Over the past fifteen years, a lot of interesting ammunition has appeared for snipers. Many of them remained unclaimed and very rare, despite their characteristics. Many have become mass-produced and generally recognized as cartridges in demand and necessary for successful performance for certain tasks. Naturally, for such ammunition, an appropriate weapon was also required. Most often, manufacturers followed the path of least resistance, adapting a particular model of a sniper rifle for a new cartridge. But very often this led to the fact that the weapon turned out to be too heavy or, on the contrary, too light for a new ammunition. And if in the first case, the excess weight had a positive effect on compensation for recoil during the shot, which can be attributed to positive phenomena, in the second case, the low weight of the weapon was good only from the point of view of transportation. But a lot of samples were created from scratch, originally designed for a new ammunition, which means those that were created only for one cartridge and no other. One of the relatively new ammunition we will discuss in this article is the.408 Chey Tac. Rather, let's get acquainted not so much with the cartridge itself, but with one of the rifles created specifically for this ammunition - THOR M408, but it is simply impossible not to mention the cartridge itself. Let's start with the patron.
The.408 Chey Tac ammunition itself appeared in 2001, while it should be noted that this cartridge was originally developed as a high-precision cartridge, although many argue that they wanted to make a replacement for the.50 BMG out of it. Where this information was taken from is not clear, but the fastest way to make such a conclusion was that quite a lot of tests of this ammunition were carried out using a large-caliber M2 machine gun, which made it possible to evaluate what the new cartridge is better than.50 BMG, and what is worse with minimal costs … Nevertheless, this ammunition was really considered as a replacement for the.50 BMG, but not in the medium of large-caliber machine guns, but among large-caliber sniper rifles. However, ammunition tests have shown that excluding the use of.50 BMG among the SWR is not a good idea, since this will significantly reduce the list of tasks that a large-caliber sniper rifle will be able to perform, but at the same time the.408 Chey Tac cartridge has a number of advantages.
First of all, it should be noted the lower weight and dimensions of the ammunition. In addition, a smaller powder charge and less bullet weight when fired create less recoil, which is also important. It is clear that the cartridge itself turned out to be "weaker" than the.50BMG, but do not forget that ballistics science is not the simplest one and the weight of the bullet and the powder charge alone does not give the full characteristics of the ammunition. Despite the fact that the weight of the bullet and the powder charge are less at distances after 700 meters, the kinetic energy of the bullet of the.408 Chey Tac cartridge is greater than that of the "fifty", and at longer distances the gap in kinetic energies only increases. However, high kinetic energy does not mean greater armor-piercing or greater lethality of the projectile, in this case the advantage is only in the higher speed of the bullet, as well as in the better ballistic coefficient. Thus, this ammunition has less armor-piercing, but much better performance in terms of accuracy, which is why it cannot displace the.50 BMG.
Based on all this, it can be said with a very big stretch that the.408 Chey Tac cartridge occupies an intermediate position between the "fifty" and the 338 LM, but this is more likely based on its metric data than on any other characteristics. The actual caliber of the.408 Chey Tac bullet is 10.3 millimeters. The ammunition was made on the basis of the.505 Gibbs liner, which was straightened to a diameter over the entire surface equal to 16, 2 millimeters. This sleeve narrows to 11.1 mm, the total length of the sleeve is 77 mm, the total length of the cartridge is 109.4 mm. The bullet can weigh 19.8 grams or 27.2 grams, respectively, its initial velocities will be equal to 1100 meters per second and 910 meters per second, and the kinetic energy will be equal to 11251 Joules and 11356 Joules. At 1840 meters, the cartridge itself provides accuracy of less than one arcminute, the maximum of which was achieved slightly less than 0, 3. Calculate what is the spread. Here is such a harsh reality, even with such ammunition, and you speak into your head for almost 2.5 kilometers …
The THOR M408 rifle is not at all the only and not the first one developed for this ammunition by the KSV, however, it attracts attention. And it attracts primarily by its appearance, which is created by the combination of many solutions of designers, some of which are quite controversial. In general, this rifle is considered by many to be a further development of the Chey Tac M200, which was discontinued. It is difficult to disagree with this statement, but we are talking about a "bolt" rifle, and here you can't think of much new. So you can find kinship even in samples that are completely distant from each other.
The appearance of the weapon really raises a lot of questions. First of all, the butt catches the eye, which has the ability to adjust its length. The fact is that the butt itself is fixed on two rods of a small section, for a wire butt, say for a submachine gun, this may be a good solution, but for a sniper rifle for a not weak cartridge, such a butt even visually seems very flimsy. Although in a folded position, or rather pushed all the way in, it can significantly reduce the length of the weapon. Under the butt there is a height-adjustable folding third "leg". There is a support for the cheek, but it is made unregulated, which is a minus for such a weapon. Very, very with
a bad solution was to place a large enough handle for carrying weapons on the bottom of the rifle. When carrying a weapon by this handle, there is a very high probability of damaging the telescopic sight by catching it on any object. And the handle itself of this size adds weight to the weapon, although it looks beautiful and unusual. Another element that can be distinguished are the rifle bipod, which are attached by squeezing the forearm of the weapon. Considering that the forend itself is a smooth tube, this solution can be attributed to the pluses, since the mount can be moved along the entire length of the forend, choosing the desired balance depending on the installed accessories or a non-standard barrel. In all other respects, the weapon is quite common.
The rifle barrel is thick-walled, has longitudinal valleys to increase rigidity, freely suspended. The bolt of the weapon is longitudinally sliding, locking the barrel bore when turning. On the surface of the bolt there are also spirally twisted dales, into which dirt is squeezed out, preventing the movement of the bolt, due to which high reliability of the weapon is achieved in adverse conditions. The rifle is fed from a detachable box magazine with a capacity of 7 rounds. The barrel length of the weapon is 762 mm as standard. The total length of the weapon ranges from 1219 millimeters to 1384 millimeters, depending on how the butt is extended. The weight of the rifle is 11.79 kilograms. The manufacturer claims an effective range equal to 1800 meters, but since the ammunition itself is intended rather for firing at enemy manpower, in practice this range is much smaller, although if the enemy stands in a crowd of 100 people, then you can try to shoot with a fairly large percentage of hits …
Thus, we can conclude that the ammunition itself is intended rather for the civilian market, since the destruction of single targets, even within such a fashionable expression as "anti-sniper shooting" is very controversial. High accuracy is certainly good, but something suggests that larger-caliber and not hand-held weapons are much more effective against snipers. Machine-gun crews and so on, of course, you can try to shoot with such weapons and cartridges, since they are at least visible, but this is practiced back when there are no alternatives. But in a calm atmosphere, without haste, warming the cartridge under the armpit, it is quite possible to shoot at the banks for one and a half thousand meters, for your own pleasure and for show to your friends. This.50 BMG ammunition cannot survive or replace the.338 LM. Although the cartridge itself is certainly good.
