was the introduction of the M16
and the 5.56 calibre cartridge to NATO, and Europe, and the world, and everyone
was very interested in it. And this was what the German government
hoped would come of that whole concept. So, the project starts in '67. It wouldn't actually
be until 1974 that Dynamit Nobel and HK actually got a signed government
development contract. Prior to that, they'd been doing this work on their
own and hoping, and assuming, that the government would come back
them up financially, eventually. Of course, in the early days it went through a
number of major developmental revisions. Dynamit Nobel actually started with an HK33,
chambered for a very early 4.9mm cartridge. They used that to do some development work. On HK's side, they went through a
couple different locking mechanisms. Not surprisingly, one of the very first
prototypes was actually a roller delay system. That was HK's bread and butter, and they
originally tried that for what would become the G11. That didn't end up working out. Ultimately, what they went with was a
very interesting ... basically a drum bolt, where the bolt rotates, but not in the
way we're normally used to thinking, where it rotates to unlock. Instead this was a
drum, firing this direction, that rotated like so. Which actually makes a lot of
sense with a caseless cartridge. Remember that one of the fundamental
characteristics of most modern firearms, ... well, in fact, all modern
firearms, is that somehow the bolt has to reciprocate backwards to pull
this empty case out of the chamber. Well, if you don't ... have a case
stuck in there that has to come out, you can really fundamentally change how the gun
works. Because nothing has to reciprocate backwards. So in this case, what the bolt does is it
rotates up, a cartridge is pushed into it (these magazines here on the top
hold cartridges stacked vertically). Bolt rotates up, cartridge is dropped into it,
bolt then rotates 90 degrees down, lines the cartridge up with the barrel (or the projectile? It's hard to say cartridge
because there's no case, anyway) lines the thing up with the barrel,
fires it, and then the chamber is empty. There's no cartridge case left to be ejected. So the bolt can simply rotate up, have
another round poked into it, down, fire. And that really changes the concept
of how the gun needs to function. So between 1974 and ultimately 1978, there
was a lot of developmental work done on this. There are a number of problems with
caseless ammunition that had to be addressed, and these are things that
are still challenging today. People wonder why we don't have a caseless
ammunition rifle in common service anywhere. Well, here are some of the reasons.
The cartridges tend to be a bit fragile. Because they don't have this nice,
heavy metal case protecting ... well, protecting the powder, a caseless round
tends to be brittle. If you drop it, it might crack. If it cracks, or deforms at all, or chips,
it might not fit in the chamber. These are problems that have to be addressed.
And, by the way, one of the ways that the Germans addressed that, was by issuing
the ammunition in little 10 or 15 round plastic containers that you would use as ... fully
enclosed stripper clips to charge magazines. You also have a problem of temperature and cookoff.
So, not only do you not have a metal case protecting the powder to prevent it from
heating up when you stuff it into a hot barrel, You also don't have that cartridge case
to expel waste heat from the action. One of the things that cases do, that a lot of people
don't think about, is they take heat out of the gun. Heat that otherwise has to go into some component,
almost certainly the barrel and chamber. You know, that cartridge case is really hot
when it spits out of the gun. That's a good thing. You want that heat out. If you don't have the ability
to remove heat like that, it's gonna stay in the gun. The barrel is going to get hotter, and now
you're stuffing an uncased block of powder into the chamber. You run the risk of
cookoffs. And that was one of the major developmental challenges for HK, and
really for Dynamit Nobel, in this project was develop ammunition that
wouldn't cookoff so easily. I should point this out for folks who aren't
intimately familiar with caseless ammunition, the way this typically works is, instead of
having your powder as, well, powder, or flakes, or balls, or you know various granules, instead
it's compressed together into a single hard block. It's water-proofed, hardened as
much as can be chemically done, and then you embed a bullet in
the front and a primer in the back. In theory, the primer goes flying out
the barrel with the whole projectile. The bullet of course goes flying out,
and the powder just goes away, so there's no need for a case. That's
how this is, in theory, supposed to work. By 1978 the future of the G11
was largely tied to NATO trials. NATO was, of course, going to adopt a
new cartridge to replace the 7.62x51mm. And there were a couple of different entries.
The US, of course, entered its 5.56 cartridge. The Belgians also entered a 5.56x45
cartridge, the SS109, with a heavier bullet and different bullet construction. The
British entered their 4.85mm cartridge from their new SA80 series of rifles.
And the Germans were going to enter this. By 1978, however, it had become clear to the German
government that development wasn't going to be done in time. They weren't going to be able to deliver
rifles and ammunition sufficient to have a ... chance of winning the trials, and
so they cancelled the development project. To the German government at this point ... it had
already failed, so why dump more money into it? As a result of course, SS109, the Belgian
cartridge, ended up winning NATO trials, and would go on to be the standard
cartridge for NATO going forward. HK, by the way, would react to this with the
HK G41, which we'll cover in a separate video. At that point HK and Dynamit Nobel were
kind of left holding the bag for this project. They've invested a lot of money,
they still see the potential for it. It just needed more time than was
available before these NATO trials. So at that point this kind of turns into a consortium
effort, because there are a lot of other people who are also very interested in this rifle. In
particular the French, working through GIAT, and the British ... working through Royal Ordnance.
Both expressed a substantial interest and so development of the gun turned into, well, this
consortium effort. They created a company ... we'll stay away from the bureaucratic
background of how this was all set up, but development would continue even though it
didn't have a formal German development contract. And there was kind of a light at the end
of the tunnel that appeared in 1982, when the US formally started the ACR
program, the Advanced Combat Rifle. The ACR ... the intention was to develop a rifle that
had a better hit probability than a standard M16. And there were four main entrants, and one of
them was the HK G11. So, the US Government was willing to actually fund the
project in order to make this happen, and so that kind of picked this
back up and gave it new life. With this new development money came a
new German development contract in 1984. It wasn't that the German government
wasn't interested in the rifle. It's that they hadn't seen any hope of it succeeding
and so they cancelled the funding. Well when new funding had been able to be procured,
and the development was able to continue by '84 the German government was like, "Oh hey,
you know, we're still interested in this, it appears that it's not actually dead".
And so HK did get a new round of German government funding as well.
And this would lead to, by 1988, about ... a dozen guns going into actual German
troop trials. Where they performed pretty well. By 1989 there was the G11 K2, or Konstruktion 2
model, and that's what we have here by the way. The K2 added two spare magazines,
mounted up on top of the action. These are, by the way, 50 round
single stack magazines. With these two spares, the gun has
a total of 150 rounds of ammunition right built into it here, which was really quite
significant. If you look at this weight wise, for the the same weight that would be required
to carry a G3 and ... 100 rounds of ammunition ..., you could carry this and 600 rounds of ammo.
That's a compelling argument. So, the German government was actually basically
ready to approve this and, in fact, in March of 1990 they did formally certify it as acceptable
and good to go for the German military. The plan was get it into production, and they were
going to outfit the entire Bundeswehr with the G11 K2. Now, let's pull this apart, and maybe it wasn't such a bad thing for everyone
that this didn't go into actual military service. Alright. Let's go over some of the basics on
this boxy looking thing with a grip and a scope. This is the final production
version, this is the K2 version. It has a polymer body housing, most of the early
prototypes had a metal body housing on them. While they were going through the development
process to make this more functional, they were of course doing everything
else as well to improve it. Trying to make it lighter, trying
to make it simpler and so on. We have a four position selector switch,
which is a very HK-like switch. Safe, semi-automatic, three round burst, which is fired at
about 2,000 rounds per minute, and then full-auto, which is
fired at 600 rounds per minute. So you did have kind of a standard full-auto selector
option here, as well as the hyper-burst version. Now we should talk about that
burst version for just a moment. The idea here was to fire three rounds,
and have the third round leave the barrel before the impact of recoil, before the
energy of recoil caused the muzzle to shift. The idea being you had a much better
chance of getting a hit with three rounds scattered out than
with just one round at a time. This was the whole fundamental basis for the
US SPIW program, the US SALVO program, the US ACR program. These were all
built around the idea of improving hit probability without requiring a fundamental
improvement in marksmanship. And this was never going to be
accepted in the US because it, kind of, demeans the whole idea of marksmanship.
But in the real world of combat, what people are mostly shooting at are
fleeting targets. They are poorly visible targets, they are some guy jumps up from behind a rock and
makes a quick dash to some other piece of cover, and you don't necessarily have the time to get more than
one shot off, and it's probably not going to be a perfect shot. And so the theory was, if you can
fire multiple projectiles with your one opportunity to take a shot, you
stand a better chance of getting a hit. So, with that in mind, the G11 was
designed with this three round burst option at 2,000 rounds per minute. We'll touch in a
minute on how that actually functioned. But for now, let's continue going
over some of the external bits here. Of course, we have our manufacturer's markings. This
particular gun was made in October of 1989 by HK. The calibre changed a number of
times over the development of the rifle, it started out as 4.9, then went
to 4.3mm, then it went to 4.75 (although the 4.75 was actually called 4.7, so
that it wouldn't be confused with the British 4.85). It ultimately wound up as 4.73. We have this integrated optical sight.
This is a one power non-magnifying sight. But it does give you a nice optical reticle
instead of having to line up iron sights. There was also a 3.5 power version,
although this particular one doesn't have it. These two little screw ports here are for zeroing,
for adjusting your windage and elevation. The magazine release is this rubberized
button on the top. So there's no actual hole in the gun, there's a release lever
inside the action which you can activate by pushing down on this guy. And when you do that, it of
course releases the magazine. There we go. The centre magazine
is the one that is actually in use. This is a 50 round, single stack magazine. You can see that they have helpfully
shown you a diagram of the case, so that you don't put the
cartridges in backwards. Now, because these things are really long
and awkward and you don't really want them hanging off your belt like an 1870s
bayonet, with the K2 pattern of the gun they decided to add some more
magazine storage to the gun itself. These mags, while long, are not particularly bulky. And so it's actually a really clever idea to just
put two more of them onto the outside of the gun. Why not? You've got the space to do it. So there's one. (We have these release buttons right
here, one on each side of the action.) Push that in, and then the magazine comes out. Note that they also put little plastic
flapper doors on those magazine wells to keep dirt out of the action if
you ... didn't have magazines in there. The K2 version also went to this kind
of squared-off rectangular handguard, because it is set up to mount
a laser optic under the bore. This one's not functioning at the moment, but
that snaps into a little housing right down here. Maybe. There we go. Now I talked about the use of this rotating drum bolt and what that means is you basically have a winder instead of a linear charging handle. So there is this handy little arrow there and in order to charge this, you rotate it, like so, one full revolution. If we look at the bottom, this is your ejection port. Now this doesn't normally eject anything,
so it normally has this plastic cover on it. However, if you have a misfire you need some way to be able
to clear that from the action, and so, when you rotate this thing,
it opens up this ejection port. It has a loading finger in there that's going
to push the next cartridge into the chamber. When it does that, if there's
already a cartridge in there, the new cartridge being put in will push the
old one out, and it will fall out this ejection port. So it's important that that stays open. That's the bolt snapping back into firing position,
and then a little charging cover goes back. Now for the fun stuff, let's take it apart. It's actually really easy to take apart.
There are just a couple of spring-loaded little tabs. So if I push those in I can pull off the front part of the body housing
which is just this hollow plastic block. There is our barrel. ... All the bulk out
front is actually just there to house that guy. We do the same thing on
the back. There's a tab here, and a tab here. And pull off the back. This one is also completely hollow. You can see the little cover for the ... ejection port. And that's it for that guy. And then we've got this thing. So,
this is the infamous action of the gun. Fortunately, we don't have to use this exclusively. Here at the Grey Room they also have this dummy version of the entire barrelled action. So, ... let me start by giving you just the basic fundamental concept of how this rifle works. Built into this system we have a recoil spring,
right here, and we have a gas system, right here. This is a gas operated rifle.
It's going to tap gas out of the barrel, use it to rotate this drum bolt to cycle cartridges. Now, in the 600 round per minute standard
full-auto rate of fire, that's what happens. At the same time, however,
there is also a recoil system in this gun. So if you've seen my video on the AN-94,
you'll remember (hopefully) that with that you have a gun that is kind of a
hybrid, both recoil and gas-operated. This is similar, although it's
actually conceptually a little bit simpler. So when I hold the trigger down on this,
I can actually operate the recoil system. Now, this just acts as a buffer. So when you fire, the recoil energy
causes this whole thing to cycle backwards. It doesn't actually mechanically operate
the gun. That's all done by the gas system. When you put it in three round burst, what's
going to happen here is it's going to fire the first round, and the gas system will have cycled the
action by the time it gets to, like, here. And then it'll fire a second round,
it will recoil more, and then (if I can hold against the spring), it will
eventually, by the time it fires the third round, (sorry, this springs too stiff for me
to hold down here with one hand). Basically, this thing is going to reciprocate all the way
back over the course of firing three rounds, very quickly. Right after the third round leaves the muzzle, this is going to hit its end of travel, stop,
and that is where the recoil energy actually gets transferred to the shooter,
and the muzzle is going to climb. The whole gun is going to bounce backwards
when this whole assembly stops moving. So, the idea of keeping the muzzle in
place for those three rounds is done by having this thing fire while it's
reciprocating backwards. This is conceptually simpler than
the AN-94 because it is caseless. So with the AN-94 it's kind of doing the same thing,
but it has to have some way to actually eject that empty casing while it's traveling
backwards. The G11 doesn't have to do that. I should point out here ... the magazine
is connected to the whole action. So when this is cycling backwards,
its whole feed system is going with it. Everything's right there.
It just has to rotate this drum, feed a cartridge, fire it, feed a cartridge,
fire it, feed a cartridge, fire it. Easy, right? The difference in standard full-auto is
that on the three round burst setting, the trigger is activated two more
times while this is going backwards. On the full-auto setting, the trigger
is not reset to fire a subsequent round until the whole action comes forward,
and that's what gives it the lower rate of fire. So with that hopefully conceptually in hand, let's
take a look at just the guts of the system here. This is the barrel. On this particular one it's solid,
this is a dummy action. This is the recoil spring. This is the gas system, the gas tube, right here.
It's got a piston in it, sort of, connected to this arm. We have a pair of toothed gear wheels here. The bolt itself is this guy, right in there. This is what's actually connected to the charging handle. So when we rotate that handle on the outside of the action, this guy, it's hooking onto this thing, and rotating it.
(It's rather hard to do without proper leverage.) When the gas system operates, (flip this around, right-side up) what's going
to happen is this arm is going to come back and it's going to act, kind of like the
steam piston arm on a locomotive engine. So when this comes back,
it's going to rotate these two wheels, push this up, that eventually will ... unlock
the bolt. So we have a little lock right there. (Get this from this side...) So, you can see this little arm disengages. (If I can get the right bits to move here, there we go.) Starts to disengage. If I had enough strength
in my thumb to cycle this the whole way, what it would eventually do is rotate this bolt upward. So the chamber is right now pointing
that way, when it rotates upward, then it's in position to feed. So this is our feed plunger,
which is going to cycle up and down. It's going to push a cartridge out of ... the front of this magazine. Push it down into the chamber, poking out an
unexpended dud round, if there's one in there. Then the drum bolt ... rotates
forward, and it's ready to fire. This is going to sound very odd, but I
feel the need to point out that as far as field-stripping goes, this is
actually an extremely simple rifle. I mean ... like boom, I've field-stripped the front assembly. And it's
basically the same process for the back. And cleaning is also a
pretty simple deal because built into the pistol grip here, if I rotate that 90
degrees, look at that, I've got a cleaning brush. You might normally think,
"Ah, well, where is your cleaning rod?" Well, they didn't bother with a
cleaning rod on this because, forget it, you're not getting into this thing anyway. Instead, what you do is just take
your charging handle rotate it open to right there, where by the way,
it does stick intentionally, we can then look down inside there
and see straight up into the chamber. So what's the cleaning procedure? Take chamber brush, clean it out, done. Now if this gets to the point where you
need to detail strip it, you're totally screwed. But as far as the actual maintenance
that's expected of an individual soldier, you know, simply to be able
to clean out the chamber, etc. they did a pretty good job on this. As complicated,
as insanely complicated as the action is, it is a unitised sort of action, and everything
else that you have to deal with around it, it's pretty simple. OK, we have been playing around with this thing a
little bit and figured out a bit more, which is really cool. First off, there is a tool which allows you
to manually cycle the action, so this (I don't know if this is an official tool or just something that someone here at HK put together for this demonstrator action), but once we have this locked into the cylinder here, now I can fully cycle this and you can actually watch that cartridge lifter, or finger, go down,
push the round in, come back up, and then locks back in place.
So a 360 degree rotation of this cylinder fully cycles the action. So you can see the finger right there pushing down. That'll clear the chamber
if necessary, and then feed a round in, and now it's ready again. If we look at it from this side right ... there, you can see the chamber open.
It just looks like a black hole there, but that goes down into it. And then, ready to go again. So. That's the action cycling dry.
Now I have a couple of dummy cartridges here. We can lock the magazine in
place, that's how it would go in. And then if I do this again, it will
actually chamber one of our dummy rounds. Now, unfortunately, you can't really see anything
here because the whole action is sealed up. But we now have (go ahead and release our magazine),
we now have only one dummy round there. You can't see anything here, because the other dummy round is actually in
the chamber, currently aligned that way, ready to fire. And if I cycle this
one more time, this cartridge finger, right there, is going to punch it out the
ejection port on the bottom of the action. You can actually see the base of the
cartridge, just barely, right there and (there we go), that is going to push it out the bottom of the action. Where it then gets stuck, because I wasn't holding it, there we go. If you're not trying to do this in slow motion upside
down, this does spit the cartridge out fairly reliably. So the new funding that became available in 1984 led
directly to the G11 being put into troop trials by 1988. Development had gone far enough that HK was
ready for it. The German military was ready for it. They did their trials, they worked pretty well. In
1989 they added the K2 version here, Konstruktion 2, with the extra magazines in the, well I was gonna say in
the stock, but sort of down the entire length of the gun. And everything was looking pretty good.
In fact by March of 1990 the German military authorities formally certified
this rifle as approved for use by the German military. The plan was to put it into mass production
and to equip the entire Bundeswehr with G11s. Sounds pretty good, and then ... geopolitics intrudes. Right about this same time, if we look at the
bigger picture, the Berlin Wall is coming down, East and West Germany are reunifying,
and the Soviet Union is crumbling. Well, the whole point of the G11, the whole point of
the West German military, was of course defence, primarily against the Soviet Union. With it
falling apart, one of the major threats to German political sovereignty is going away.
At the same time, the German government is looking at a tremendous amount of money that it's going
to need for the reunification, for rebuilding East Germany. They have also received a, you know,
acquired, a giant, mountainous stockpile of East German AK-74s. So they now
have a whole ton more armaments, they have fewer people that they're
potentially going to need to use them on, and they have this huge new expense coming out. And
all of these things work together to kill the G11 program. It's going to be expensive, and now
it just doesn't look all that necessary. So the German parliament formally
cancelled the adoption plan for the G11 in the fall of 1990, and that was pretty
much the end of the line for the rifle. Now of course it was, at this same
approximate time, going through the US ACR trials, and those went well. There were
15 G11 K2s in the ACR trials program. These guns put about 4,000 rounds
downrange each. They all worked well. But, as a whole package, when you looked at the logistics
and the cost, and the accuracy and everything else, the US government decided that they
weren't an overall improvement over the M16. In fact, none of the ACR trials rifles
were. None of them were adopted. The program simply ended with no
change to the US military rifle system. So, that had been the last hope for the G11. With it gone as well, this
program pretty much just ended. ... We were left with a very small
number of these rifles existing anywhere. Here at HK's Grey Room in Virginia
they have this particular one complete rifle. ... They also have three other earlier
ones which are basically dummy shells, with just some solid metal internals to give them weight. There are some at HK in Oberndorf, I expect. And there are a few dotting
around military museums worldwide. Mostly the countries, the militaries, that
actually did some testing with these. So it is extremely uncommon to be able to find them, and I am very grateful to HK here for giving me access to this one to pull apart and show you. Thank you guys for watching.
Hope you enjoyed the video.
Now I have
a caseless service rifle
Ho Ho Ho
Yes! YES!
I've been up since 5AM waiting for this to come out!
Jaw dropped and said oh my god out loud when the back the back cover came off the action, wow. That drum action was reminding me of something and it was bothering me, pretty sure I'm thinking of the Madsen action. Forward facing falling block, feeds above and rotates down to lock.
https://youtu.be/1i59rTpXfj4
https://youtu.be/zpF2hS2avd8
New Years video Ian finds some caseless ammo?
In the grey room I keep being distracted by one amazing gun or another on the back wall. I would love to know the story of that yellow MP5 at 6:29 and see more of it. I really hope Ian was able to do a comprehensive tour of the room or theres one up somewhere else.
two good posts I found on the Gray/Grey room among many others, but couldn't find an up to date one with the MP5B(anana)
that's a loooots of details for what previously only blurry photos existed though no measurements as always
The time has come
This is more exciting than any other present I’ll get today. Maybe if I got a G11 from Santa I’d feel differently.
Wow, the best Christmas gift Ian could have given us! Thanks so much Ian!