I meant 30% less. At 33% less, a will be 50% more.
Machine guns aren't supposed to be "to whom it may concern" weapons: they are supposed to hit what you're firing at with reasonable precision. The .50 as it stands is a good, accurate weapon with devastating terminal energy on the target. Why screw with a working formula?
The army (civilian engineers again plus slimy vendors) tried pushing the XM-307 25mm Objective Crew Served Weapon (OCSW) with a tricky soft-recoil "out of battery" firing system where the barrel and receiver slide forward to fire and then the recoil energy shoves the whole mess back into battery and a nice, leisurely 250 rounds per minute. It fires the 25mm explosive projectile, which is nifty but as with all small warheads, has itty-bitty frags and costs a day's paycheck per round fired. because the barrel and receiver are launched forward on rails, accuracy is limited yet the civilian never-been-shot-at designers have the optical sight right on top of the weapon so the operator can sit up nice and tall behind an already tall weapon. Given how much attention machine gunners get on the battlefield, I hope we have lots of spare machine gunners.
The Browning M2 has been in the inventory all these years because it's powerful, accurate, dependable, cheap to feed (relatively), low to the ground where it should be, and kills effectively further than a mile. Don't ask me how I know that.
We waste zillions of dollars on dead-end systems because we aren't using experienced combat veterans for improving weapon systems design.