Borepatch has discovered the Evans rifle. I should have bought that one I once saw at a gun show for, like, $499. I bet the guy would have taken four and a half to not have to carry it home with him.
When the Calico carbine came out with its helical magazine behind the action, antique collectors just looked at it and thought "Huh. Just like an ol' Evans." (Similarly, the new Boberg XR-9's exotic shell elevator loading system? Webley Mars.)
There is very little new under the sun when it comes to firearms. Since, oh, probably the 1930s, the only advances have been in materials and construction techniques. Armies today are still using gas-operated, rotating bolt, brass-cased smokeless powder self-loaders, just like they were 75 years ago. The machine pistol has come and gone.
This is a very mature technology.
And I think I remember reading a SF novel one time in which the people of the future looked back at us and laughed and *facepalm*'d because we were using lasers as sights for our firearms!
ReplyDeleteYeah, but I betcha they never put all them flashlights and grippies and 3-point slings and HUD sights and iPods and facebook interfaces on their guns back then.
ReplyDeletejf
They would have if they'd invented them.
ReplyDelete"Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid." - Han Solo.
ReplyDeleteTam, you just got me thinking. I'm going to make a steampunk CQB race gun. I'm picturing a Springfield Trapdoor with a lantern tied on with leather straps. Maybe bolt on a sawed-off broomstick for the vertical front grip. Can't think of a good equivalent for a red-dot sight, though...
ReplyDeletejf
wv: plings: The sound heard from shooting at assorted paraphernalia thrown downrange.
The amount of creativity at the beginning of any system is really amazing to see. But interesting-but-not-ultimately-practical ends up getting weeded out.
ReplyDeleteSee Pet, Commodore. ;-)
Given the maturity of the technology, I'm amazed how much futzing there is with bullets and cartridges and so on. You'd figure there would be like... 10 or 12 cartridges that are dog standard and fulfilling 95% of needs...
ReplyDeleteOh, never mind. I'm still amazed how much messing about there is with the little brass thingies.
This is one of the reasons why I've been investigating thermal imagining sights and night vision.
ReplyDeleteIn comparison to firearms, this really is NEW technology and figuring out how to use it effectively WITH firearms is a Hoot!.
Yeah, it's expensive, but due to the '86 Ban so are MGs and here I'm playing with stuff that's state-of-the-art, not some 60 year old museum reject...
All The Best,
Frank W. James
I'm amazed at how many times the U.S. Army and Marine have screwed up the rifles they issue given the maturity of the technology.
ReplyDeleteHow many times do we have to reject the Pederson .276, Brit .280, 6.5 Grendel?
Instead we get too much (.308 / .30-06) or too little (5.56).
What the hell?
jf,
ReplyDeleteTwo words: Galilean Sights. A dot with magnification: http://www.targetsportsmagazine.com/features/view/10359/sniper-rifle-sniping-remarks/
Whatever happened to the Metal Storm?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.metalstorm.com/
-Popgun
Popgun, it probably wasn't green enough or ObamaCrony enough to get funding.
ReplyDeletejf
Well, since it looks like the U.S. Navy has got their Beam Weapons and Railguns for the Ships ready to come out of the Lab, I expect that we should have practical "Death Ray Pistols" within our Lifetime.
ReplyDeleteOf course, we'll have to be Mexican Drug Lords to Own one....
The reason why we've rejected the .270-ish rounds time and time again (despite hundreds of goats, then pigs, being shot with varying calibers to test the terminal efficacy of .270-ish rounds vs. .30's and .45 caliber rifle rounds) is that the Rubber Desk Johnnies in the acquisition part of Ordinance listened to "gravel belly" senior officers in the early part of the 20th century when choosing calibers.
ReplyDeleteEveryone thought that "real soldiers" better be packing at least a .30 cal round. Didn't matter that there might be something better in something smaller diameter, .30 was the smallest "real men" should be carrying.
So we passed up a great opportunity to get into the 6.5 to 7mm caliber area, whereas many European nations found what long distance shooters today have discovered: the 6.5 to 7mm region has a lot of efficacy in high Bc bullets with terrific sectional density at much lighter weights than similar .30 cal projectiles. Look at the specs on 6.5mm bullets now - you can find ultra-slippery bullets in the 130 to 145gr area, whereas you need to be launching pills in the 190 to 220 weight range in .308 to achieve the same Bc's.
Well, the recoil from 175+ grain bullets in .30 start getting hefty if you're shooting hundreds of rounds, day after day, and they're too much for our modern military to carry. So we go to the other extreme of sillyness, a varmint round.
I get that "I should've bought it" feeling about a Johnson Automatics rifle I saw at a funshow quite a few years ago. It was <$1000 and I could almost afford it, but passed it up. Now it kills me every time I see one advertised.
ReplyDeleteAnd it also had a cool magazine.
Well, Anon, I can think of two armies that went from 6.5mm to .30 cal. but none that went the other way beyond the speculative stage. Were there any?
ReplyDeleteSmall world.
ReplyDeleteI'm rereading Wilson's "Textbook of Automatic Pistols" and just read past the section on the Mars.
Yeah, it's interesting how much mechanical innovation happened in a few decades, followed by a mess of mtrls and mfg refinement.
Also... Tam's recommended it in the past (why I have a copy) but Wilson's book is a great read if you're interested in the development of autoloaders.
ReplyDeleteWith regard to technological advances, who the hell cares about .30 v. 6.5mm, 9mm v. .45, etc? It's a caliber, not an advance. Show me something not discussed a century ago.
ReplyDeleteFrank James is precisely right: sights are a major advance. Tritium and lasers are pretty much old hat, now, but there are new ways of looking at things, without even getting complicated.
For example, how about range estimation, on the fly, at night? Not too hard, when you've got a laser (might as well make it green) mounted under the rifle, and a mini-Eotech mounted atop the rifle, and you play with the points of convergence. Oleg and I were able to get his to establish precisely where 200m was, in the dark, without tools, in about 5 minutes, last year. This qualifies, in my mind, as Something New, and likely only a tiny tip of the iceburg.
Every time I think that we're done with ammunition updates, I see something that changes the game a bit. Federal's new(ish) Flite Control actually makes buckshot a going proposition out of a cylinder bore shotgun. Bonded expanding bullets actually make intermediate calibers roughly as effective as major calibers. Soft-tip ballistic tips make long-range possible in tubular magazines. But really, half of what I'm mentioning here is 20 years old technology. Think of how much change occurred during any 20 year period between 1820 and 1920 in firearms. The mind boggles.
Roller-delayed blowback. (Not roller locking.)
ReplyDeleteOkay, 1945.
ReplyDeleteEvery so often I wonder about the slightly weird tech that the Slammer's opponents field, or the rifle that Price Roger totes around; those would be right on the edge of revolutionary/evolutionary. Powerguns are magic, as defined, right now, but the "lower-tech" weapons seem almost plausible sometimes; and Price Roger's "smokepole" strikes me as being a Simple (hah) Matter of Engineering.
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