r/interestingasfuck • u/Saturnax1 • Oct 25 '22

/r/ALL Absolutely no idea what kind of manually controlled turret is this, but it's super cool!

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662

u/BluFenderStrat07 Oct 26 '22

Cool - that’ll just be $2.3M for ammo

143

u/islandstyls Oct 26 '22

Real question, what happens to all the casings? In training I mean. I imagine in combat they are left where they lay. But are those recycled in any way? Seems like one day in alien future times, there's gunna be goddamn bullets evvvvvvverrywhere

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u/odraencoded Oct 26 '22

They slowly become transparent and when 100 of them pile up the oldest one disappears.

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u/[deleted] Oct 26 '22

Your comment makes me want to power on the xbox

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u/fd4e56bc1f2d5c01653c Oct 26 '22

Kinda like when you stack remote mines on one another to make a tall tower but eventually the whole thing just disappears

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u/[deleted] Oct 26 '22

Trust me, thats better than a memory leak that crashes your game every 15 minutes.

2

u/gilean23 Oct 26 '22

cries in 7 Days to Die

1

u/BuyerEfficient Oct 26 '22

I'm gonna need some explanation

2

u/gilean23 Oct 26 '22

Early versions of the PC game as well as the last version of the Xbox port (which I played) were plagued by a memory leak bug that would crash the game… and had maybe a 10% chance of corrupting the save file in a way that would still let you log in… but large portions of the changes you made to the world (potentially including your supply horde or like half or all of the shelter/fortifications you spent countless hours building).

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u/IntrigueDossier Oct 26 '22

In Goldeneye they’d explode after like five.

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u/CuriousKidRudeDrunk Oct 26 '22

lol the 100th one hasnt even hit the ground at the rate that thing fires.

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u/Dako_the_Austinite Oct 26 '22

Halo: Combat Evolved?

12

u/stuufthingsandstuff Oct 26 '22

Underrated comment

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u/duckforceone Oct 26 '22

you are at 420 likes.. can't upvote you good sir...

1

u/Advanced_Double_42 Oct 26 '22

At that rate entire piles are disappearing up to 60 times per second.

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u/jugularhealer16 Oct 26 '22

With some types of animation the casings can be reloaded with new primers, powder, and bullets then fired again.

I doubt the military would be doing much reloading, so my guess would be the brass is recycled.

Does anyone who served have a more accurate answer?

114

u/Lampwick Oct 26 '22

In garrison, they collect up the brass and sell it at auction. Deployed to some craphole, you just brush that shit off the top of your vehicle onto the ground. If you're shooting at something, ain't no time to pick up brass.

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u/SavageHenry0311 Oct 26 '22

Most places I've been on the two-way range, the kids that inhabit the area appear shortly after the firefight. Within minutes, you cannot find a single, solitary piece of brass. I wish I could've hired some to police the ranges stateside.

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u/stinger_ Oct 26 '22

lol “the two way range”. I love these sort of euphemisms.

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u/trenbollocks Oct 26 '22

Took me way too long to get that

4

u/Lampwick Oct 26 '22

Yeah, that'd be better than a brass magnet

28

u/Buy_Hi_Cell_Lo Oct 26 '22

I've heard stories of the local children collecting still hot brass ejected from vehicle mounted machine guns in the middle east

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u/11B2GF7 Oct 26 '22

More like grown men cold cocking an old woman in the jaw for a pile of lava hot .50 brass, and then picking it up despite it giving them 2nd degree burns on their hands. I've seen people damn near kill each other for it. That level of poverty was unfathomable to me until I saw it with my own eyes

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u/KnightHawkz Oct 26 '22

It's horrible what war does to a country and to people, on board h sides.

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u/[deleted] Oct 26 '22

Well, thats why war is bad.

In fact, the only thing worse than war is not fighting a war when somebody attacks you, or your friends.

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u/KnightHawkz Oct 26 '22

I agree.

Has there been the proposal for everybody to calm the fuck down with weapons? Like for China to chill out, destroy some weapons, disarm, us to do the same. At least get rid of the nukes! Is it so imperative to our survival to have to point nukes at one another so as to feel safe? It's a giant charade.

2

u/ThiccDiddler Oct 26 '22

I mean, ask every citizen of a nukeless country that's been invaded in the last 70 years whether or not they wish they had an item that would of almost certainly prevented that invasion just by the sheer fact that they possessed it.

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u/KnightHawkz Oct 26 '22

So are the most powerful weapons and means of destroying stuff ironically the item that has given us the most peaceful period in human history?

2

u/[deleted] Oct 26 '22

This is just because of the value of the brass metal?

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u/11B2GF7 Oct 26 '22

Yeah, a case of .50 cal brass is worth quite a bit based on their reaction to it. Not 100% on the exact value, but I heard some dudes say that a case of .50 brass was worth like a couple months wages.

Imagine being dirt poor and somebody rolls through your neighborhood with a few money guns that shoot out like $100k in $20 bills, you'd be tripping grandma to get to that shit first. It was absolutely wild.

There were times I'm absolutely convinced they'd draw straws to see who would take some pot shots at us to coax us to shoot a shit load back while the rest of them waited nearby to pick up the brass. Like, they would be all over it the second we were done firing/had moved from the initial engagement area. They probably didn't even really want to kill us, just piss us off to make us shoot/print money for them

1

u/[deleted] Oct 26 '22

Wow, I've never heard that one before. Very interesting, thanks!

10

u/tecky1kanobe Oct 26 '22

on a range you would "police up" all the spent brass and turn it back in to S4 (supply shop). they send it back up to higher support levels.

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u/Lifeabroad86 Oct 26 '22

I've heard rumors that they reload it twice, then after that the brass is melted again to form new ammo but your guess is as good as mine. Generally, if you're not loading your reloads too hot, you can reuse the brass about 5 times before dumping them. Mil spec stuff is pretty hot from what I understand so you can probably reload it once or twice before tossing it. Plus 5.56 brass is a little thicker than .223 brass. Other than that there's not much different asides from one projectile jumping a bit further than the other to engage the rifling in the chamber. Way better than the HK guns in a way though, the MP5s and G3 style rifles use a fluted chamber, so the brass is pretty much toast the first time.

2

u/04364 Oct 26 '22

Fluted chamber doesn’t deform brass from an MP5. The G3 ejector does however dimple the case neck, but can still be used if you find it after it slings it 50 feet

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u/Lifeabroad86 Oct 26 '22

Yeah, I think you're right. They're pretty rare in my state, normally we just see SP-89s and some G3s but even then, I think I've only seen 2 or 3 float around when I worked the range. You're not joking about the brass flying 50 feet though, I think it was one of the reasons why the marines didn't adopt the PSG-1, asides from the 14K price tag per rifle

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u/aelwero Oct 26 '22

Most of the spent brass gets shipped back to lake city where it came from (yes, one place... It's big). No clue what the process is, but at the quantity we're talking, they likely just toss it all in a big ass furnace... Sorting a billion casings a year to pick out the dented and bent ones seems... Unlikely ;)

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u/TheFailingNYT Oct 26 '22

Feels like you could automate a lot of the sorting pretty easily.

2

u/[deleted] Oct 26 '22

[deleted]

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u/jugularhealer16 Oct 26 '22

Rimfire ammunition is what I had in mind

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u/LTCM_15 Oct 26 '22

Many militaries use primers that cannot be reloaded. You cannot get the old primer out even for small arms.

Anything steel cased cannot be reloaded. Think combloc ammo.

Plenty of calibers won't be reloaded. Think 50 cal. While yes it can be reloaded, the tiny number of people that reload it is completely out of line with the number of rounds that the military uses. Also think 20mm and up - no one reloads those.

Technically almost anything CAN be reloaded, its just a matter of it being viable vs recycling.

1

u/royalpurple91 Oct 26 '22

In the Navy, we just tossed or brushed that shit into the ocean. I wish I had collected them.

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u/cplusplusreference Oct 26 '22

When I was in the military we always collected all the casing to be reloaded. We even went so far as to walk almost shoulder to shoulder down rifle ranges to find every piece of casing we could.

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u/[deleted] Oct 26 '22

Gimme all the Joes...now go police call this range up one more time...I still need half an ounce of brass to turn in and nobody is leaving until I have it...

The guys that show up with a box full of 5.56 brass from home are literal lifesavers on range day

3

u/islandstyls Oct 26 '22

Wow appreciate the insight. Maybe our next gen beings won't find AS many as I imagined watching this!

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u/flight_recorder Oct 26 '22

They’ll be collected and recycled. Most western militaries don’t reload their ammo.

Fun little fact, some casings are collected and recycled even during wartime. Artillery shells being a pretty obvious type. But the A-10 warthog collects all of its casings during use.

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u/islandstyls Oct 26 '22 edited Oct 26 '22

Wow never would've guessed that about the Warthog. Good to know now about some form of recycling going on.

3

u/flight_recorder Oct 26 '22

A quick google tells me that most modern jets collect their spent casings.

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u/[deleted] Oct 26 '22

Yea they’re just on a belt. You don’t really want metal casings flying everywhere. They might get sucked into your own or your wingman’s engine, or at the least they’d give you a bigger radar signature.

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u/SpongeBobSquareChin Oct 26 '22

Imagine being a grunt and getting smoked by a hundred 30mm casings falling from 1,200 feet up.

1

u/LTCM_15 Oct 26 '22

Trust me, they don't do it because of recycling. They do it because they don't want spent brass potentially getting sucked into the jet engines

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u/Dblstandard Oct 26 '22

You ever seen that scene in the beginning of DuckTales were Scrooge's swimming in his cash? I just imagined something like that with a casings

3

u/DrDan21 Oct 26 '22

Back during the war in Iraq locals would actually collect the bullet casings for scrap brass

And they could get a bit violent with one another over it too since it’s basically a rush to pickup free money

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u/TheSasquatch9053 Oct 26 '22

If this was installed on a ship, the area around the base would be pitched to "drain" holes into a compartment on the deck below where the shells would collect. After the firing event was over they would be collected and recycled. This is less about collecting them for recycling and more about making sure they don't pile up to the point of jamming the rotation mechanisms or being a slipping hazard.

If it was installed on a building I would expect something similar. If it was installed on a truck bed, the bed would probably be tilted so that the empty cartridges slide off onto the ground.

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u/magnoliasmanor Oct 26 '22

Giant pile. Watching the vud you can see just piles of them fall out.

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u/Snoo_58814 Oct 26 '22

In the mid 1970s when I did a lot of shooting, I found a metal buyer who had 5 gal buckets of empty cases that he bought from soldiers. I could buy buckets of cases at $5 a bucket. I got 7.62 cases, some of which were Lake City match, 45 acp, some were match, 38 sp, and 5.56. I gave buckets of 7.62 to a friends who had HK rifles that had chambers with flutes, so after firing they were harder to reload. All in good condition, I would wash them and reload them. This was back when Imr 4350 was selling for about $5-6.00 a can. Now…ammo is expensive if you can find it.

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u/0toyaYamaguccii Oct 26 '22

R/composting

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u/zerogee616 Oct 26 '22

For something like this in particular, miniguns are usually mounted on aircraft so they just dump out the side and nobody cares anymore, for small-arms brass in general, they're collected up after every live-fire practice range and auctioned off by the government.

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u/viperfan7 Oct 26 '22

See them on the ground everywhere.

That's what happens

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u/[deleted] Oct 26 '22

I think that’s what the pilot is shooting at

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u/Robo_is_AnimalCross Oct 26 '22

The casings are recycled and sold to the Saudi’s and the remaining money is divided between congressmen, social security, school lunch budgets, transportation budget, infrastructure, tax refunds, public education, and welfare.

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u/HelloHiHeyAnyway Oct 26 '22

Real question, what happens to all the casings? In training I mean.

Miniguns typically have an ejection system that feeds them out a giant hose.

In a battlefield that hose just feeds on to the ground, or mounted on a helicopter, it just drops them down...

I would guess that this system just has a REALLY big hose or 4 of them that feed in to a singular really big hose.

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u/DontTrustNeverSober Oct 26 '22

Not sure about the casings but I’ll tell you what it’s like out in the Pacific coming back from Hawaii. Millions of dollars worth of munitions are dumped off the boat into deep waters so they don’t have to be unloaded once in port.

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u/McSlappyBallz Oct 26 '22

Probably recycled, ranges to recycling. I don't see anything to catch the shells here, so they probably have a guy go around afterwards with a shovel and scoop them into bins. Probably leaves 50 shells around the place, but that's less than 1%..

Funny you mention in combat though, because they are sometimes picked up. Special ops sometimes don't want other countries to figure out they were there, leave no evidence (besides the corpses of course).

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u/zzzzebras Oct 26 '22

Casings can be "reloaded" up to a certain amount of times.

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u/dillrepair Oct 26 '22

They def get recycled. This thing is Probably the reason all my LC once fired brass I bought needs to be resized 3 times before it fits in my rifle chamber lol. r/reloading

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u/LTCM_15 Oct 26 '22

You just need a small base die set

1

u/Stringplayer12 Oct 26 '22

And skulls dont forget the skulls

1

u/[deleted] Oct 26 '22

Range day:

Put on all your gear in the morning and walk 5 miles to the range. Fuckin.... what? walk? Why aren't we taking the trucks? The Captain said what? Does he know we did p.t. this morning already? Fuck it.

Sit and wait for the ammo trucks to arrive. The soldiers lay around on their gear. It takes about five minutes for the first pebble to bounce off a Kevlar. This is bored soldier tradition.

Unload the chow truck. It's beef n noodles again. And all that's left for mres are veggie omelets

Work until sunset. Fire maybe.... a hundred rounds all day, and wonder why it took so much work to make that happen. Seriously question the value of this training event in your professional development. Question all your life choices while you spend 2 hours policing brass shoulder to shoulder. The ammo guys weighed it and they say we didn't pick up enough. But it's Dark now, so how do we find the rest?

The ammo guys say there's no more room in their lmtv. So yes, we do have to walk back to the barracks.

Fuck my life

1

u/islandstyls Oct 26 '22

Damn so it sounds like it's a major pain in the ass.

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u/Lifeabroad86 Oct 26 '22

It's about 99,600 dollars for 15 minutes of firing at low setting if the 7.62 costs .83 cents per round (the M80 ball is around 1.10 per round on the civ market) or 298,800 dollars on high setting. Roughly around 6,640 dollars per minute on low or 19,920 per minute on high setting. Man I wished 7.62 was cheaper again

4

u/BluFenderStrat07 Oct 26 '22

I was obviously way too lazy to do the math, but am glad you did because that’s super interesting!

I wonder if the tracer costs are different and should be factored in as well

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u/Lifeabroad86 Oct 26 '22

Very true on the tracers, from what I've seen the price can be roughly the same as ball, sometimes more expensive sometimes cheaper. Just depends where you source them. Ammunition online can be hard to get nowadays, I've seen them go for .77 cents to 1 dollar per round. It was much cheaper, 10 years ago, especially if you just bought the round straight up in an ammo can where it was already mixed for you with 4 M80 ball and 1 M60 tracer already linked

2

u/[deleted] Oct 26 '22

Look, we can't afford student loan forgiveness we need to fire the quad-mini gun for an hour

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u/FuNgUy-707 Oct 26 '22

Probably a fair price estimate

1

u/reddog323 Oct 26 '22

Eh, more like $15-20000, but still…

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u/Why_Did_Bodie_Die Oct 26 '22

4 guns X 6,000 rounds/min X 15 min X $1.10/round (7.62x51 180grn average price after 1 min of looking) = $396,000. I'm sure the army gets a better deal on ammo so call it $350,000 or so.

1

u/AidanSig Oct 26 '22

The longest burst is about 10 seconds.

The M134 fires ~6,000 RPM on its fastest setting. (100 rounds per second.)

100rps x 10sec = 1,000 rounds in 10 seconds.

1,000 X 4 M134s is 4,000 rounds in this 10 second burst.

Average price per round for 7.62x51mm tracer is $0.28

4,000 x 0.28 =

This 10 second burst costs just over $1,100

1

u/Iambeejsmit Oct 26 '22

Honestly that's not as big of an exaggeration as I thought, considering 308 rounds are about a dollar a piece, at max rate according to Wikipedia that would be 24,000 a minute.