FN BRG-15 was a
heavy machine gun
A heavy machine gun (HMG) is significantly larger than light, medium or general-purpose machine guns. HMGs are typically too heavy to be man-portable (carried by one person) and require mounting onto a weapons platform to be operably stable or ...
designed by
Fabrique Nationale de Herstal
Fabrique Nationale Herstal (), trading as FN Herstal and often referred to as Fabrique Nationale or simply FN, is a leading firearms manufacturer based in Herstal, Belgium. It is currently the largest exporter of military small arms in Europe.
...
as a potential replacement for the
Browning M2HB .50 caliber
This is a list of firearm cartridges which have bullets in the to caliber range.
*''Length'' refers to the cartridge case
Case or CASE may refer to:
Containers
* Case (goods), a package of related merchandise
* Cartridge case or casing, a ...
machine gun
A machine gun is a fully automatic, rifled autoloading firearm designed for sustained direct fire with rifle cartridges. Other automatic firearms such as automatic shotguns and automatic rifles (including assault rifles and battle rifles) ar ...
.
History
It was announced in October 1983, FN were seeking to develop a more powerful replacement for the .50 BMG, better able to penetrate light armoured vehicles (in effect, a Western equivalent to the
Soviet
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nation ...
14.5mm
KPV heavy machine gun
The KPV-14.5 heavy machine gun (KPV is an initialism for Krupnokaliberniy Pulemyot Vladimirova (Large-caliber Machine gun Vladimirov), in Russian as Крупнокалиберный Пулемёт Владимирова, or КПВ) is a Soviet de ...
). FN initially selected the 20mm Hispano case as a basis and
necked it down to 15mm for the FN-BRG (15x115). The weapon and its ammunition had a protracted development and finally emerged as a 15.5mm because of fast barrel wear.
The 15.5x106 was FN's second effort to make a KPV competitor in the BRG-15, appropriately by necking out the KPV's case. It also utilized an unusual
dual feed
Dual or Duals may refer to:
Paired/two things
* Dual (mathematics), a notion of paired concepts that mirror one another
** Dual (category theory), a formalization of mathematical duality
*** see more cases in :Duality theories
* Dual (grammatica ...
device, with link ammunition belts feeding from both the right and left.
Spent shell casings were ejected out of the bottom of the gun, as in FN's later
P90 personal defense weapon. The quick-change barrel assembly developed for the BRG-15 was redesigned for use in an updated version of the M2HB.
The project was cancelled in the early 1990s, as FN shifted its focus to the
P90 personal defense weapon
Personal defense weapons (PDWs) are a class of firearms intended for self-defense and security rather than warfare and infantry. Most PDWs fire a small-caliber (less than ), centerfire bottleneck cartridge resembling a scaled-down intermedia ...
.
The subcaliber bullet fired from FN BRG-15 15.5mm round, with a muzzle energy of 40,000 J (more than double that of the
M2HB at ≈18,000 J of bullet energy at muzzle).
References
External links
Williams, Anthony: MILITARY CARTRIDGE RELATIONSHIPSModern Firearms - FN BRG-15Historical Firearms - FN BRG-15
{{FN Herstal firearms
BRG-15
Heavy machine guns
Trial and research firearms