Today’s Q&A is sponsored by Kyrö – get 10% off all their spirits with code FORGOTTENWHISKY10 at:
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01:05 – Guns from Peru
JoLoAr video: https://youtu.be/c9JfodMKlBY
03:23 – Why not blow-forward bullpups?
AK-53 video: https://youtu.be/-ykmqUFJWAw
05:00 – Was the SKS used in WW2?
C&Rsenal SKS video: https://youtu.be/7x1jyDHxqO4
07:28 – Favorite gun breakdown?
Terni 1921 video: https://youtu.be/vQDlafCwqws
08:42 – Madsen LMG action still viable today?
11:28 – Valuable input from viewers in the comments?
13:17 – How long will Forgotten Weapons go?
15:45 – Is KelTec onto something with clip-fed pistols?
17:44 – Why not more innovative new pistols from big companies?
20:14 – What is barrel life?
22:48 – AK with bolt hold-open?
Early M70 video: https://youtu.be/0gPTpLIUMN0
25:15 – Future of stocked pistols and chassis systems?
27:11 – How to update a 1970s Soviet AK?
28:29 – Combination subsonic/supersonic cartridges
31:53 – AI and workflow
35:19 – Reproduction or resto-mod guns?
37:10 – Why not stainless for military barrels?
37:41 – Converting the Trapdoor Springfield to .30-40
39:50 – Thoughts on 6.5mm military cartridges
45:10 – Do high end rifles really make a difference?
48:04 – Anti-drone weapons
52:42 – Down-loaded cartridges in the PTRS and PTRD
54:43 – Why no American proof houses?
56:50 – Shotgun suppressors
57:42 – Why create Headstamp instead of using an existing publisher?
The best firearms reference books: https://www.headstamppublishing.com
“(…)Was the SKS used in WW2?”
СКС-31 https://www.kalashnikov.ru/sks-kotoryj-tak-i-ne-vstupil-v-boj/ was self-loading rifle chambered for 7,62 mm rifle rimmed cartridge, procured in small quantities during 2nd World War. Small batch was tested inside 312th Rifleman Division in August 1944. This might be source of said confusion. СКС-31 was found not reliable enough and that fixing this issue would result in loss of main advantages – low weight.
The FS2000 is a forward ejection bullpup rifle
Technically yes, but technically no…
I mean, yeah, sure… FN describes it as “forward ejection”, but that’s more marketing than actual agreed-upon terminology.
Define “ejection”. What is it? Basically, that phase of the cycling process is where the cartridge is moved out of the firing mechanism, and if you were to say something “ejects forward”, then what you’re really going to have to do there is somehow have the barrel move forward rather than the bolt backwards, and then the case thrown forward. That ain’t what’s going on in the F2000.
I would argue that the F2000 ejects cases upwards, where they’re captured and placed into a case management mechanism that results in the case being deposited out the front of the rifle. Ejection, in other words, is entirely conventional.
Were the case fully controlled by the mechanism throughout the process of moving it out the front of the rifle, then I’d say that it’s a forward-ejection system. However, comma, and I can prove this from having fired one sufficiently, the F2000 is not a rifle where the case is under full control until leaving the body of the weapon. Instead, it’s a loose ‘effing cannon the minute that the bolt abandons control of it, and I’ve done the clearance process enough to be able to say that no, it is not a controlled-feed system. At. All.
I think that was the most memorable thing about that day on the range; having to essentially detail-strip the rifle in order to overcome a jam. It also convinced me to never buy one, but that’s me.
If you want to use bull-pup but fear case stuck, then use BRASHZERO https://brashzero.com/ where there are not cases at all.
Concerning 5.56 vs 6.5 comments about supply issues, during development of the M-1 Garand, General Douglas MacArthur who was Chief of Staff for the Army vetoed the .276 Pedersen round and mandated .30-06 be made to work in the Garand, so that all issuable rifles and machine guns have ammo compatibility in case of war breaking out. The .276 was possibly the first tested intermediate cartridge developed.
The .276 Pedersen was not really intermediate (it was more powerful than 6.5 Arisaka, IE), and there had been precedents that were more intermediate (8mm Ribeyrolles, the experimental cartridges for the Terni 1921…)
I’d argue that MacArthur had no pertinent experience or expertise, and had no business making that decision.
One, none of the stockpiled ammo was actually compatible with the Garand; two, the vast majority of it was low-quality dreck produced in haste during WWI, and three, what they actually wound up using it for was mostly Lend-Lease and training.
As such, his decision was… Poor. Also, entirely unnecessary.
The real issue wasn’t that they chose not to procure the Pedersen cartridge. The actual issue was that they were so totally disconnected from reality-in-combat during the closing phases of WWI that they remained delightfully oblivious to the fact that a full-power cartridge was both unnecessary and almost totally useless in modern warfare. Witness the procurement of the M1 Carbine. They should have known better…
My beef with this issue isn’t so much that they weren’t perfect, but that the actual decision-making process was fundamentally flawed and still remains flawed. The people making the decisions about what to buy and design are not connected with reality, and do not understand that which they are doing.
Anyone thinking I’m full of shiite thus needs to explain the M7 procurement to me, which is basically “M14 Redux” all over again. The majority of our decision-making small arms procurement types do not understand what the hell an individual weapon is supposed to do, and sure as hell do not understand what it’s actual real-world role is. They clearly do not “get” machineguns, either, or they would be issuing decent tripods and accessories to go with the gun crews. Most of whom leave their abysmal tripods in the base camp and who have no idea how to use a reticle or observation system together with the abandoned tripod…
MacArthur’s decision was only one in a long trail of similar ones that demonstrate the utter inadequacy of US small arms procurement, training, and usage.
Korea was where it all came together, more or less by accident.
After the initial panic and then Pusan followed by Inchon, as Marshall related, the predominate infantry weapon was the M2 carbine, precisely because it was fully-automatic and effective to about 150 yards, which was about as far as anybody could see in that terrain anyway without standing on top of an M46.
The Browning MGs in .30 and .50 became the perimeter defense weapons of choice because their sustained fire capability delivered the volume of fire needed to deal with the enemy’s preferred style of Zerg Rush assault. It’s worth noting that a decade and a half later, the VC didn’t do it that way and neither did NVA sappers.
In the end the high/low mix of sustained firescreens on the flanks while he heavy MG’s got on with the business of killing every enemy m*****f***er in front of them was proven valid.
Not that anybody above the rank of O-6 noticed or cared.
clear ether
eon
The thing that still outrages me is just how little actual attention or thought was paid to the entire question of “Is what we’re doing actually working, and if so, just how is it working…?”
There is zero intellectual curiosity on these issues. Nobody down on the line is apparently capable of looking around and thinking about what is going on surrounding them, and nobody above bothers to actually check on things personally.
This is one of the major things that just irks the living hell out of me, with regards to the US Army’s internal culture and operational habits: Nobody that “does” actually bothers to either really “think” or “document”. Good luck finding anyone that will even bother trying to articulate this crap, because they’re vanishingly rare. To the point where I’d say “non-existent”, really…
I mean, seriously… When I was a senior sort of junior enlisted person, transitioning to leadership, I wanted to understand how it was all supposed to work together, tactically. Talked to people, read, looked at the manuals, read histories, researched the snot out of it… Ya know what I found? Nobody seemed to have ever really thought things through to the point where they laid out how it was all supposed to integrate and work together. At. All.
It was all just awkwardly articulated learned behaviors, collected up into seemingly thought-through policies and procedures, carried forward from past experience.
Only thing was, none of it had any real framework; it was all haphazard, without actual institutional form or coherence. Nobody sat down and said “Yeah, hey… All you guys who do this crap for really realsie-reals need to distill what you know so we can disseminate it to everyone else…”
This is how we went from three full chapters, an appendix, and copious illustrations from real life regarding route clearance in the late Vietnam-era mine manuals to the single half-ass chapter, zero illustrations, and what amounted to a doctrinal hand-wave in the ones they were publishing during the 1990s.
There isn’t an actual intellectual framework that integrates the tribal knowledge and the doctrinal theory into some coherent comprehensible form, one that a person of reasonable intelligence can look at and go “Yeah, OK… I see that, that’s how that works…”
Which is how we get all these idiocies like MacArthur redlining the .276 Pedersen (which he absolutely should have done, for other reasons…) for dubious rationales that didn’t stand up to the test of time.
You see this same problem across all of our institutions; there’s a dichotomy between those who do, and those who think. The doers don’t document or “intellectualize” what they do, so all their vast experience and knowledge is lost every time one of them retires, and the thinkers are mostly arrogant dumbasses that think there’s nothing to be gained by paying attention to and honoring the tacit knowledge built up over decades of experience. It’s like that in every field; you see it with engineers and architects who think that their idealized paper and electron-based designs can be built easily and cheaply, but the actual tradesmen and contractors would all offer up opposing views based on experienced reality…
That was pretty much the point of Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House, a book I cannot recommend too highly even if you have no interest in architecture whatsoever.
As Wolfe observed “modern architecture” since the Bauhaus era is all about theory, not actual “building”. And the “theory” is about “purity”. And the “purity” is purely Marxist. Glass box skyscrapers are Bauhaus “worker housing” pitched up a quarter-mile into the sky. And they are not “the best way” to build anything, as was shown in no uncertain terms on 9/11/2001.
Architecture schools are essentially clerisies. Compounds of True Believers battling on the Plains of Heaven over things like “Are Venetian blinds on the 40th floor facing south bourgeois?”
As Wolfe says, the purpose of modern architecture is not to ask people what they need and design accordingly. It is to do endless drawings of ideal structures, which are intended to be incomprehensible. And when people are baffled by whatever the drawing is, to sit back looking smug and lecture them on their lack of insight into the purity of revolutionary socialism as applied to things people have to live and work in.
Every “glass box” is a Monument to the Third International in spirit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatlin%27s_Tower
It just has (mostly) level floors.
In the military, you also have to deal with “tradition”. Like “marksmanship tradition”. Every soldier is not Sgt. Alvin York and never will be. (And to be frank, York was mostly just lucky, especially to have a lot of gullible opponents.)
It’s interesting that among the things that “never get studied” is the circumstances in which Audie Murphy won his CMH. Which was a far more typical example of small-unit action than York’s.
The Marine “This is my rifle” credo is “marksmanship tradition” carried to a fever pitch of religious dogma. (There. I’ve criticized the Corps. Deal with it.) It has little or nothing to do with what Marines or Army soldiers actually do in an IA.
If it did, it would say something like “This is my rifle and it is most efficiently used on full-automatic” and “My purpose with my rifle is to kill as many of the enemy at one time as possible, not to concentrate on carefully picking off one man and ignoring the rest of his mob”.
Nobody studies anything because their minds are already made up and they don’t want to be confused with the facts.
You can see this at work in every “group” which attains social dominance. Nobody wants to “rock the boat” and question the belief system, because they are True Believers.
When you get down to it, the difference between a three-star and a deep-ecology fanatic is they are just believers in two different but equally illogical and useless dogmas.
clear ether
eon
@eon,
Yeah, the congruencies between all the various hierarchy-failures are amazing, when you start looking for them.
What absolutely blows my mind about it all is the way you can find examples demonstrating the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect everywhere, once you start looking. And, even with that, people blindly worship the “Expert” everywhere outside their own narrow stovepipe of experience and personal knowledge.
Once you observe the fact that your worshipped “experts” all have feet of clay, you can’t unsee it, nor can you really get around that fact. It’s the same with “faith in the system”; once you’ve lost yours, all that’s really left is cynical doubt in everything.
Which, sadly, is almost certainly the more realistic way to view the world.
The Serbia army is moving to 6.5 Grendal. Because U are firing a bullet with a better ballistic coefficient, at longer ranges the energy of a 6.5 Grendal bullet is better than a 7.62×51 mm. The most prolific assault rifle is AK 47. With the Grendal U are firing a 123 grain bullet with a better ballistic coefficient vs a 123 grain bullet from 7.62×39 mm. In terms of the weight of ammunition U can carry, there is no loss to the AK 47. Where U gain is on the GPMG ammunition and a lighter GPMG. In ammunition about 1/3 in weight and on support machine gun also a 1/3 less in weight. The problem is penetrating level IV body armour at a reasonable range. With 5.56×45 mm can not do that.
Not really. Army has issued no requirement for it and ATM it is Zastava and state arms trading company pushing it on army.
I honestly think that the era of bespoke calibers for smaller nations is over.
Nobody is going to take the risk that they won’t be able to procure ammunition on the international market. Serbia has manufacturing capacity, but not in the depth they’d be giving up by going to some flaky uber-cartridge nobody else uses.