I thought I saw somewhere that bullets were a huge chunk of metal use during WWII.If a nation has to spare metal on bullets it has way bigger problems.
If you're making a million bullets and you can use 20% less metal that's over 200k more bullets to make. When OTL's WWII had people donating every bit of scrap metal they had and ripping up old rail lines for the metal I don't think those savings are insignificant.The point im making is that what ever tiny amount of metal their spared would be insignificant if they are forced to do it,it would mean they have already stripped all the cars,planes etc that they didnt need,all in all its probably easier to just smuggle bullets in illegaly.
Going to steel cartridge cases vs brass saves you a lot more copper for jackets.
Hollow point rounds don't have very good penetration capabilities, and are also less aerodynamic. A plastic ballistic tip would be required for rifle rounds to bring back some of the lost accuracy. Also, bullets weigh only a few grams. The 7.62 mm NATO bullet, a medium sized small arm cartridge, has only a 10 gram bullet. If a million 7.62 mm bullets are produced that is only 10 metric tons of material. Even a billion bullets would be only 10,000 metric tons of material. The United States military received 47 billion small arm rounds in World War II, which is still only 470,000 metric tons of material. I say only because a country could always switch to using steel or another material for bullets, and any industrialized country should have well over million or so tons of steel production capacity per year.
Apart from being impossible to reload the cases, what are the other disadvantages of using steel cases? Doesn't steel have lower heat dissipation compared to brass cases?
Also, considering how much steel rounds would tear up the guns, it would probably be best to save metal on the cases where possible before considering using steel bullets.
Well 470,000 metric tons isn't insignificant. That's 4.5 Nimitz carriers worth of material.
Less than I'd hoped though.
... OTL's WWII had people donating every bit of scrap metal they had and ripping up old rail lines for the metal...
Steel, even very mild steel doesn't expand as much under pressure as brass so chambers will be leaky and get a lot of powder residue deposited in it. In a manually operated gun or one with very loose clearances and firing strongly tapered cartridges (e.g. AK-47), this isn't a problem, but for semiautomatics with tighter clearances residue buildup could degrade reliability.
The choice of brass versus steel cartridges is decided more by local mines (and access to imported ores) than by cost.
A country with copper mines will cheerfully make brass cartridges, while countries that can only import copper may resort to substitutes.
Shortages of other strategic metals can lead to some bizarre alliances. For example, Russia owns the bulk of titanium mines, so during the Cold War, the USA was forced to import titanium from South Africa. The USA pretended to deplore South African racial policies, but they still bought many tons of titanium from SA. Meanwhile, the CIA quietly shared intelligence about communist troop movements in Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe, etc.
That assumes that the metal is the bottleneck in bullet manufacture. In which case you should be able to pick them up for little over their scrap value.If you're making a million bullets and you can use 20% less metal that's over 200k more bullets to make. When OTL's WWII had people donating every bit of scrap metal they had and ripping up old rail lines for the metal I don't think those savings are insignificant.