This month I am excited to invite three other firearms YouTube channels to join me in the Q&A – Polenar Tactical, Bloke on the Range, and PrintShootRepeat. We all just finished shooting Lynx Brutality (put on by Polenar Tactical) and took the opportunity to address a bunch of questions about firearms and YouTube. If you like this, please consider joining the Patreon support for your favorite channels:
Forgotten Weapons:
https://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
Bloke on the Range:
https://www.patreon.com/BlokeOnTheRange
Polenar Tactical:
https://www.patreon.com/PolenarTactical
Print Shoot Repeat:
https://www.patreon.com/PrintShootRepeat
0:01:15 – What alcohol is Žiga making everyone drink?
0:02:44 – What guns are the most interesting to film, and what guns do you like talking about?
0:09:50 – What elements of firearms content do you think YouTube is okay with, or do they hate it all?
0:20:50 – Who were the YouTube gun channels that inspired you to become one?
0:29:38 – Running matches with obsolete kit
0:35:08 – Does liberalizing gun laws make society more resilient against a military threat?
0:41:04 – What guns could have become as good as the AR and AK if given the chance?
0:50:20 – How do you get information on new YouTube rules and how to navigate them?
0:55:16 – What was your first machine gun, and do you still have it?
1:03:38 – Future of 3D printing for military arms.
1:07:09 – US firearms laws compared to European ones.
1:16:17 – Differences between a firearms reviewer and influencer?
1:29:07 – What car for a road trip from Slovenia to Norway?
1:32:06 – What guns have you used in Brutality matches that performed a lot better or worse than you expected?
1:41:41 – What is your role on the platform? What is “winning” look like for you?
1:45:08 – Looking back on your YouTube beginnings, are you surprised at where you ended up? Would you do it again?
“(…)What guns could have become as good as(…)AK if given the chance?(…)”
There were some serious contenders against AK, even before very beginning.
OAS-44 https://modernfirearms.net/en/assault-rifles/russia-assault-rifles/sudaev-as-44-2/ by Sudaev, development not finished due to death of designer
AD-46 https://military-exotic.blogspot.com/2024/01/46-1946.html one of closed competitor for becoming default automaton of Soviet Union
and few years later
TKB-517 https://modernfirearms.net/en/assault-rifles/russia-assault-rifles/korobov-tkb-517-eng/ which was detected to be superior to would-be AKM, but not selected due to greater difference to already used AK
Someone compared owning and firing full auto firearms to dating an exotic girlfriend. At first the thrill of getting a full auto was intoxicating. The reward seemed to be worth the money. Then the full auto needed to be fed, but not just any old ammo. It needs good quality consistent and expensive ammo. The smells, the dance, the jiggle, and the movements are all exciting. All your friends want to try, which at first seems impolite but as the excitement wears off, you begin to think about moving on. There’s the whole business of cleaning and maintenance. You can’t just take a full auto everywhere without attracting lots of unwanted attention. Soon you think you’ve had enough trouble that it is time to give all those problems to someone else.
Thats a fairly accurate analogy i must say.
“(…)What guns could have become as good as(…)AR(…)if given the chance?(…)”
I bet at Steyr ACR https://modernfirearms.net/en/assault-rifles/austria-assault-rifles/steyr-acr-eng/ which failed to do 100% improvement in hit probablility (alongside all its’ rival), still provided noticeable advantage over existing design. Due to expeditious projectile flight time is very short, giving high chance of hit even without applying correction for moving target and making estimating distance to target less critical. Projectile is light giving mild recoil, yet provide enough penetration due to its’ shape. Mechanism itself is untypical, but not unnecessarily complex (somewhat akin to revolver cannon, but with 1 chamber, see drawing).
There has yet to be any extensive real-world validation of the single flechette fired from an individual weapon as an effective alternative to standard projectiles. I think that this entire technology is going to remain relegated to the fever dreams of science fiction and the technologists for a long, long time. The problems with it are just too difficult to deal with, given current materials technology; it’s a lot like the caseless idea.
I mean, I’d like to believe in the concept, but… Yeah. I’m not seeing anyone mass-produce the flechettes or the sabots at all affordably, and those are key to the technology working. I’ve talked to testers who participated in the ACR program, and they universally said that the Steyr had issues with accuracy and the damn sabots doing weird things out past the end of the muzzle. I do not think I would like to be doing CQB in a unit armed with these things; the sabot bits and pieces going everywhere every time you fire are not the same as the debris from firing blanks through a blank adapter, which was what the folks at Steyr promised the Army.
Sabots are damn near secondary projectiles, out to about ten meters. You know… Where your friends are?
The main thing is that nobody has really gone into what the flechette does on impact. A bunch of very small ones fired from a shotgun act like small-caliber shot but with higher penetration, supposedly. A single, much larger one fired from a smoothbored weapon with a typically rifle-sized bore? Does it penetrate? Does it tumble inside the body? What is its wounding mechanism? In short, WTF does it actually do?
No. Body. Knows. Because. No. Body. Asked.
Everybody just assumed “flechette>bullet”. Nobody has ever really researched it.
It’s the FBI’s Relative Incapacitation Index (RII) all over again. Except in this case, since it began in the late 1950s with SPIW, there weren’t even computer simulations; just those Holy Assumptions.
Thought experiment; Target is mean, nasty Orcish sort of person, no armor but big axe to hit you with and every intention of doing so.
You have Welsh longbow, 120-lb pull, with a 30-inch long, pile-headed arrow.
Your BFF five feet to your right has crossbow, 120-lb pull, loaded with a 10-inch long, pile headed war bolt.
Range is 25 yards.
You and BFF loose simultaneously and hit nasty, Orcish sort of person in the chest, about six inches apart.
Which one does enough damage to make him not chop you up like a dressed-out deer?
Does either one?
That’s pretty much the dichotomy between “rifle-sized flechette” and “shotgun-load sized flechette”.
And as with our present now century-plus aged type of Hague Accord-Approved “humanitarian” projectiles, even after spending half of that century developing flechette ammunition, we still just don’t know what happens “when the bullet hits the bone”.
clear ether
eon
Japan used to use condemned prisoners to test out s words on. An old idea whose time has come again?
The much-misunderstood Thompson-LaGarde tests on slaughterhouse bullocks were intended to determine the effects of various pistol calibers on, not humans, but cavalry horses. Because the pistol was seen as primarily a cavalry weapon.
Shooting a bolt-action carbine from horseback while at the canter or etc. can generally be done exactly once. Repeat fire required a one-hand weapon that did not require manual cycling, i.e. a revolver or self-loading pistol.
Seen in this light, the supposed “excessive penetration” of the .45 ACP 230-grain hardball (averages 26 to 30 inches in muscle tissue) makes perfect sense. It had to be able to reach the horse’s vital organs from any angle, even dead astern.
So it’s not such an outdated concept as it appears at first glance.
cheers
eon
“(…)said that the Steyr had issues with accuracy(…)”
According to https://www.globalmilitary.net/firearms/acr/ Variable strength in the plastic ammunition cases affected ballistic consistency, potentially solvable with material improvements and quality control.
“(…)damn sabots doing weird things(…)”
If this is problem then use muzzle device to balance this, see upper half of 1st image at https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/the-smoothbore-pkg-machine-gun-44820022
@Daweo,
The biggest “weird thing” described to me was that the discarded sabot bits and pieces were not at all predictable; you’d think you were safe firing, and then someone would get whacked with something completely outside the danger zone you’d cleared. One guy I talked to described having pieces of plastic hit him in the eye, and he was the guy shooting the Steyr at the time!
Which was absolutely not supposed to happen.
A lot of the ACR test program was put to bed based on the idea that there wasn’t the 100% improvement over the M16A2, but the sad reality was that more than a few of the weapons were embarrassingly bad and effectively unworkable. The worst offender was the HK G11, because of the ammo degradation issue. That Octol propellant was definitely not “ready for prime time”, as the phrasing went. From what I had related to me, the HK reps that accompanied the test article rifles were absolutely livid that their ammo got exposed over about a week to high temperatures in a quadcon out on a range in the Georgia heat, and were even more outraged that the Army guys shooting had the temerity to complain about unusual performance after shooting some of that ammo…
I really don’t think that the G11 would have done all that well, had it actually reached fielding with the Bundeswehr. I’ve got two data points for it, and one was a German officer who told me he was involved in the field testing for it, and described the sheer alacrity and joy with which they’d binned the whole project after the Berlin Wall came down. The way he told it, it was political from start to finish, HK had invested way too much in the program, and the whole thing was being forced down the Bundeswehr’s throat in order to bail out HK. Which they were not happy about… Same issues about ammo not doing well when stored under less than ideal conditions were described to me by him as were reported by the guys who were on the ACR testing.
Given that the original NGSW program had a piece that spiraled out of the G11, and that it didn’t get very far…? I infer that caseless, as expressed by the G11 and its successor technologies, ain’t gonna happen. At least, not as HK and Dynamit Nobel put it together.
The rest of ACR? Only thing worth a damn that came out of there was the popularization of the ACOG.