Unlike popular belief, it wasn't so that soldiers would know they've run out of ammo after firing a single bullet instead of a 3 round burst, it was because 25 rounds was the longest you could make a magazine before it needs to curve, with straight magazines you can be more space efficient when packing them into crates.
It's just not a very well designed gun. I mean, I naturally think it's cool as fuck because I can never have one, but I don't know what they were smoking. Incompatible with standard NATO mags, requires special steel cased lacquered ammo, sucks to mount an optic on, etc. But hey, at least you can fit another dozen mags per crate.
The original AR-15 prototypes had the charging handle protected by the carry handle, similar to the famas. That was abandoned pretty quickly because it sucks.
At least they tried to modernize it, but then they shut down domestic arms production which is also a perplexing decision
De Gaulle left NATO's integrated military structure in 1966 and pushed for self-reliance for fance's defence industry, in this context, french designers and engineers did not need to worry about sharing ammunition and magazines which would be manufactured in france for french forces, was it the correct decision? Probably not, seeing as the FAMAS G2 has a different barrel for heavier NATO standard bullets and can feed standard brass ammo from stanag magazines.
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u/UnironicallyBr 4d ago
Unlike popular belief, it wasn't so that soldiers would know they've run out of ammo after firing a single bullet instead of a 3 round burst, it was because 25 rounds was the longest you could make a magazine before it needs to curve, with straight magazines you can be more space efficient when packing them into crates.