Heckler & Koch G11K2 Caseless Assault Rifle

November 28, 2007 7:29 am

It’s surprisingly hard to find a good photograph of the G11 prototypes out there. This rifle, developed in the 1970’s and 1980’s, caught the imagination of RPG designers in both computer and pen and paper role-playing, if not actual militaries. The rifle was entered in the 1979 NATO rifle trials but had to be withdrawn because of cook-offs in the chamber prior to firing once the chamber was hot. Later designs supposedly fixed this problem (common to most attempts at engineering a caseless-firing weapon), and the G11 was again entered in the US ACR trials, where no entered rifle succeeded at meeting the army specs.

Supposedly up to 1,000 of these rifles were manufactured for the West German military, but the rifle never went into full production.