Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and today we have
a really cool opportunity to take a look at a seriously unusual and really interesting firearm. Now this ... started off being called the Neopup. It was designed
by a South African gentleman by the name of Tony Neophytou. And the idea here is to do something a little bit different. This is a 20mm, handheld, semi-automatic grenade launcher. Now it uses a proprietary 20x42mm
cartridge, and this ... has a muzzle velocity
[closely related to the MG151 cartridge] of about 310 metres per second,
which is about 1,000 feet per second.
[Closely related to the MG151 cartridge.] Now the reason this is relevant is this is substantially
higher than, for example, 40mm grenades. ... The purpose of this, the things that are similar to it on
the market are things like the Korean K-11 and the US XM25. However, what's cool about this one is simplicity and it
just works. It doesn't have a lot of weird things going on. So if you look at, for example, the XM25, that
is a 25mm semi-automatic grenade launcher, very similar in basic concept, basic purpose. However, it uses a programmable fuse that's intended
to detonate at a specific laser designated range. So the way that thing works is you have a big optical
... computerised unit, and you put the sight on target, and lase the target, and that gives
you a range of, you know, 287 meters, and then you hit a button, and that ... information
is sent into the warhead of the cartridge. Then it readjusts your reticle to give you the correct
holdover, you fire, and ... there's circuitry in the cartridge that keeps track of how many times it's
revolved and detonates it at exactly 287 metres. This sounds fantastic on paper. The downsides of
this system are well, first off, it's all battery powered. It has a very complex computerised optic on it.
You have to actually laser designate targets in order for this whole thing to work, and that's more
complicated in real life than a lot of people realise. If you've ever gone out and just even
used a laser rangefinder to try and you know figure out how far you
are from a target at the range, once you get beyond like 100 metres or 200 metres it's a little tricky to make sure that
the laser is actually on what you want, and to make sure it's on the right thing
and hit the button at the right moment. All of that is ... like a whole second aiming and firing
process built into the XM25 before you can actually shoot it. And then on top of that it has a proprietary
25mm cartridge that's still under development. Now compare that to this. So I said this was called
the Neopup, it's now called the Inkunzi PAW, Inkunzi PAW manufactured by PMP
Denel Land Systems in South Africa. It uses a totally standard 20mm projectile, meaning this
is the same projectile that's in things like the US 20mm Vulcan. The technology for the cartridges has
existed for a long time, it's existing technology. It's cheap ammunition compared to something
like the 1,000 dollar per cartridge XM25 rounds. ... You have a basic set of cartridges, you
have high explosive, you have semi-AP high explosive, you have armour-piercing
tracer and a couple of practice rounds. And this ... is not trying to detonate the cartridge in a
smart way, it just detonates like a 20mm HE detonates. It means it's basically, depending
on what kind of fuse you use, it's basically going to go through a
little bit of material and then explode. And this is ideal for military applications like
shooting through doors, shooting through windows, shooting through light walls of buildings,
shooting through light skinned vehicles. For example, an ideal application of this in the
real world are those countries in the Middle East where they are dealing with
things like suicide car bombers. ... What if you have two or three of
those approaching at the same time? Something like a .30 calibre machine gun has to spend
a substantial amount of time on target to effectively neutralise a vehicle, because you've got little, small
projectiles and they only disable what they actually hit. So you have to hit the driver, or ... hit
something really critical to disable the engine. Well, alternatively if you had an area
effect weapon, like a 20mm HE projectile, one or two rounds are gonna pretty much take care of anything
like a light-skinned car, or certainly all the people inside it. So this really gives the opportunity for a
portable, and easily used, and rapid fire, area effect weapon. It's really
an interesting concept. So. ... What's unique about this is of course the layout, if
you look on this side we have a pistol grip on the side. This is ... like a semi-bullpup rifle. The closest
thing to compare it to would probably be the FG42. ... And the reason for this unique grip on the side
here is to shorten the length of the overall gun. So by not having to put the grip on the bottom
and make space for the firing mechanism, with the grip and everything else going on
there. You put it on the side out of the way, and then you have a relatively short barrel,
this is about a 14 inch barrel. I think it's 335mm. And that's all that's necessary because this is a very
heavy projectile with a relatively low muzzle velocity. ... I'm sorry, short barrel, you have a receiver
unit here and the whole receiver unit actually reciprocates into the buttstock like an FG42. And that is a critically important
component of recoil reduction for this gun, because this is really kicking
out a big ... projectile. Now a couple other things to point out.
A lot of people would look at this and say, "What's the advantage of this
over, say, a 40mm grenade, like a Mark 19 Automatic Grenade
Launcher or an under-barrel 40mm?" Well, there are two. The first is this is semi-automatic. So compared
to something like an underslung single-shot grenade launcher, this gives you 6 rounds of repeat rapid
firepower, which is definitely relevant. Especially if you don't hit with your first shot, you can then
follow up with a quick second shot, third, fourth, fifth, sixth. And then this has a far flatter ballistic
trajectory than a 40mm grenade. That means a couple of things: first off it means
you don't have to estimate your range as precisely, because you're gonna have ... tremendously less
drop than a 40mm grenade at pretty much any range. It also means the time of flight is a lot faster. So if you are leading a moving
target at extended range, 400 metres, with a 40mm grenade you're talking several seconds of flight
time, and you really actually have to consider leading that target. With something like this that's moving 50% to 100%
... faster than a 40mm grenade, depending on type, there's a lot less of that that you
have to take into consideration. And this basically meets the same benefit
as having an explosive round in the first place, which is you have a huge margin of error. You don't have
to hit a target with this, you have to hit near a target with this. And that's a whole different
ballgame than a rifle or a machine gun. So, I have blathered on about this enough. We
need to actually put a couple of rounds downrange. It uses a 6 round drum magazine, got the bolt locked open here, lock that in place. I am going to look like a dork wearing
sunglasses at an indoor shooting range because these are my ballistic shooting glasses
and I didn't think to bring clear ones. So, let's put 6 rounds downrange. Alrighty, so you've seen it shooting now. Now let's take a look at how this thing actually
works, because mechanically this is really cool. This is actually an inertially operated gun,
kind of like a Sjögren or a Benelli shotgun. The very first versions of this were gas operated. In fact, actually Neophytou originally ... decided to do the
inertial system and then was tinkering with it and decided, "Well, gas operation will be better, that'll allow
me to have a lot of flexibility with the gas port size and placement and get the thing set up,
... make sure it runs right as a prototype." And then eventually he came back around to the
inertial system, being cleaner and simpler and easier. And it's a really elegant operating system. So let's start with basic field stripping and disassembly.
Which is going to involve taking the stock assembly off. Alright, actually before I do that I should point
out that this is currently in its stowed position. So there's a little latch on the bottom here,
right here, this is your stowage latch and this allows you to actually compress
the recoil system and lock it in place That has a couple of purposes, first off
it makes the gun a little bit more compact, which is nice, especially if you
are in an APC or in a helicopter. And secondly it acts as a safety, because with
the thing compressed you can still operate the bolt, but the trigger doesn't work at all. Can't possibly
work, and you'll see why when we take it apart. So this acts as a really effective transit safety. For example, let's say you have a squad of
guys in a helicopter deploying somewhere, leave the gun compressed like this
and it can be chambered, loaded, hot, but completely safe until you get out
of the helicopter, hit the button there, and it opened back up and
now it's ready to actually use. Now that we've seen that, field
stripping is really quick and simple. This is our ... stowage latch, this is the
disassembly catch. So we just push that on, and that separates the action
from the grip and stock assembly. I suppose I should pull the magazine first. So the magazine catch here is interesting. The magazine is held in just by a front and a rear lug.
And so this is a pretty typical magazine catch where when I lift this, that lug lifts up
and allows the magazine to come out. What's interesting here is that this lever is pointed
directly forward, and that's for a good reason. Originally, on the early versions, this thing was pointed
up, kind of like you would expect with a typical firearm. And the problem was ... actually between
the recoil and the inertia of the ... lever here caused the lever to slip out of position when
firing, and occasionally it would drop the magazine. By having the lever directly in line with the recoil that
doesn't happen any more. So that's how the mag catch sits. The magazine itself is a 6 round, drum-type magazine. Well, sort of a drum. It's got a single spindle
so you get one revolution of cartridges in there. And this is for good reason. They
experimented with box magazines for these guns, and the problem is the cartridges in the bottom
tend to get jostled out of position, again under recoil. So having a spindle here ... it's able to put better
pressure on the cartridges and keep them in alignment. It's interesting to note that the front plate of this magazine
actually has to be made of some pretty sturdy material, because, again, recoil being one of the
primary characteristics of this weapon, the cartridges would tend to move
forward ... under recoil when firing. And with thin metal on the front of the
magazine you ... can see indentations where the cartridges have
rammed into that front plate. So that's a pretty heavy
duty magazine in order to run. Moving on on disassembly. The next thing
we're going to do is take out the recoil spring. It's held in place just by a simple plug right here. Now the current production versions
of these have a fully captive recoil spring. This one is an early sort of prototype
gun and it's recoil spring is not captive, which is a little more of a
pain in the butt to deal with. But there's our recoil spring. Then we can pull the bolt assembly
out by using the charging handle here, like that, pop that all the way back. And then the bolt assembly just lifts out like that. And that right there is a field stripped Inkunzi PAW. Now to me one of the most interesting
aspects to this is the actual operating system. So this has what looks like a gas piston,
and of course I mentioned that on the very first prototypes these were gas
operated guns. And this was a gas piston. On the ... redesign to make
this an inertial operation, this is very much like the ... charging handle
guide on an HK G3. That's basically what it does. The charging handle pushes on this, and
this just pushes on the rest of the bolt carrier. It has a two lug rotating bolt to lock. And you may be asking, what causes that to lock? Well, what happens when you fire, is
that ... due to Newton's laws with inertia the bolt carrier here wants to stay in place
while the whole gun starts to recoil backwards. As it does there's a big spring
underneath this semicircular part, in fact there's actually two springs and they're
underneath this cover plate on the back. The top of the receiver hits this, and
because this is tending to stay in place and the receiver is moving back
from recoil, that actually compresses these two really heavy
springs through this part. I mean they're heavy enough
I can't move those at all by hand. As soon ... as the inertial effect kind of
wears off, the springs in here decompress and ... this pushes back against the
receiver, and throws the bolt carrier back with enough velocity to cycle the whole system,
to eject the round and then load a new one. It's a really cool, simple system. Now if we look on the receiver, there
are a couple other things to point out. One of them is of course these two big pistons,
this is the hydraulic recoil damping mechanism. This is what compresses to
(yeah, just get it in a little bit there), that's what gives the resistance to
this recoiling into the stock assembly. We have a fire control group in here
that is very much inspired by the AK. It's a pretty simple system. The most unusual
part is that instead of having a trigger on the bottom of course the trigger's on the side of the gun. And we can actually see that right here. This part, this
right here is the trigger. And when this is pushed in laterally, it pushes this out of the way
and releases the hammer. So if I go back to the grip assembly
here, I have a trigger right there. And when I push the trigger
it pushes a lever out right here. That pushes inward into the side of the actual receiver,
and that releases the hammer and fires the gun. This is why when the gun is in stowage mode it can't fire,
because when it's in stowage this button, this lever, is not lined up with the actual fire mechanism here. So there is a safety lever on the left
side of the gun, obviously fire and safe. Despite this being an AK derived fire control group, you can
actually put it on safe and still ... cycle the action, unlike an AK. So that's kind of a cool little feature. I should have pointed out the markings
here. There's not a whole lot. This is PAW, Personal Assault Weapon, 20x42B. "B" for belted,
we'll take a look at the cartridges in a moment. And it's made by Denel in South Africa. Now here's another really cool physics lesson
from this gun. There is actually a stack of basically compression buffer washers inside
this housing in the front of the magazine. And that's for a really interesting reason. So when they were doing the original testing of this,
you have a 6 round magazine that locks in here, and what Neophytou found was that the
actual point of impact changed substantially between the first shot and the last shot. And this wasn't a matter of like
firing in full-auto and having it climb, this was a matter of ...
on a bench, held firmly in place, the gun would ... hit substantially differently in elevation
when the mag was full versus when the mag was empty. And the reason was that there is a
substantial amount of weight in this thing, and because the gun ... was actually recoiling
while the projectile was still in the barrel, and it was actually changing the
characteristics of how long the bolt took to cycle depending on how many rounds were in the
magazine, because those cartridges are so heavy. This is an effect that does impact like rifles, however because
the comparative mass of a rifle bullet to the whole rifle is so much smaller than the mass of one of these
20mm shells to this gun, it's an irrelevant thing in a rifle. But what they found is by adding buffers to the magazine,
... this little buffer right here is able to actually compress just slightly upon firing, and that allows the
magazine to effectively slide slightly forward, which gives it enough time for the projectile to clear the
barrel before this has an impact on the gun's recoil and physics. So, hopefully that made some sense. But that's another interesting element, one of those
things that you only find out through experiment and trial and designing things like this. Going back to a slightly more mundane aspect
of the gun, we have a charging handle up here. This simply impinges on, basically, the charging handle
tube of the bolt carrier. And it snaps into place in the front. So in order to cycle it, you have to pull it out like
that and then you can move it back, locks in place, it's not reciprocating of course.
And then it locks open kind of like an HK, except it locks down instead of locking up,
and there are a couple reasons for that. One of them is to ensure that it doesn't interfere
with any optic mounted on the top of the gun. And the other handy thing is
when it's locked in place like this, it's actually accessible to the
thumb from pretty much a firing grip. So you can have it locked open, pop it up with
your thumb and the spring will then close it. It's the equivalent of the HK slap, except you don't
have to take your hand off of the handguard to do it. So as for ammunition here's a selection, these are all dummy
cartridges, but this is the range of ammunition for the gun. The blue one of course is a practice round, just a dummy. Although I'll tell you what, these things actually
have a significant terminal effect because in order to match the ballistics of an actual
HE round the interior core of this is hollow. On these guys ... it's I think a 4mm
steel wall filled with high explosive. On this it's just empty in the centre, and
that acts kind of like a gigantic hollow point with the practice round when it hits
something solid. Anyway, that's the practice. This is the armour-piercing, but ... really I don't think
they even make this as a production item for this cartridge. Because, well, 310 metres per second is a great
velocity for explosive, it's not really all that useful for AP. I think they told me this penetrates
something like 6mm of armour plate, which is pretty insignificant. If you want AP don't use this gun. So that's there. What this does point out
though is these are standard 20mm projectiles. This isn't a proprietary custom
sort of sort of thing, and that means they're actually really inexpensive and
affordable from a military perspective. So we then have two others. This is probably
the main thing that would be used with this gun, this is HEI, high-explosive incendiary. And then the one with the black tip
is semi-armour-piercing HEI, so it's got a little bit of a tungsten penetrator core. And apparently this basically does just as well for armour-
piercing as a true AP warhead because of muzzle velocity. So ... you know in normal terms this
would be a general-purpose round, for the Neopup, the Inkunzi, I think
honestly the HEI is the best round to go for. It's interesting shooting this thing,
you know with a machine gun you're trying to control it and put repeated
multiple hits on target and fight the gun. But this, ... this thing does its job when it gets there, and it
doesn't matter how long it takes to get there, so to speak. Alright, so one last thing to take a look at, now that I've got the
gun reassembled, is the actual optics and sighting system. So this is set up with right now an EOTech, but I
think this is actually really well suited to a red dot. Certainly, you don't want a magnified optic on it
because of eye relief issues, and with the recoil of this a magnified optic would just pop
you in the eye every single time. So instead the red dot allows quick
target acquisition, quick movement, however, the thing that a red dot doesn't do
well on a gun like this is account for drop. And this has an effective range of like
1,000 metres for area effect targets and something like 600 for point targets, if you're
shooting at a vehicle or something like that. So you need a way to accommodate for the
drop of something that is, while a very fast 20mm, it's very slow by rifle bullet standards. So it's going
to have a fairly substantial drop by rifle standards. And the way they did that is by
building the BDC into the optics base. So here on the back we have this big, obvious and easy to
use knob that starts at 100 metres and rotates up to 1,000. So one full revolution gives
you your full effective range. Now this is enough elevation that you can't do it just
with an EOTech reticle. However, it's only about 11 degrees. So looking at it from the side you can see
the whole range of travel, not all that much. You know that's not a 40mm grenade
launcher sort of ... aim at a 30 degree angle up. but it is enough that you want to build that into the optics mount, instead of trying to have it in a reticle. [ cc by sk cn2 ]
Hey Ian, what's the purpose of that second pic rail over the trigger?
Can you clarify what ammunition this thing uses? That little stubby round doesn't look anything like a 20mm Vulcan cartridge and they go 3000fps, not 1000fps like this rifle.
I like this sort of video. I didn't notice it'd been 20 minutes of watching gun stuff when I had other things to do until it was over.
Even Ian is on this space force kick??
The recoil on that thing looks pretty massive. Cool video as always.
The question here: Given its direct-fire design, wouldn't this weapon just be considered as a large caliber rifle? Because in that case the HE ammo for it can qualify as explosive anti-personnel bullets, which is outlawed by the The Hague Conventions.
But no one will answer or seems to know how to order one.