Project Lightening Episode 06: Total Damage

[Music] you in this test each shooter will have 30 seconds to claim as many clays as possible at 30 yards in order to find the most potentially destructive weapon on the crowded battlefield [Music] now what you might not have caught on camera is that I grabbed a chunk of my own beard trying to get back into position and both of my elbows are extremely uncomfortable I'm having to reach so far forward and dig my elbows that's such a weird like obtuse angle that your shoulders are uncomfortable under my arms is uncomfortable I don't really feel like I've got some good placement on this one there's just no way to mount this thing just a simple PI pod would make such a world of a difference on this one really would benefit from a bipod he doesn't have a bipod I'm not gonna try and fire it in full auto because I know I'm gonna go climbing way up over the Clay's and I'm kind of counting on the recoil I'm aiming low and then letting the gun creep up the target a little bit although still not climbing as bad as I thought it would to my way of thinking this is an automatic rifle I'm gonna shoot it like an automatic rifle I imagine you would plan your position better ahead of time have a sandbag up front then make a big difference on this gun I'm having to do so much focus on this for just keeping it up and straight and my sights lined up that it's it's definitely not simple it's got great sights and they're kind of wasted in non-supported fire so on full auto easier reloading than a lot of the other stuff we played them with even though I managed to kind of mess it up I did I was hoping to do a little bit better than I think I actually did in fact I goofed when I set the selector at the very beginning I thought I had it on semi I kept it on full I don't think I did I know I'm confident I did better this way than I would have in full auto and I think that's the best way to use this particular gun alright folks let's talk field repair because it's been a long day on range and we don't always have time to resolve issues and we've got a little too much slop in this rear pin so if I pull this trigger I got nothing unless there's some yoke on this gun yeah yeah nature's most perfect invention the zip tie actually I got to I'm linked together so let's see how probably the most ridiculous World War one gunsmithing ever can yo let me take my hand off now I think we're gonna try this out hopefully I don't get poked in the eye [Music] [Music] ah the yoke done struck again and I have no way ah all right well I at least got something so I've saved my reputation a little bit okay I think it's a second mag and I had to tighten my zip top this is it standard issue the show shot is an incredibly difficult gun to shoot the recoil is stupendously uncomfortable this has the same sort of pattern as not necessarily an auto five shotgun but actually the winchester 1911 Widowmaker it just bounces around on you it's shaking so violently I still can't really track what I'm doing downrange so I can't walk it in like I did the Lewis gun it doesn't even really see very well these legs this bipod is like really flimsy and weird in that both of them are very able to act independently so even seating it in the mud is quite difficult this is not an easy gun to actually aim at a point target I still have a very hard time getting a sight picture I have to raise this gun up so high and I just am NOT able to get line up over that sight I'm still having to do a weird alignment on this one you saw I actually ended up going back here to the rear cap which is what you're not supposed to do I did that deliberately and the reason you're not supposed to do it is because then the edge of this collar will come back and kick you in the cheek but I wanted to back here I can actually get my eye down lower and get a sight picture it doesn't feel like it really is one that's good for total damage of this distance I tried a variety of different techniques I tried walking my fire in and I think I started very high so I kept lowering it and it took a surprising amount of time until I started seeing dirt kicked up close I certainly did show in who thought I wouldn't get a single clay I see at least one broken one down there at some point I managed to get at least one clay but I think it was only one maybe two looks like may have hit one but did hit one yes [Music] I believe in myself the show Shaw is not a weapon of precision it is a weapon of a long I switch strategies almost immediately because there's no hope for that I see a broken clay blanket the area even if I can't see where I'm hitting try to adjust fire to cover where I think I'm gonna be hitting know the key to properly utilizing a show Shaw is aggressiveness attack and basically just violence I can not see down these sights while the gun is emotion for a lot of the guns for this gun I can't see down the sights when the gun isn't in motion a lot of bursts a lot of full auto fire I was I can't get a sight picture anyway so I'm not gonna try and take a careful one honestly this one it's it feels like it's even worse than the eight millimeter it's it's so high I mean just trying to get up to where they present I'm gonna line this up while I got the camera for zigga that's how I mean I'm not I'm all the way up I only have so much arm and I'm already a tall guy it's it's too so bipods weak overall it's just not the best to to do this kind of total destruction demonstration with it really doesn't do any destruction of this distance this is a weapon for diving into a trench and clearing a trench with fully automatic fire in this configuration from the bipod aiming at relatively small static targets it's not at its best ah [Music] [Music] [Music] all right this is fantastic that's fantastic Lewis gun she does drill a hole you can just watch where you're hitting even in this wet muddy weather the sights still digging accurate it's easy to read down I'm going to tell Ian exactly what I just learned which is don't bother with bursts I am able to actually watch impacts downrange over the site and make adjustments in real time once I got even one lick emotion downrange I could walk her right in the the way that the action runs the weight of the gun the aperture sights the really nice trigger this all goes together to make a magnificent firearm she's so mild and easy on recoil so linear on recoil I just drew it I mean I drew it like mspaint she's pretty well I think she would have done fine I think I should get a little bit faster my reloads though even when I got malfunctions they were easy to clear they were pretty quick to clear he definitely performed what I thought she would do it just it sucks we don't have any more rounds to use on her otherwise I feel like she would have the most destructive power I think I'm gonna end up doing substantially better with the Lois than with any of the other guns despite the fact that I cleared like five malfunctions during my 30 second stint beautiful system for this sort of use I was that close getting off rounds from a second drum after a reload I really like this thing [Music] that was difficult this is a difficult one to realistically try to sweep the line with now I took my time only because I saw the other two so I had an advantage their problem is is that lining up that site and actually hitting the targets I was not doing so hot on that one I don't think I nailed a single one with that I think I was spraying all around the hay I'm not sure exactly where it was shooting and so I did some kind of wandering around trying to find exactly where I was hitting I aimed just above each Bale and managed to make some contact I know I got a couple of hits but it was a matter of like try and find a vaguely correct position and then drop a burst kind of curious to see how the other guys will do but I tried to take it slow tried to keep it concise bursts to try to see if I could possibly land it on there still looks like there's a lot of spread on this gun we saw some of this in the hundred-yard test this gun has kind of a lot of dispersion even at a relatively shorter range like this it's got a good swivel point on it so yes you're able to sweep it pretty smoothly by the time I got this yoke pushed forward I'm rocking off the rear leg of the tripod now it's just so unstable this is just the wackiest way to do this I still didn't have any luck today with that unfortunately [Music] well that's not too shabby problem is that it's so difficult to tell where it's hitting I think we read these targets as I'm looking I'm bullseye in the first shots on the burst it's really kind of difficult to shoot good bursts with it I did however choose to do it this way because well we already saw it used as a semiautomatic rifle and I really wanted to try burst I tried to do a little bit of burst fire I tried to do some single shots to see where was it like where I was lining up but I honestly I couldn't get a grasp of exactly where I was shooting it's a light machine gun however with this actual World War one model they really actually kind of had it more in the guise of an automatic rifle specifically because of the trigger because it's such a long long draw on that trigger before you get to that second round I don't have to agree with you in this gun doesn't like doing bursts if you have to under stress and you just clamp down on the trigger great that'll work but if I want to actually hit discrete targets this gun is really designed to have you do that in semi-auto it feels like automatic would have to be reserved for targets almost closer than these and definitely man-sized so for this one I was just having a hard time finding exactly what I was hitting I mean it looks like I may have that there was sometimes there it's got a very small V notch sight and the when I said the periods when I started missing I realized were periods when I was letting the front sight drift high and like focusing on the front sight to the detriment of the V naught this bipod has this front sights so high and then keeping the rear sight in line with it's also just so difficult I think if there had been a way to put an aperture sight on this like the Lewis has it would have been real quite quite exceptional I did more damage with this gun than a lot of the others so I will say that as much as I might say it's not great I did fairly well with it it's still better than a lot of what we've seen so I have a lot of love for the Matson [Music] so I was being a baby about it I should have just held the trigger down and if this thing was running a little bit better I could have had a bunch of malfunctions they're not entirely sure why we'll have to check into that I'm not doing this gun a fair representation because I'm not just powering through it once you saw me pull the trigger and hold and just watch the dirt I started hitting this was one of the guns that I think has the potential to do a lot more damage to these clays than well most of them I've got a nice easy sweep so I'm able to move laterally very very smoothly this thing has a battle sight zero of 400 meters so that's gonna require some significant offset and adjustment you're able to get a good sight picture on her like very well from this distance sights are okay but the gun just bounces around only issue really a first staying on target is just the bounciness on that recoil a recoil just bouncing the entire time so I recommend don't even bother with the sights because of this balance issue it doesn't matter how heavy the gun is because they've so nicely balanced it right in the middle it's actually kind of really aggravating alright time for another review and I think what a lot of people are probably noticing is that we were over prepared for this test so I've spent the last time of many weeks figuring out what we could shoot settle in straw bales I was regulated clays I'm sure they're going I really like 100 right some of these guns might be we'll do more than 100 clays and we're trying to do it now one thing that did change is I was expecting to clump them really tight to lay together and just see a spread but then you had the idea of changing up being able to like oh no we need to show seek and find a little bit yeah and so and I think that was a great way to demonstrate that because that definitely I think shows in these results well some of these guns you cannot twist them as easily but one thing that lets pay to do something very clearly even with a machine gun lone man volume of fire is still not enough to overcome the fact that most of the universe is made up of space yes I mean really like we're sending an eight-millimeter issue bullet down range it has to make contact with you know a three-inch clay or whatever 90 percent of what we have in front of us even when we're focused down on something there's still space and any sort of these are not sniper rebels they're machine guns so we're hucking ammo at these targets now granted we're much closer but try imagining you know everybody thinks about mowing people down a hundred yards with these things yeah you're not you're mostly hitting it when people say like there was a solid wall of men advancing there wasn't they were meters apart right and when you look at that your reaction is that's a lot of people together that's like a solid wall of people and I think what we have with these clay pigeons is a more accurate representation of yes right there's a lot of gaps right so I mean maybe if we had some sort of long clay pigeon so that they're separated gisli busily for standing man yeah so I think this is giving us a much fair representation of what machine guns do make sure we didn't have the targets too high because we want to make sure we were staying on the berm - yeah there's that and our last caveat I think is several of these guns we were limited by magazines available right like if we're gonna do this test the way we did it we can't we don't have time for someone to take the spare mags and reload them while we're still shooting and hand them back and so the 30 up six show Shaw the Madsen he was primarily those two we really had a limitation of we only have a couple magazines to work with because these are very scarce magazines especially to find them in good working today so that forced us to keep the timeframe a little bit short shorter than we otherwise would have done also we were a little proud of ourselves yeah we also thought we were gonna do way better than their fire rate 30 seconds we'll divide that out that'll just result in blah blah nope once we started firing it's like oh god I'm not hitting anything accounting for like some of these to have like a hundred clays like up to I had the World War one experience I'm like alright I know what I'm doing nothing good is happening nothing good alright so if we start at the bottom the worst performer was exactly the one we all thought it would be yes 30 OPSEC show show and by the time we got to the range mark over a table gunsmithing had cleaned up the sights so that you could actually see down them even better than when we started this whole thing could have if you could get your eye in that position yeah damn good old brucy nice little breezy over here yep so we had a total of five hits with that thing between the three of us and not evenly distributed I would like to congratulate you though a whopping four hits like this I'm more I'm happier getting four hits with that thing that I was I was performing you said no hits Pete for any of us I said I'm gonna get one and then I guess that just set you off because so I think the key is you get angry you have to be angry to use the show shot effectively I wasn't really that angry I was a little bit sleepy going on a few hours of sleep but I wasn't that angry that day I did consider briefly picking up the gun when the timer went off and and just running down range with it charging and firing from the hip but that probably meant no moving up from that one we have and by the way the reason the thirty-aught-six show Shaun particulars not just the site also the recoils force right yes it's just more honestly the recoil weren't so bad I feel like with that slow rate of fire I could rely on not even I could just walk it in with the hit impact which in fact is exactly what you did with the eight millimeter show show yes we had three guns the eight millimeter show show the BA R and Hotchkiss we're all right smack in this middle like middle mediocre performance nine nine and eight hits respectively and for different reasons the Hotchkiss bounces around and has a terrible tripod which again nicely done you managed to come out ahead of that one like five of the hits were yours there are a few guns that don't want to be shot as much as that Hotchkiss yeah I mean it just I don't I don't know how describe I've been that like it just doesn't want you behind it the proper the best thing you could do to improve the Hotchkiss is to take that crows foot tripod and replace it with a tank yeah you bolt that thing into a tank I know they didn't have the cavalry version another difference I should point out of this is this stage is that it had a regular bipod much further up at the front of the barrel and I feel like that would have made a huge difference in stability on that gun however it doesn't clean up a lot of the reloading and other handling issues via the BA R was a problem simply because I has no bipod at all it's like the opposite issue it's not a crappy one it's just not there I mean the same issue with a hundred yards it basically set up that we had previously done just nothing to really hold it but you I like this one because we had several strategies yes may kind of light and mixed fire and you just semi-auto from the start right it would have been a little bit better if I had not accidentally dumped a burst on my first let's dress sure you were like just the fact that it just sent it and so you think you would have had an actual hit hit and then well no I thought I'd put the selector on semi yeah I did a nice long trigger press to get a good shot and I how many extra hits do you think you could have done with that one or two more probably no so that's significant for what we're seeing in these sort of tests I don't know how perfectly the sights are zero and that's that makes a big difference with individual semi-auto fire in that way right the sights on the in 1918 BA are outstanding and if they are zero that thing is a deadly rifle in semi it's essentially the same as the 1917 rifle yeah but semi-auto with four times the magazine capacity yeah it's I agree I said anything over immediate danger you know 30 feet just uses a big semi-auto yeah yes yep and and the 8-millimeter show show you were saying you walked the rounds in yeah didn't work great but it got you three hits yeah I mean we all actually came out even on those days this is interesting on paper I did very well with that gun walking the hits in on clays I did poorly I can almost guarantee you if we I felt confident about my clay hits with that gun if there'd been paper there I think you had seen something akin to a grouping yeah but the problem is the slow rate of fire means that I don't get the burst benefit the benefit of the burst is if I can get into a section and hold it through the burst in a vaguely if I can if I can keep it dispersed to here and just hose rounds in there my hit probability goes up and we were playing a statistics game right but because the slow rate of fire even though it looks great on paper I didn't statistically get all that many attempts to hit that spot and so not so good if it had triple the rate of fire I would have had triple clays broken in that little section you would have had no face left well yeah recoil - I forget about the recoil there so then once we get out of like the mediocre zone we had the three guns that we really expected going in would be the best but they didn't necessarily perform in the same way that we thought they would so those are of course the lowest the maximum and the Madison and I'm gonna start with the Madsen okay I took one look at the trigger on that thing not one look but from our previous testing I knew that the trigger on that gun is really designed to be a semi-auto gun capable of full auto in emergencies right so that that Madsen and that differs by the way from the later Madsen's and there are a lot more of the late ones out there the the World War one Madsen is an extremely rare gun today and on the later ones they have a regular selector switch so you've got a trigger and it's got safe semi and full auto and on this one it's a progressive trigger and I looked at that and I went you know what this is clearly trying to tell me to shoot semi-auto I'm just gonna shoot semi-auto and see how it does and it did really quite well I got nine hits with it which is the second most that I got with anything you two both did some burst fire as well yes and fourth eius he was able to work his like walkers shots in like he was able to get like a good solid bursts like oh yeah I can't I don't recall all I know is that may you really struggle the progressive trigger because you you have been trained throughout the entirety of our series where we shoot a ton of vintage bolt-action guns may is hardwired to not snatch a trigger oh no I'm a slow pull in the the only way to get automatic fire out of that gun is to snatch the trigger or pull through and then just keep on pulling and then this it's very awkward the snatch is really the only way to get a burst out of that gun and I tried the snatch and I'm going to trigger snatcher either and so I had really difficult time keeping my sights online even with all the extra mass and everything and then just jerking a trigger but I it just it's the only way you can run that thing in Auto I wanted to try an auto burst to see if I could get the sort of grouping in the interestingly as much as I'm complaining it's still not that bad still a I think thunderian you're honestly at the worst because that you were trying to do what I was trying to do and yet you kept not getting the burst I just couldn't get a hang on the trigger like I just I wasn't able to get the shots that I want it with it's unfortunate I think I hit a good bit of hay here on there though the Madsen is a gun that with some practice you could get really good at oh yeah the Madsen has fewer things that are going to fewer things that make it a fundamentally bad gun there are a lot of these others like you can practice a lot on the Hotchkiss and you can get better at it but you're still gonna be facing some serious limitations from the mechanics of the gun I mean you can get really fast and low real Oh with that one too I mean if you get that if you're managed to get the toe of the mag in there right like that's gonna speed up or have a proper team yeah yeah well like these total damages again we're all doing those reloads like on our own animals able to get a few mags in here there but I could I have some for the most part didn't even get a maggot off yeah so it's worth pointing out from our reload test basically every reload for us is going to be 10 to 15 seconds and we have a 30-second time penalty to start with or time period so by the time you're up and shooting you're a couple seconds in and then you've legitimate Lee you've only got like 10 seconds to shoot the entire magazine if you want to be able to reload and get anything out of that second magazine if I had to redo it and keep the 30 seconds I'd say we probably should have been eyes on and ready and then that would give us a chance to have a mag change in a second burst but yes no science next time we'll get some more magazines there and then we can just extend the time out that way the maximum you did better I feel like our scores are the same on the maxim it didn't come out as well as we thought we had a grand total of 13 hits with the maximum compared to 19 for the Madsen yeah why bounce yeah honestly that bounce with that recoil like I feel like no matter what I would have two shots in the bay if I shot in the Hale Bay if I actually shot it and then unfortunately like a moment I got out of the bail like it was just out of the bay like it was just into the berm behind us so unfortunately like you just got to put like one or two bursts on it and then hope it's staying in there like I think that was we chose the arrangement of those targets based off the idea of World War one so low and horizontal and you're not people who just step up and walk across that's gonna be easy pickings and we know it so we wanted lots of little dots along the horizon for us to shoot at and when your gun has that central pivot and if I mean is the teeter-totter of a firearm yeah this would be the best one for swiveling with two just because that bipod on there it great travel I compared to the others that have all these like I mean shoot the the show shows like they have an individual legs that essentially they can move independently like that hello Jesus you know some people will say by the rail man o 815 that wish I had to bipod the other way around and it's doubly help it it plays no benefit and you don't have the advantage of the dig in for the recoil so doesn't matter and I think we see some evidence that it's not just us that bipod was bad in the the Germans by the 1930s when they were reworking oh wait 15s to keep them in in service they moved the bipods out to the front of the water jacket you could have clamped a bipod over the whole jacket kind of like what you see on the Lewis gun and I guarantee you I could I could have at least 50% increased my score yeah just from that horrible vertice that's in there so speaking of the Lewis Lewis is our clear and undisputed winner of this test with shocking 31 hits yeah in fact every single one of us including you hit more with the Lewis than with any other gun it's true now for me I was the first one to shoot the Louis and instantly the first time I was shooting at the hill it okay yeah I'm just gonna combine words at this point and bail I'm just gonna say bail I'm just he's one word when I was first aiming at the first one I was able to basically I could see the target I could see I'd hit my target and then basically little tiny wiggle like a little circle essentially and that was when I nailed for clays in one and that's when I had that point I moved to the next bail and I just shipped it over made it to the next one I managed to hit one but the problem was is that I just I hit one and I did a little swivel and I was like I'm not getting any more what the heck is going on means you'd gone hi laughs right I just I had managed to like not get it just in the right spot unfortunately so that's when like we whenever we did by the way get off range like whoever shot at first or second or whatever we tried to give little tips to each other just to kind of see and that way it gave them also an opportunity to see if they want to change out what maybe they were going to start off yeah don't forget may went into this assuming the Lewis was going to shoot low so he's a high hold so may actually warranty and I don't keep shooting high I don't know what the difference is or where we're at but well we were assuming that it would perform the same at about 45 yards for this test that it did at the hundred yard test right where you did have to hold high and at the shorter range not quite so much right so so I'm a bust our scores with her warning we always say about the same day which is actually a testament because you know if if that's so even if her second burst had hit as well as I first should be right in there with us so I think what we're seeing here is that the Lewis's advantage is just the right rate of fire here with the ability to pick a zone and hose that zone the opposite was saying with like the show shall where the show shot I actually out of the three of us I'm able to pick his own but then I just sort of poke a couple holes in that area and that's all I get whereas it's almost a shotgun blast with the Lewis gun you just a little look right in that spot so to me it's it's the stability of the bipod it's not a good bipod really by today's standards but is it the other better than most it's in the right place and then the lack of felt recoil which means I can actually watch my sights I don't have this shot shot shot it just stays where we're shooting there is one other thing and I feel like we haven't covered it is the low bipod combined with just the right stock shape because all of us I think pistol grip opposite arm grab the but the butt is a sort of triangular shape in your palm that you can squeeze up or let down and you don't think about it but you you have a natural ability to puff up pump up and pump down that thing and it gets you a lot when you have that shorter bipod because it pivots you up and down on that bipod smoothly and you're able to just try like that probably was the most couple if we're talking about laying prone with all these that probably for me was the most comfortable gun to lay prone with behind the laser extreme it was all of them seemed to told me I mean just the height on most of them and I'm I'm a large really upper body and everything and especially when you get into like the us show shot was the worst offender yeah the Manson was not bad no Madsen acceptable medicine is also extendable so that thing could be extended far enough out that you could take a seated position behind an object we just didn't have any basis of the comparison to do that I'd also argue the OI 15 wasn't too bad but it was it was still high don't get me wrong but that swooped in the bottom of the buttstock it has horizontal marks all up in it that thing rests really well for its height you don't have any pockets or like anyway can snack because you put that gun down it's gonna snag it every time I swear so weirdly I felt pretty good about the Oh a 15 probably right behind the Lewis at 100 yards because I thought oh yeah we got the total damage over you 15s gonna do a ton because you can swivel you can do all these things but then that that dispersion that we saw on the hundred-yard target has come back around to us because having a tight group with an automatic weapon for this kind of burst firing thing is critical oh yeah yep a degree well I think we have done some damage on this happily total damage well I think we need to just kick things down for a quick review and go over our final impressions for the entire series yep alright gang that's our final test but it is not the end of the series and by the way that series only exists due to the support from Brownells that's right they took on a chunk of the financial risk that really made this show almost impossible to do for a channel as small as ours we had obviously forgotten weapons buying in but it's no reason to sort of put everything on the line and these guys got really excited about the opportunity and they dove on it and asked us for practically nothing I'm saying what I'm saying now because I chose to say it and so if you have a really treaty point and shooting of your own and you need something to help maintain it or maybe accessorize it well these are the guys to check out and when you do by all means tell them that we sent you over there and that you appreciate them supporting gun history accessible to everyone who bothers to tune in it's actually quite altruistic of them now if you'd like to see the entire series with the final conclusion and the extra behind the scenes and stuff like that ahead of time right now you can still go over to see our film comm and get the whole series for 6 bucks and honestly you could also just do that to support the series to say yes I want more of this kind of content and yes I want to put some piggies in the bank so that you and forgotten weapons can do this sort of thing again now if you don't want to do any of that that's perfectly fine you're just going to have to tune in one more time for the conclusion over on forgotten weapons channel alright have a go [Music] you [Music] you

Channel: C&Rsenal

Views: 151,172

Rating: 4.9677305 out of 5

Keywords: firearms, guns, WWI, History, greatwar, bf1, battlefield1, worldwar1

Id: xnKy_BSOZys

Length: 48min 7sec (2887 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 28 2019