TYR Tactical

AUSA – KAC 7.62 Assault Machine Gun

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At AUSA, Knight’s Armament Co displayed an example of their 7.62mm NATO Assault Machine Gun. Basically, it’s a big brother to the 5.56mm variant we recently featured. Since they are finalizing production of the 5.56mm gun, they wanted to start development of the 7.62mm version in order to provide as much part commonality as possible between the weapons.

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It weighs in at 12.5 lbs, features a hard Picatinny Rail on the Receiver and can be fired without the removable stock.

www.knightarmco.com

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24 Responses to “AUSA – KAC 7.62 Assault Machine Gun”

  1. TominVA says:

    What’s the barrel length?

    12.5lbs? Very impressive, very tantalizing, but…the Marine Corps tried to go light on a medium machine gun and it didn’t work out so well.

    • Joe says:

      50% lighter than the MK48, hopefully the design allows for accuracy/controllability given its weight. And it better not be “most effective muzzle device evar!”.

      • Retired Saw Gunner says:

        The MK-48 weighs 18lbs and change. The KAC gun is light, but it ain’t 50% lighter than a 48, it’s 50% lighter than a 240B.

      • JokerBob says:

        Check out their 5.56 version of this gun, lots of videos on YouTube. The bolt never fully makes it to the rear, reducing the recoil substantially.

    • JokerBob says:

      PKM seems to do just fine, lets give this a chance.

  2. J. Thornhill says:

    In before “how can we beat the Taliban without a lafette tripod like the Germans had in WWII.”

    • Vic says:

      Don’t you talk shit about my homie Kirk.

    • Non-operator says:

      A three foot high mud wall presents an obstacle that our best tripod engineers have yet to find a solution for.

      • AbnMedOps says:

        Well, we USED to have a high-pedestal type tripod, for anti-aircraft use with Browning machine guns. I remember it illustrated in the great C.B Colby books in my elementary school library. Our “Best Engineers” could start there.

        • Kirk says:

          I suspect you’re thinking of the M63 AA mount, which while a decent mount for a .50 M2HB doing anti-aircraft work, isn’t readily adaptable to much else on the ground. Ask me how I know, having been “The Guy” for a year or so tasked with setting up the one (1) .50 in the company, and not having been issued any other mount for it in the MTOE.

          You can fire the .50 off that thing pretty well, but it’s all “free gun”, and you’re not going to be able to lock it down for things like a range card or FPF. There’s also one hell of a lot of digging involved in getting that sumbitch down below ground level…

          In short, we lose air superiority or start having a lot more problems with UAVs, the M63 might not be a bad starting point for something to modernize. As it is, right now? About ‘effing useless, and an artifact of an earlier age when we had to worry about the Luftwaffe and the Imperial Japanese military…

      • Kirk says:

        Surprisingly, though, a Dane figured out at least one, back in the 1930s…

    • Kirk says:

      Make mock of what I say as much as you like, the fact still remains that the gun itself is only about a third of the equation, the other two-thirds being the crew training and the tripod. Bestest most uber gun in the world ain’t going to get you squat without a trained crew running the damn thing, and the proper support gear to get the most out of it.

      The unfortunate fact is, most of the people making the decisions about what to buy and develop have never been gun crew, and never been faced with the dilemma of trying to get that primitive-ass M122 into a firing solution on the ground to where it can respond to fire at the max effective range of the gun and the ammo. Nor have they ever observed a proper German gun crew doing the same task with a facility and ease that would leave a frustrated American corporal weeping with jealousy, watching how easy it was for them.

      Average idjit leadership cadre member in the US Army thinks “Tripods is tripods… What’re ya whinging for, bitch?”. Unfortunately, there is a huge difference between equipment, and we just haven’t been paying attention to it. As long as we were working out of Bradleys and with copious amounts of aviation/artillery support, that hasn’t mattered. Now that we aren’t, wellllll… It matters. And, what I find really irritating is just how assiduously so many avoid thinking about the issue. Apparently, the issue of maintaining traditionalism in tripods is more important than a lot of other things, like dress uniforms and unit continuity–Because we’re still issuing basically the same damn tripod with which we intended to fight with in trenches during WWI with, and mount the .30 Browning on top of. Does that make sense on the modern battlefield, where we’re trying to range a set of enemies out to the maximum effective range of our weapons, while on patrol in the mountains of Central Asia…?

      • Dave says:

        Preach!

        Those German tripods are so nice to use. If you think the 122 sucks, the 192 makes it look like a MG3 kit.

        I appreciate your candor and desire to train useful combat skills into our force.

        • Kirk says:

          Candor, a broke-ass body, and an inability to suffer idjits in silence are the main reason I retired as an SFC after 25 years. I see stupid, I call it as I see it, and I’m here to tell you, an awful lot of our small arms decisions have been pretty ‘effing stupid.

          Swear to God, I think I could probably solve about 75% of the so-called “issues” we have with better training, particularly in the leadership, and some improved equipment–Both of which would probably cost a hell of a lot less than the programs I see coming down the pike, which will likely never see fruition in the form of actually issued weapons or equipment.

          I mean, seriously–Which makes more sense to you? Ummpty-ump millions of dollars on new weapons, or a few million on more ammo, some ranges that actually replicate where we’re fighting, improved training scenarios that match the training/qualification standards to what we need the gun crews to do in combat, and some equipment we should have procured decades ago?

          Seriously, folks… What do our MG ranges look like, in terms of qual and training (which, sadly, are about the same damn thing, these days…)? Are we not locked into a replication of late-war Korea, with fixed firing tables and fighting positions? Like we’re manning ‘effing trenches, waiting to deal with hordes of enemy coming at us?

          Couple of times I wanted to do realistic, dynamic engagement ranges, the folks at Range Control shit their pants, the commander told me we didn’t have the budget, and the XO said there was no call for such training in the METL… Huh. Go figure. And, these same sorts are now going “Waily, waily, woe… We can’t hit the enemy that’s shooting at us from yon mountaintop…”.

          Ain’t that a fucking surprise. We have never trained our gun crews to do this shit, and we sure as hell haven’t equipped them to do so, either.

          • AbnMedOps says:

            And we have completely forgotten some other amazing stuff…Read the World War One accounts of highly trained machine gun crews (in machine gun units) conducting well planned and effective indirect MG raids against enemy rear-area activities, completely out of visual range on the backside of hills a mile or more away! Studious map recon, with maybe a smidgeon of intel or scouting, precise gun-laying with the T&E, and then, when you figure the enemy is assembled for chow time or whatever, hundreds of rounds into the beaten zone before the sound arrives.

            • Kirk says:

              Oh, I know, I know… I’ve read those same books and manuals. Somewhere in the accumulated detritus of my military career, I’ve got a stack of stuff I pulled out of DTIC and other sources back when I was doing the New Equipment Training on the M249 for my Engineer Group. Tons and tons of stuff about the automatic rifle, marching fire, walking fire, WWI French tactics, WWI German tactics, UK stuff… All of it is in the library system or DTIC, but do you know what? Nobody but a few enthusiasts actually read that stuff, or even know it exists and is available. Number of those enthusiasts who are able to even attempt to replicate that work, in the real world? About zero.

              I think I heard of one SF weapons bubba who got ahold of a bunch of seriously old-school MG gear down in Honduras or El Salvador (location varied, between tellers of the tale…) and did a full-scale live-fire reenactment of a WWI MG fire raid with full use of indirect fire scales and everything that went along with it. Lucky bastard–And, he only managed it on someone else’s ammo budget, and with someone else’s equipment.

              Funny thing is, you go to solve a problem, and think you’re the first guy to run into the issue…? Well, you usually aren’t–The history books are full of illuminating information, if only you look. Which is why I find the whole MG/tripod issue so damnably frustrating–Other people have already been down this road, solved most of the problems, and all we need to do is copy what they were doing.

              What blows my mind is that when I was a private, a lot of this stuff was trained, and somewhat common knowledge. I can remember my gun team leader showing me how we’d set up MG overwatch positions as the platoon moved, leap-frogging tripod-mounted guns along the route the platoon was working, all the positions with pre-arranged range cards showing what the T&E settings were for pre-planned likely targets in the overwatch area. We trained doing withdrawals along routes at night, with the same kind of pre-planned and plotted range card/position set-ups such that you could drop the gun and tripod into position and then start dumping rounds downrange to cover the platoon.

              All that crap was integrated into platoon operations, and considered SOP, especially during route-clearance operations.

              Somehow, though… By the time I was a platoon sergeant myself, this stuff was gone as corporate knowledge, and trying to bring it back…? LOL. “SFC K, we don’t need to waste our time doing that stuff… The Infantry will be providing security for us… We need to concentrate on our METL tasks, not train this extraneous bullshit you’re talking about, here…”.

              You can do a lot more with a tripod than set up for FPF in a fixed fighting position. People have forgotten that.

          • Shane says:

            Kirk,

            Lol if you think that’s bad you should come to Canada.
            Seriously lol Im in one of our Infantry units and shes bad dude and not bad in a good way….bad in a very shitty way. As in we got rid of our TOW capability years ago for some fucked up reason and now that we are engaged with training Ukraine forces its come to light that we need an anti armour capability if we are going to fight the Russians.
            No shit that’s how bad its gotten.

            • Kirk says:

              I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, hearing that…

              With the Canadians and the Australians, I’ve always felt a great sense of brotherhood-of-arms, but to tell you the truth, I don’t know whether that’s because we’re all operating under a similar set of idjit leadership, and I’m feeling what I feel out of sheer sympathetic pity, or if it’s something that’s based on shared history at war together.

              All I can say is… Wow. Like you’re never gonna go up against a real opponent with, like, tanks… What the hell are they smoking, in Ottawa?

      • RT says:

        Hey man you caught the attention of some of the right eggheads though and the solutions might just be nifty doodle fuckin HSLD combat gucci enough to actually interest the right pentagon pussies…

        Stranger things have happened and the army does fuck up sometimes and accidentally buys good shit, here’s hoping this is one of them…

        P.s. It was developed with all the hardcore cynicism it usually takes 20 years as an NCO to attain with a healthy respect for the idea that private snuffy can fuck up anything, more or better training probably ain’t gonna happen, and therefore we set about making an apollo program even a tribe of red assed bonobos could run…. We pretty much did it, it won’t actually make up for untrained/badly trained people completely, but in theory it might have enough wow factor to get guys to RTFM and maybe get interested in making their guns sing.

        • Kirk says:

          I hope I’m reading you right, and someone is looking at this stuff in a serious way. Even if we wind up automating the hell out of this kind of fire support, and building what amounts to a ground-mount CROWS, that’s still a better solution than PVT Snuffy snuggled up to his M240 on a bipod, trying to return fire at someone shooting at him from 1500m.

          • RT says:

            You indeed were reading me correctly…

            There’s a lot of maxim, Vickers, and vickers class d gun carriage dna sprinkled in there along with the Lafette and contemporary Russian/Chinese tripod and mount DNA which was the original starting point of this process…

            (Those 3 tripods, the arfcom lost art of machine gunnery thread, the ultra information rich articles and massive comment chains so commonly occurring at the weaponsman site, and et cetera both inspired the project and the initial designs i chose to base my project off of)

            It didn’t evolve into what it’s become currently until i was properly inculcated with the requisite cynicism and absolute faith in the ability of the pentagon to f*** up a one cow cattle drive / their utter willingness to die rather than allow anything approaching useful amounts of sufficiently realistic & true to life and our conops training for the actual shooters!

  3. Lcon says:

    This baby must use the constant recoil system. Could be an interesting alternative to the LSAT. I mean ammo would weigh more but you have the weapon weight dropped even more then the Barrett LW240