Trapezoidal magazines - solution for rimmed and tapered cartridges?
Faced with the problem of difficult to successfully design and produce detachable shotgun magazines, and thus the lack of development of shotguns that use them or any of significant capacity, I was looking into ways to overcome this problem.
Basically, as big as shotgun shells are, and adding the fact that they're all rimmed, box magazines for them are hard to make, hard to make work reliably, and are particularly large for the amount of ammo they hold. 5rd mags for the Saiga 12 are about the size of a 20rd mag for a military 308 rifle.
Additionally, you don't see many box/stick mags for 357 or 44 Rem Mag, due to their rim. And tapered rounds like the 7.62x39mm require a curved magazine that has its advantages and complications.
Then I got to thinking, what if instead of a rectancular cross section (from above), we made some magazines with a trapezoidal cross section? The Tec-9 is the only gun I'm familiar with that uses this type of magazine. Basically, instead of curving the mag to fit the taper of the rounds, the mag could be straight vertical, but the front would be thin enough to hold the rounds tight and basically straighten out the column. Imagine the backs of the cartridges touching each other vertically, but the fronts would have some space, held together by the magazine being thinner at the front.
Make any sense? Did I manage to get the concept across? If this actually worked, it could mean better magazines for AR-15s in 7.62x39mm, and the means to give shotgun mags twice the capacity for the same length (though the result would be pretty wide... a real "box" magazine indeed.) It means we could have home defense and hunting carbines (possibly based on the AKM) in 357 Rem Mag feeding from 20rd mags or so.
Good idea, bad idea? Anyone else try this before and give up?
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