Q&A 22: Travel and More

hey guys thanks for tuning in to another QA on forgotten weapons comm I'm Ian McCallum and we have as usual about four pages here of questions all submitted by the fine folks who've contributed to support the channel on patreon if you're interested in getting one of your questions into one of these videos head over to patreon calm down weapons there's a link in the description text below and as always of course I should also mention that I got way more questions than I can manage to put into a single video so if you submitted a question and didn't get it answered and you think it was a good question please do submit it again and I promise by the time you've done it three or four times I will put in for one of these videos with that out of the way let's get into our first question which is from Tyler who says of all your trips abroad for forgotten weapons and in range which was your most favorite or most enlightening and why well honestly my most enlightening has been the the two times that I've been able to go to the National Firearms Center in Leeds in the UK it's a collection colloquially known as the pattern room collection although that's not technically accurate anymore the collection from the pattern room was actually amalgamated up with one of the other British military government gun collections to be honest I've sort of lost track of exactly what the nomenclature was at any rate they're all put together under the auspices of the Royal Armouries now and then the National Firearms Centre is the part of the royal Henry's that has the available they're basically the reserve collection so it is actually open to the public although only by appointment so you can get in there which is interesting in that many many major reserve collections are not really open to the public they're open by private appointment to people who maybe have special access in the case of the National firearm center it really is open to anybody you just have to go through the process to to schedule a visit and go in there and I would strongly recommend it to anyone who finds themselves in northern England it's in the town of Leeds the city of Leeds there's not a whole lot else to do in Leeds so the Royal Armouries is a really good thing to to take advantage of if you happen to be there as for most enjoyable honestly that would probably be a combination of my trips to Finland probably because those have involved more sort of vacation time than most of my other trips and it is a gorgeous country at least in the summer I've yet to travel there in the winter which I would like to do but it's probably not quite as environmentally hospitable there in the winter in the summer getting to leave a place like southern Arizona and go to a place like Finland is a really nice respite second question is from Grayson says are there any other operating systems like the Blish system used by the Thompson auto rifle and the Thompson submachine-gun which managed to work despite a fundamental misunderstanding of the physics behind them and why there are not any others that I can think of that I'm aware of that actually made it into production despite being based on entirely flawed premises the thing with Blish is that he was basically through trial and error able to design that gun as a delayed blowback there have been some other delayed blowback systems that didn't delay nearly as much as they should have the Kimble pistol is an example of one with a ring cut in the chamber into which the brass was supposed to expand and then be held temporarily briefly before extracting that one just didn't work all that well and led to a lot of parts breakage and an overly high slide velocity which is why the Kimble pistols are so rare probably the best example I can come up with of one that that was really fundamentally flawed so much so that it never made it into production but still had a is well-known today is the rollin white system we know rollin white as the guy who patented the idea of drilling chambers all the way through a revolver cylinder but his patent that was actually just kind of like a side claim of his patent what he was really patenting what he was trying to design was a rear-loading revolver and the problem was he basically had nothing sealing the back of the revolver and apparently didn't really quite understand the idea that this you know when the his cartridge fired it was going to move with basically equal power out the front and out the back of the cylinder simultaneously and this is largely why his patent why his ideas were rejected by most by all of the major gun companies when he first got this idea and and marketed it around it was only when Smith and Wesson tried to patent the the board through cylinder for their own gun and discovered that it was already patented by white that they went looking to him to try and license his patent the whole rest of his idea the rest of his gun they screw that throw that thing away it's a piece of garbage Colonel told him it was garbage and it was so that's that's another interesting aspect interesting example of one that was fundamentally flawed but became historically notable nonetheless we have actually a couple well let's say we have a question from deviant here who says this might sound like a pedestrian question but it's one that piques my interest in many of your videos as it relates to how much gear you have with you have to travel with while filming those wooden and often felt Top Gun display blocks or those typically on site or you have to pack your own collectible ones I imagine places like the auction houses may have them but what about your in when you're in the homes of private collectors are they sold retail or do folks make their own I think generally people make their own there are two there's one type that I normally use which is like a little kidney shaped wooden block that's maybe three inches long and inch inch-and-a-half high with a couple of rounded surfaces to it that generally do a pretty good job of being a universal gun stand those someone makes those I don't know who I don't remember but I've seen little label stickers on the bottom of them both of the auction houses that I've worked with have had those in fact they basically had buckets of them and I don't tell them but I may have swiped a couple so that I have a handful of them back that I can use when I'm at home and then I take those generally with me when I'm traveling to a private collection so that I have something to stand guns up with in the same way I also take my own tablecloth with me a piece of cloth that way I have a good color backdrop some people complain about the gray cloth that I use that's there for a very specific reason and it is to to get the auto brightness feature of the camera to properly calibrate for guns if I put up a white backdrop in theory the guns are more visible except the problem is the camera sees the white and it changes the brightness settings substantially and it ends up that the guns end up being very dark so I use a dark backdrop which makes the guns stand out nicely because of the camera settings I realize there are almost certainly ways that I could fix that manually but that is a bridge farther than I would like to go and to me that the dark gray backdrop cloth works right anyway I'm getting a little bit of field here in addition to those little kidney blocks there are also larger rifle stands usually for two or three or four guns I don't use those very often but every once in a while and when I do there are stands that belong to the auction house where I'm filming and they're usually something that's kind of lying around those auction houses will they travel to major gun shows to set up displays to entice both interest from buyers and also interest from consigners and so they have a bunch of gun stands and racks that they use for gun show displays and I usually scrounge one of those up when I need something like that for filming at an auction house then we have let's see next question is from Dustin Dustin says window or aisle and in fact we had a follow up question from deviant who says this leads to an interesting question do you have a preferred air carrier or Alliance and another question from another person asking also about particular airline preference so first off aisle window window is potentially better on an international trip because windows are a little bit easier to sleep in because you can kind of rest your head between the seat and the window where if you have a middle or an aisle seat you got nothing if you roll off one side of the chair your head's just gonna flop I'll so most of my flying is not international most of it is actually domestic and I have very poor luck trying to actually sleep on international flights anyway so I almost always go for aisle I like the fact that it lets me stand up and get out of the plane a little earlier or at least stand up once the plane lands I also like having access to the aisle so I can get out if I need to use the bathroom or if I just want to stretch my legs or if I want to go try and scrounge an extra dessert or snack or something from the kitchen as for airlines honestly in the u.s. to my experience they're all kind of equally blase airline travel has really been commoditized and I see almost the only distinguishable difference I see in Airlines is Southwest because they have some different boarding and baggage policies however the two places that I have been primarily going Rock Island and the julia auction house which was in maine it is now merged with Murphy's they're located in Pennsylvania so we'll see if that changes things but I would very seriously be interested in flying Southwest except Southwest didn't go to the two airports that I needed the most often so beyond that they're all pretty much the same they all have about the same statistical rate of late flights and always for the same reasons I don't find any of them to be noticeably better or worse than others as for international airlines that well international flights are almost always nicer than domestic flights like for example for some reason I have never had any trouble getting all of my carry-on luggage into the carry-on bins into the luggage bins on an international flight where it is sometimes a challenge on domestic flights it's probably just because the international aircraft are larger have a little more luggage space per customer and more people are checking bags instead of trying to carry on everything beyond that honestly my one complaint internationally I've had great luck with great experiences I mean great for airline travel with British Airways with KLM with Air France with those are the three major ones that I've flown I've also flown SAS which is Scandinavian Airlines a number of times because of the aforementioned trips to Finland and my gripe with them is that they're a little bit cheap everyone else on an international flight when they serve you dinner you get wine or spirits with it and SAS does not they do give you free soft drinks unless you're on an SAS domestic flight like for example Copenhagen to Helsinki and there you get tea coffee or water free and if you want US soda you're gonna have to pay for it so that's the American in me being annoyed that I don't get free soda but that is my gripe with SAS next question is from Joe regarding future improvements in the realm of firearms what would you consider to be the mower more important or most likely to come first improve metallurgical technologies so a lighter gun can hold higher pressure rounds improve propellant so less powder will do the same or more work allowing for smaller casings allowing for more more rounds carried per magazine or something else entirely I think the most likely thing for us to actually see in the relatively short term is polymer cased ammunition and that does have a substantial impact on cartridge weight especially when we in a military perspective especially on the larger calibers so the US military is already using polymer cased 50 primarily for helicopters it really does make a difference in the amount of ammunition that they can carry or if you keep the ammo load the same it makes a difference in the amount of flight time that they have that will also have an impact on machine guns you know if you think about your brass case 760 NATO belted up 100-200 ground belts and you want to carry as much of that as you can for a machine gun teams having polymer cased ammo would make a substantial difference there it would make the least difference for the individual rifleman but that's not necessarily the military is going to follow up on that technology for the aircraft and the machine gun roles so that's coming that has not that's only starting to become available right now because of being able to develop the right polymers that are going to be strong enough and have the sort of heat and pressure resistance tolerance capacities that are necessary to make ammunition out of them beyond that I don't think a higher energy level propellant is really all that big of a deal I don't think that would lead to a whole lot better metallurgy maybe I really think the next thing after that's going to be optics I think I've said this I think a bunch of times now I think we've really hit a plateau in the actual firearms development themselves and what we see going forward from here that will improve their capabilities are going to be optics and information technology integrated into and with firearms Lee Lee has a question here that he's posted before and I want to answer this but I'll be honest this isn't something I have looked into closely he says the six millimeter unified was the result of a Soviet project to replace the long lasting 760 by 54 rimmed the project died with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the cessation of funding but it raises questions about why there aren't many if any other small caliber high velocity cartridges in the realm of full power rifles are they all victims of short barrel life like the six millimeter the Navy in spite of advancements that allowed the six millimeter unified to shoot 77 grain bullets at 3,700 feet per second with a seven thousand rounds barrel life from double crook double chromed cold hammer-forged barrels I think really it is my guess is that yet is the barrel life that's that well not entirely it's gonna be the barrel life because even 7000 rounds that's pretty good for a rifle that's not so great for a machine gun that's like half of what you really want to have in a machine gun barrel life you're also going to have issues the small caliber bullets are not generally speaking going to be as as widely adopted for machine guns because you want that larger projectile so that you can throw a payload in it machine guns are places where you really can get a benefit from armor-piercing incendiary explosive tracer ammunition all these things whose effectiveness is substantially reduced when you drop to a small diameter cartridge you just have a lot less space for whatever payload you're trying to get so I think between the two and then the idea of if you're gonna use it in a machine gun yeah well I guess I was going to say if you're gonna use it the machine gun you want to use it in the rifles too but we've kind of gotten away from that since five five six was adopted so that's probably not so much of an issue yeah I apologize six the the Soviet cartridge developments are not something that I'm particularly well-informed on Craig Gehrke says the term Hertz kit comes up a lot in your videos when talking about imports into the US this is true for those of us not familiar with US laws what is a parts kit what is the legal significance of the term how is it gun turned into a parts kit and then back into a gun this all stems from the fact that in the United States the the registered or the legally significant component in a firearm is the receiver and on some guns that's pretty obvious like what part is the receiver on some guns it's not so much we don't in the United States we don't legally control guns based on pressure bearing parts like barrels and bolts and gas Pistons in the way that almost the entire rest of the world does we care about the receiver which is basically the part that contains the magazine so on an ar-15 it's the lower receiver assembly on a maxim gun it's actually one of the two side plates because they had to come up with something so in much of Europe you can deactivate a gun legally by say plugging the barrel cutting the bolt face modifying it in various ways and turning it into something that is not regulated as a gun we don't have any legally recognized way to do that in the u.s. except for destroying the receiver because the receiver is the part that's considered a firearm I would also point out here one of the other eccentricities of US law is that in the US once a gun is legally a machine gun it can never become legally a semi-automatic gun and when I say gun I mean technically the receiver so in Europe almost all of Europe as far as I'm aware if you have a fully automatic m16 lower receiver you can modify it put in some say semi-automatic fire control parts and get it registered and legally owned as a semi-automatic firearm in the US you cannot do that that that lower receiver is considered a machine gun no matter what you ever do to it short of destroying it so this is where a parts kit comes in what you can do is if you get a machine gun disassemble it strip it down get the receiver just by itself and then if you destroy the receiver or just leave it out what you have left is legally unregulated and that's what's called a parts kit so it's going to include parts that are heavily regulated in Europe like intact barrels bolts gas operating parts that sort of thing but in the u.s. none of that is legally actionable stuff so that's your parts kit is the sum total of the machine gun less the receiver now ATF has specific dictates on what constitutes destruction of a receiver and so often when you buy a parts kit you will actually get the destroyed receiver pieces with it and that that destruction process like the activation standards in Europe has changed over time currently it generally means you need to have you need to use a torch to cut the receiver into four pieces using diagonal cuts that each remove at least a quarter-inch six millimeters of metal in each cut once you've done that the resulting pieces are legally considered scrap metal they're no longer a regulated item so you can include those with the parts kit sell it all together and it's the equivalent of a completely deactivated firearm once you have that parts kit you have a couple of options you could either manufacture or just buy a brand new semi-automatic receiver so if it's something like an ar-15 if you have an m-16 machine gun destroy the reset the lower receiver get the parts kit you can then buy a semi-automatic ar-15s eevr assemble the rest of the parts onto it and now you have a legal semi-auto firearm or in the case of something that is more difficult to obtain commercially like let's say a Bren gun or a DPM you can't there are people out there making those receivers but it's also perfectly legal to manufacture a semi-automatic receiver by welding up the leftover scrap remnants of the original receiver once they're destroyed they're no longer legally a firearm much less a machine gun and so manufacturing a new receiver from those scrap parts is legally the same as manufacturing a new receiver from just a block of raw metal as long as it's a semi-automatic receiver that you make by doing things like welding up Auto sear pin holes and that sort of thing as long as it's semi-auto receiver you can legally build the gun that way so that's that is a fairly lengthy description required to go through that whole process because it is kind of a weird element of an element of all unique to the United States that's a parts kit Yemen says is the savage 99 on your list of guns to do videos on I know you tend to focus more on military guns than sporting arms but the savage 99 is interesting for being a lever action that could use spits or bullets yes and yes it is interesting it is definitely a historically relevant video firearm and yes I do plan to do video on on it actually on them there are a couple different versions that I would like to touch on I actually just recently got a book really the reference book on the savage 99 which I'll be doing a book review on shortly in fact I'm not sure exactly when this Q&A is going to be publishing so there's a slim chance that the book review has already published by the time you see this then it's just a matter of finding a couple of good examples of the 99 and yes we'll have some videos on those next question is from Tim are you planning to go back through your old videos and reshoot some of the more interesting ones in hi-def and with more information that has since come to your attention yes in particular my Bren gun video there are a number of early ones that I did boy almost five years ago now that definitely would benefit from being redone the Bren gun in particular because it is such an interesting and iconic firearm and they're a lot of fun to shoot I haven't done it yet because I just haven't had the opportunity that's quite right if I'm gonna redo a video like that I want to make sure that the new version is really head and shoulders above the old version and I want to do it right and I haven't had the opportunity there for the Bren gun one of the guns high on my list to try and do a new video on is the fedorov that was one of the very first videos on the channel and it's actually not even me in the video it's a friend who took some footage and let me use it for the channel I would love to do a proper video on the fedorov 1916 hopefully that will come the Owen gun I would love to do a proper video on that I just haven't had the opportunity to get my hands on one of those again and I'm sure there are some others it was kind of cool actually well cool for unfortunate reasons I did have the chance to redo a number of of some of the really exotic early ones when unfortunately the owner who had originally let me use them passed away and his collection ended up at the Julia auction house where I was able to get my hands on literally the same gun that I had used in earlier videos and and do a much better new video on them so so yes those are coming next question next page next question is from Robert says I heard about a 1930s French project to develop a machine gun in nine by 66 the RFP to tsai-tien and shuttle arrow was supposedly similar in concept to the current 8.6 or 338 Norma Magnum LW MMG lightweight medium machine gun essentially they wanted something to bridge the gap between the 13 - Hotchkiss and the seven five machine guns very little information is available do you know anything about this project or any other concepts for weapons between 30 and 50 Cal I don't know any particular specific details I know that it is a concept that has come up periodically the 338 belt-fed machine guns I don't know that I'm dubious that they will ever achieve like full military adoption in the United States but they are a very interesting concept especially for something like a tripod or vehicle mounted gun as for the French project the only source I am aware of is the book by Jean you all and Alan bow xavier called Liz Makai you Fran says the French machine guns there are like three pages maybe five pages in here on the whole 1920s and 30s developmental program of French machine guns which included among other things that project so I haven't translated those sections of this book so I can't tell you exactly what they're talking about in them my French isn't good enough yet to just read them straight through but I will include a link to this book in the description text below listed with this question so if you're interested you can order a copy of the book that is the only source I am aware of on it next up is from Carl says of all the surplus comm block pistols in nine by 1832 Auto and 760 Tokarev that have flooded the market in recent years which ones have caught your attention and why to really and ones not so much the recent surplus all those sort of one of them is the the Tokarev the tt-33 and fifty thirty Tokarev I really like those guns more than I can maybe rationally explain they absolutely would be better off if they had a safety in the original design that said I really don't like be added on safeties that have to be put in there for us import requirements I am in fact much in debt to a viewer who heard me complaining about this earlier and generously sold me an original Russian Tokarev that does not have said thumb safety but I like the design I think it's very clever I think it's very efficient it's a great for world war ii i think it's a really nice combat pistol the other one that i am particularly particularly like is the CZ 82 that's the czech sort of it it's a compact pistol but bigger than some of the really small ones and it was made primarily in 380 auto 380 yea auto for export as well as nine by eking Makarov for the Czech military and I think in 9 by 18 that's a really neat little gun it has a lot of very nice features on it it actually feels good in the hand ambidextrous safety double stack in round or 12-round I guess a 12-round I should probably check that before I started filming anyway a double-stack magazine it's and just fantastic build quality most of the other guns in this sort of field most of the other recent import comm block pistols are single stack subcompact sorts of guns that are really quite unpleasant to shoot the 32 ACP ones are to my mind a little bit boring the more I read about them the more interesting they become but still they don't hold my interest the way that the 82 and the Tokarev do and as for the cz 52 I am definitely not a fan I really kind of don't like that gun at all have some potential safety issues I don't think it handles well I don't think it's a particularly well engineered firearm next up is from Darren says how do you feel about modernized SKS's are they in your opinion practical or a fool's errand I think they're a little bit less practical now than they would have been five or ten years ago when you could get Ness casts for a hundred bucks or less or maybe like 90 bucks and a free case of ammo with it today you're gonna be paying here in the US what minimum three hundred and fifty bucks for an SKS at that point you're a lot closer to a gun that's a better rifle to begin with there are some things you can do to modernize the SKS but this is something we've actually talked about over on in range that we are still actually planning to do which is a project looking at modernizing the SKS and the m1 garand both and I really my my hypothesis is that the garand will be the better of those two guns with the SKS the the options for optical sights are not quite as good there aren't a whole lot of options out there to improve the trigger there aren't a whole lot of options out there to improve the stock even which is seems a little puzzling to me I know there are replacement stocks but none of them really mean quite measure up to my mind so if you're in a place where you're not allowed a detachable magazine the SKS is definitely one of your better options available and there are some things you can do to improve them but if you have access to detachable magazines or if you have access to an m1 garand I think that is a better option stay tuned on in range when we do pull that project together and we'll see what we come up with there but could be I'd have to be wrong next question is from Andy says can you think of a time in history where the gun won a war or major battle two adversaries both well-led reasonably on the same level of supply in morale the deciding factor could be said to be the gun that was carried the best that comes to mind for me would be the austro-prussian war where the Prussians had joycie needle fire rifles for each loading needle fire rifles and the Austrians had muzzle loaders and depressions really just wiped the floor with Austria in that conflict now I am NOT a certified scholar on that conflict and my understanding is that all the other factors were relatively similar and it was the rifles that made a really big difference but again I leave open the possibility of being wrong there may have been some particularly good leadership on the Prussian side or other factors that I'm not aware of but if you want to look into the subject of that is one battle or one conflict leave the main battle is Koenig Roth's that's one that I would look into to begin with Vincent says your collection obviously has a large French component I'm pretty sure you said you were drawn to the innovations of the French how is that how the collection started with the French how would you describe your collection what other types our nations make up a significant bloc in your collection no it definitely didn't start with French I started just by collecting acquiring accumulating guns that I found interesting the French thing came when I decided that I was really kind of acquiring a lot of guns and it was this mishmash of you know like squirrel want that I want that I want that and I figured it would be beneficial to me to have some focus have an area to concentrate on and I'm very happy with having having concentrated and focused and specialized on French firearms French rifles in particular there is one other reasonable bloc of firearms in my collection that and that is Japanese and that is largely from my father's influence he collected Japanese World War 2 firearms and when he sort of lost interest in the subject I ended up getting a bunch of them from him so it's I'm not quite as into that at this point as I am in French but it is a collection that was reasonably substantial not not as impressive as some people on the net seem to think that it was but it was a pretty decent collection and added i've added a number of interesting things to it so that's the other major block my collection is first French then Japanese just interesting stuff that appeals to me because I usually don't get rid of things so there's a lot of holdover from years and years before Teddy asks what is the funniest TSA / customs story you have you have had from your extensive international travel that's an easy one it is definitely the time that I almost didn't get led him to Belgium so I was flying to Belgium for the beginning of a couple week-long trip that involved visiting I was going to start with a Dutch Firearms collectors by the name of Burt and I front about it I didn't really do my due diligence I had I talked to him over email and Facebook Messenger actually and I was really just kind of relying on this guy to be there at the airport to pick me up like he said he would and if he hadn't been there I wouldn't have been totally screwed but I would have been in a really unpleasant situation with no particular plan so he was hosting me at his house and and the reason I bring this all up is when I got to the customs booth the customs officer she sometimes they ask you a lot of questions and sometimes they just kind of glance up at you glance at the passport stamp it and wave you through well this lady started asking me questions you know how you're going to be here this long where are you staying and that was the one that really tripped me up so I'm like well Bert because I had this I had as his contact in Fayette his address and all in my computer but I haven't thought to like write it down or you know memorize it or anything so I yeah I'm staying with Bert and she was kind of unimpressed with that and went oh I see and and where does this person live and I'm like I really I don't know oh and how did you meet him Oh through the internet you can see how well this is going and I guess somehow I managed to convince her that I was legitimate but as she was stamping my passport she looked at me squarely in the eye and and said you know I think if I had been trying to get into the United States with this story they probably wouldn't let me in and stay at my passport and waved me through suggesting that perhaps I do a little more due diligence the next time so that's that's definitely my best custom story and by the way Bert was in fact there at the airport waiting for me it was an excellent visit we got some great video out of it some of which you've seen actually almost all of that video contest has published now so next up Brandon says as someone with limited money but lots of time to search auction houses do any ideas come to mind that would make for an interesting purely antique as an ATF definition of 1898 or earlier themed and preferably not American also not intended for shooting gun collection so yes actually despite that being a long list of caveats there are a couple of of themes that come to mind right off the bat for me that I think would make really interesting collections and to my mind the best of them the first one I would go with would be military cartridge revolvers and you could extend that back into muzzleloading revolvers as well if you wanted but through the 1870s 1880s 1890s there was a tremendous amount of variation in military service revolvers that that led up to a Scalia development of smokeless powder once we had smokeless powder most militaries started transitioning to semi-automatic pistols but before that every nation in Europe had its own black powder cartridge revolvers and they're all a little different and there are a handful of major mechanical systems that went into all of these different guns and I think it would be a really fascinating collection that I've actually occasionally dabbled in myself looking at all of these different patterns of military revolvers even within single countries you can get some really you could get a really nice diverse collection think of a collection of Webley revolver x' think about you've got shallow Delphine's you've got like a freaking menagerie of belgian revolvers that you could look at Germany had its own revolvers austria-hungary had its own revolvers Italy had its own revolvers all of these things I think that would make a really cool collection and pistols are small this this may seem obvious but it's something that has become more has come to play a more valuable part in my thoughts on gun collecting since I got an unfortunately large number of French rifles that I'm looking at you know how do you display that how do you store it well handguns are a lot smaller and easier to deal if you don't want that I would say you've got the option of say black powder military rifles there's also a really interesting assortment of different designs there as people come up with different reach loading systems prior to the development of smokeless powder so you know you got mousers you've got them in fields you've got Beaumont's you've got better Lee's you've got all manner of different things there if you want to go earlier than that you could look at the period of cartridge conversions so looking or looking at conversions of muzzleloading firearms to cartridge firing firearms we've got things like Snyder's and trap tower Springfield's and Parvati ales a lot of that whole period because people were experimenting with what were basically new metallic cartridges you've got a lot of innovation a lot of variety of design that make I think would make for really good collecting next question is Tanner says what in your opinion is the reason most European nations have abandoned arms manufacturing they all appear to be near 100% relying on Germans to supply their arms not historically a good idea I think it's basically just a matter of cost and where most of these nationally owned arms fabrication facilities started was when the rifle was the main military weapon you look at the French Arsenal's you look at the English Arsenal's they're building rifles they developed from the need to have tens if not hundreds of thousands of parts interchangeable identical infantry rifles in today's world the infantry rifle isn't quite so much the the main way that you project force militarily we have we have aircraft we have armoured vehicles we have a lot of complex computerized electro-optical weapon systems missiles all this sort of stuff the rifle is a little less important I guess a lot of countries feel that it's not worth the expense of maintaining a large national rifle factory if for like that typically like the 30 year periods where they're not doing anything if you look at the timeframe between the adoption of new generations of firearm I'll use France as an example because that's the one I'm most intimately familiar with you know they they adopt the the Lebel and then they don't need another gun until World War one starts that's you know the Lebel shut down production in 1904 so solid ten years and it would have been more without world war ii world war one intervening of they're paying for this arms factory they want to maintain the workforce the expertise the machine tools all this they're not actually making any rifles and they adopt the mas 36 or let's skip to the end of world war ii the 49:56 they're gonna make a couple hundred thousand of them and then shut down production and then you've got another 20 years before they start making the FAMAS and they're gonna make a couple hundred thousand of those in five to ten years shut down production and then they're not gonna make anything until 2016 when they need to replace the FAMAS that's an expensive proposition a spell surely for what are becoming more liberalized sorts of governments that are less militaristic they don't want to be spending a lot of money on maintaining and basically maintaining and in in active arms production capability now I think a lot of countries are keeping those resources going for the more high-tech weapons and just figuring you know there's people out there that can supply rifles and and it's not enough we don't have enough need for that to be domestically produced to justify the expense so most of the European arm well a lot of the European arms national arms factories have been shut down France and England being the two most obvious examples Christopher says what perceived benefit did the French see in the using the metallic feed strip in their Hotchkiss machine guns it wasn't just the French the Japanese also used the Hotchkiss the the Italians use strip fed guns the the advantage of strips at the time and actually let me preface this by pointing out that when this when Hotchkiss was adopted which is like 1897 your two options and this applies to the maximum as well your two options where I'm a solid metal feed strip or a cloth belt there warn't metal disintegrating links those who basically show up in World War one because they were necessary for aircraft so metallic links are the obvious best choice but that wasn't an option when the decision was made so with cloth belts you're going to have you've got a very long belt this is kind of awkward to use you have to keep it out of the dirt yeah you can do that by having the whole belt in an ammo can but you may need to make sure that you're actually doing that if the belt gets wet it can shrink and hold the cartridges too tightly and cause malfunctions if you know if the belt gets wet and then dries out the the cloth can you know the fibers can stretch out you can have cartridges not fully not adequately held in the belt you know has the belts feeding up into the gun the recoil the force on the belt the bouncing around if the belt can cause cartridges to fall out if they're not held tightly enough these are issues with cloth belts the metallic strip you have ammunition that's more portable it's easy to to package these 30 round strips that are about this this long you don't have to deal with a big you know 250 rounds hanging out a feed side of the gun or 250 round empty belt hanging out the ejection side of the gun and I think it's important to remember to know that which some people don't that as you're feeding these feed strips the way you do it you don't let one go through and then it ejects and then you put the next one in you are actually clipping one strip into the next and feeding them as a continuous unit that's the purpose of the gun crew running something like a Hotchkiss gun now if it's you don't typically see that today because what you usually get are individual machine gun owners or collectors who are you see one person shooting guns you put the strip in and charge the gun and then fire that strip and then you put a new strip in but that's not how they were originally used in military service so I think history has shown us that the belts were probably the better option but there were solid reasons to use the feed strips at that time Brandon says given your extensive collection of books and now experience writing do you think it would be advisable to look into researching and writing a book on an overlooked country's firearms and history in English any advice I think yes I think in particular the Internet has given us the the capability to communicate with people across the globe that allows us to to get information that would have been much much harder 10 or 20 or 30 years ago and that is a huge boon to people who are researching and writing books in terms of a firearms specific book you know today it's very easy to find collectors worldwide who have weird rare examples of guns and to talk to people in foreign countries who have first-hand knowledge or just being able to find museum curators online and talk to them one on one that has made firearms reference research and book writing far easier today than it was a couple decades ago I think that there is still a desire among the public for physical hardcopy books containing this sort of information because for all that the Internet does allow us in terms of communication a lot of this kind of obscure data isn't easy to find quickly so you know I could come up with the history of the carpet check if I spent a lot of time like Osias did communicating with people who have that knowledge and and learning it research again learning it but if I just want to like hit up Wikipedia and find some of that information you can't so the capability to get the information is out there but that's not the same as it being all readily prepared and presented for your convenience and a lot of that information probably never will be or maybe eventually will be but it's far more effective to be able to find a published book on the subject so I think firearms reference books continue to be something that they're not obsolete let me put it that way if I were to give you advice on writing such a book my very first piece of advice would be do it for the learning and and the opportunity and the cred not for money because I don't think you have much chance of making all that much money publishing a book of firearms a technical firearms reference book I know this for the experience I have obviously I'm working on my own but haven't published anything myself yet my father wrote a book small introductory collector's guide to Japanese rifles and it was at the time this was published like more than 20 years ago now it was a twenty dollar book and his royalty was 10% but royalties are based on the price that the publisher sells your book for so while it was a retail price of $20 it sold wholesale for $10 so that book dealers could buy it and make a profit reselling it so the vast majority of sales of that book were wholesale and so the $10 cover price meant a a $1 yeah no I think it was yeah it was a 10% royalty he got so he got $1 per book I believe that book isn't its seventh printing right now at a thousand copies per so my dad made maybe seven thousand dollars on that book over I think it was published in 95 so it was like twenty eight years that's not a particularly good monetary return on the amount of time that you will spend writing the book so don't do it for the money if you can come up with a good deal with publisher and make a nice though a nice pocket load of money for your efforts fantastic I wouldn't say avoid that I would say try to do that if you can but don't go in expecting it instead do it because you will learn a tremendous amount I know I have just in the process of trying to write this sort of stuff down and do it because it's something that you think ought to be done that no one else has done and do it because it establishes you as a scholar again despite the prevalence of the Internet today there is something special about having a published book with your name on it you know I would to my mind if I go and need to present my credentials to someone every video I have done is really effectively equivalent to a magazine article and if I showed up with a CV a resume on it that had 1500 you know mainstream gun magazine historical articles on different firearms that would be a massive amount of of experience of recognizable industry historical experience but if you show up and say well I've got 1500 YouTube videos well YouTube video doesn't really carry any weight with academia today maybe eventually it will but it really doesn't today you're much more likely to be taken seriously and thus even access to other of interesting reference material resources collections that sort of thing if you show up and say I am a printed author and here's my book went a little bit long on that one um next question is from Kyle who says what can the u.s. firearm community learn from the international community I think that's a really interesting question and I thought about it a little bit and I think what it most that comes down to is community a sense of community the International firearms community is much more centered around shooting clubs and associations than we are here in the US we have some of that and most of our competition is of course built around clubs as it kind of has to be but I think a huge number of gun owners and shooters in the US aren't part of any larger firearms community in person maybe they are online but there's something different there's a huge difference actually from being part of an online group versus being part of a physical real world group that gets together shoots at a club have similar interests you can share experience help each other out this is something that's required generally by most European or international firearms regulations like you have to be part of a club to get a license to own a firearm here in the US we don't and I don't think we should but there is a definite benefit that comes to having that that physical community there's a lot of things that you can learn from fellow collectors and fellow shooters more you'll learn about your subject matter you'll learn about gun handling safety habits will often be better as a result uh-huh and I think there is there's definitely some benefit to that that we could we could learn from here in the United States next question is from Noah we actually have kind of two related questions here Noah says do you believe there is a market for a redesigned and modernized what were one or World War two parts kit slash firearm designs with the increase in popularity of guns like the redesigned parf the HB AR from ohio ordinance we have a follow of about the page essays HC AR we have a follow up on that which we'll get to in just a moment I do not think there is much of a market for redesigned and modernized historical firearms I think there is a small market for it but not a particularly substantial one I think there are a lot of people online who think that they these sorts of things would be really cool but don't recognize the the realities of manufac shirring on a small scale and the prices that that sort of gun has to command just to be feasible to produce without actually losing money and you know good heavens if you want to actually make some money for your time as a manufacturer well then the price is going to be even higher and in the problem is when you start modernizing a world war ii firearm you're going to lose a significant portion of the potential market for people who want a reproduction of the historical gun take the fg42 for example there is a market for reproduction after you 42s we know that SMG rick smith has sold hundreds of them for five grand apiece they're not cheap and they can't be cheap in fact it's honestly kind of remarkable that he's able to sell them at that price even know he's talked about doing a modernized fg42 and the problem is as soon as you do that when you're selling that one how many of the people who want who are willing to spend five grand on a reproduction fg42 they probably want it because it's a historical reproduction when you modernize it they're no longer interested at the same time you're modernized historical gun is very unlikely to be better than the actual modern guns that are out there potentially competing with it so if I want a 308 caliber semi-automatic combat style rifle which my better off getting a modernized FG 42 and 308 or an AR 10 or a g3 those guns have gone through the whole development process for much larger production runs and they're let's be honest they're better guns the number of people who are going to be actually interested in a modernized historical gun interested enough to put down money on it is very slim now the follow-up question from Frederick is what is your opinion of the HC AR could it ever be a likely candidate as an America's future main battle rifle in a scenario where armies revert back to full power cartridges the answer is no for about twelve different reasons on all of those points actually my opinion on the HTR is actually that it's really kind of an interesting gun and I've handled them but I've never fired one I would love to get my hands on one if they cost $5,000 I would have been a lot more likely to have purchased one on my own by this point but they're just really expensive so I haven't I maintain some hope that I will be able to get one as a loaner from Ohio ordinance at some point it may happen it may not now as for that becoming a future American issue combat rifle absolutely not going to happen the chance that we will revert back to standard military use of full power rifle cartridges totally not going to happen the hdare I think was developed for a very specific niche purpose a way to get a little more range than 308 for a very small subset of Special Forces sorts of guys in fact it's been a while since I talked to them about this but my understanding was I remember this correctly instead of having to carry something like a mag 58 to get extended range for Special Forces guys in Afghanistan there was the HC AR was put together as a conceptual thing with overpressure loaded thirty out six if I remember correctly that would actually get substantially more velocity than seven sixteen NATO to give these guys a repeating firepower higher velocity more powerful cartridge without having to drag around all the way of a belt-fed machine gun now that is a very niche requirement I think I mean HDR's have been out of production for a long time now I think so yeah they're never going to become a mainstream gun next up the victor says what would you choose for a squad automatic weapon between drums and quad stack mags like surefire or similar I'm of course I'm referring to the loading device you carry around loaded in the gun not ones on the pouches alright so between drums and quad stack I would go with drums both are historically sketchy um historically not hugely reliable but I think the drums have a better track record than quad stack magazines and the other thing is the drums allow you to actually get more ammunition in a lower profile than a quad stack if you look at for example what the Russians have done they started with a sixty round quad stack for the aka 74 in order to get it to work properly they had to reduce that to 50 rounds and at 50 rounds it's almost the same it's it's not that much shorter than a 45 round double stack magnets I can't imagine it being more reliable it's it's less reliable than a double stack magnet raid off there the the fins had a quad stack mag for the Swami submachine guns they ditched that after only a couple years of production in fact I think the only reason they had them in the first place was that they were less expensive to make them the drum magazines but they just didn't work well enough and they ended up replacing them after the war with double stack magazines so in a modern gun today I would go with a mag full d60 drum I have a couple of those they have been completely reliable in my experience with the sole exception of don't try to manually unload them one round at a time that's where you run into malfunctions as long as you don't do that either just shoot the thing dry or as potentially sketchy as this is just dry cycle the rounds through a gun to unload that drum you'll be just fine and I would be more comfortable more confident in that than something like a surefire quad stack mag or even a modern Russian quad stack mag next question is from Tristan said we look at historical combat rifles with features that are useless in hindsight like magazine cut offs or sights built for ranges other than in the trenches what are some features on current combat rifles that will look equally useless in 50 or hundred years I'm gonna get some some pushback on this I suspect but the answer I'm very tempted to give as adjustable length stocks I just don't think they're that important I really think they're kind of the same thing as sights out to 1,200 meters on a bolt-action Mauser where yeah you're always gonna get the argument of well it's not that big a deal to have it there and you might sometime want it so you might as well put it on and then in hindsight you look at it you're like well you never actually use those things the vast vast majority of collapsing stocks that I've ever seen have pretty much all been set to the same length it's same like an m1 or is an m16a1 and especially if you're if you're using a non magnified optic like a red dot even things like having armor on or not having armor or weird shooting positions they just don't matter that much so I know there are some people who have legitimate uses for collapsing stocks I know there are some couples out there where the husband is like 6 foot 5 and the wife is like 4 foot 8 and they can share one rifle by having a collapsing stock with different settings on it I know there is some of that but I think as a general rule collapsing stocks aren't nearly as important to the most people think and at some point we will probably get rid of them Thaddius says do you believe the US made a mistake in sticking with the 1903 Springfield over the 1917 Enfield as the primary rifle following World War one I had at leat two other people also bring up this exact same question so the answer is yes I think it was definitely a mistake now I'm not necessarily looking at that with all the same factors that the US military would have been in 1919 to my mind the 1917 Enfield is absolutely a better combat rifle than the O 3 Springfield and on the if you're selecting on the basis of what's the better combat rifle they absolutely should have taken the 1917 Enfield as for all of the other logistics questions you know they had spare parts in store they had all the training materials would that make a substantial difference I don't know obviously it did to the US military in conjunction with the fact that they had sights that were probably better calibrated to the known distance marksmanship sort of culture of the US military but yeah to me 1917 is a better rifle we should have kept it would it have made a big difference ultimately not really we didn't we use the o3 Springfield in World War two but not a whole lot they both were would have been replaced with the m1 garand at the same time so let's see dip to death next up Nikolas says you posted a video a while back about a trip that was canceled how often does that happen to you things just falling through due to other parties that was actually one of the apocryphal videos that Nicolas is talking about that's some behind the scenes three four times a week behind the scenes little short video stuff that I'm doing now for patrons at the $3 level so if you want to see that check out patreon.com/crashcourse you can pay us and then you can do your shooting and the large company that wanted to have me out there with them as a consultant they instead wanted to pay like 60 days after the fact because don't you know who we are and so the whole thing fell apart next question Charles says you've done several videos on semi-automatic 9-millimeter carbines intended for self-defense in Rhodesia since it seems that such guns would have stood a significant chance of being used wouldn't have been preferable to have more effective cartridges was the choice of 9-millimeter over something like five six or seven sixty by 39 simply a matter of availability and/or ease of manufacturing or was there a deeper reason to things manufacturing and there was a deeper reason so on the manufacturing front all of the firearms manufacturing Rhodesia was very small-scale garage works up shop sort of stuff and the bytes sticking to nine millimeter they were able to make simple blowback guns that were easy to engineer easy to make even given that not all of them worked quite right if you've seen the video we did on the Cobra that thing didn't really work right that thing had way too light of a bolt and they didn't they really did not have the capacity to do locked breech rifle caliber designs at the same time these nine millimeter carbines were often being marketed to women's self-defense and not men the men more typically would have FAL rifles or g3 rifles so it wasn't five five six or seven sixty by 39 that they was the alternative it was actually 760 NATO and the rifles were available imported through South Africa and internationally and so they were less important these nine-millimeter carbines were the other segment of the market and that's why they all exist next question is from Kyle says why or how is the 1911 constantly being redesigned and manufactured by companies everywhere but the high power is in decline why haven't there been any attempts to modernize the high power in a meaningful way ie rail frames standardized common modifications like the magazine disconnect I think this is a massive misunderstanding although there are some some elements in it that we should touch on one of them is the 1911 was a military standard piece for the US military it was manufactured by a bunch of different companies which meant they all got the technical data packages and that information got out into the market in general and once the patents ran out on the gun pretty much any ones pretty much free to manufacture that thing to their heart's content so people did the US military never adopted the browning hi-power didn't have a technical data package for it that would fall into general commercial hams at the same time the a huge number of pistols available today are in fact modernized updates of the browning hi-power it has been the base for a huge number of other semi-automatic pistols out there so for example the cz 75 based on the browning hi-power there's no need to take the original gun and just kind of like kludge rails on to it if you can take the whole concept improve it in other ways like give it a double action trigger give it a little bit bigger magazine get rid of the magazine disconnect you don't need to call it a modernized high power you can just call it a brand new gun and improve it that way and that's what like in the same way that many modern five five six combat rifles are based on the AR 18 but they're not really modernized AR eighteens a great number of existing hammer fired pistols company you know service style pistols are in fact a on the browning hi-power Nigel says in a video a while ago you said that the British went into World War two without a submachine gun and had to buy the expensive Thompson as a result was the suomi M 31 considered if not why not probably not seriously considered because by the time Britain was actually trying to get submachine guns for one thing Finland was at war themselves and they probably weren't looking to export a lot of guns by this point like call it 1940 the Finns weren't building a whole lot of Swami's salami production would ramp up only after the winter war and before the continuation war that's when they would have had more guns available and of course when Barbarossa went when Germany invaded Russia Finland kind of de facto ended up on the axis side of the war because the Finns were fighting the Russians which meant they were allied with the Germans so not really an easy place for the British to be able to be purchasing weapons what the British really needed and the reason they went with the Thompson is they needed some industrial capacity that was not being taken up by other war needs that could be used to supply them some gin guns so the Thompson was the one that was in production and available the European powers weren't necessarily looking to do a whole lot of exporting by 1939 or 1940 so that's what left the British with basically no other choice but Thompson last page and our next question comes from hammer said is there any gun that you're simply content looking at from afar as an example I believe your remote your Nagant revolver video you made a little quip about how people usually buy guns to improve their collection but this particular one was sold to improve its owners its former owners collection just being that as best it is or mechanically intricate or unique or you don't want it for that reason yes there I basically had to come to grips with the fact that there are an immense number of guns that I need to be content seeing and not owning because there is no way I have enough money to buy everything that I look at that seems interesting so the best for me the ideal situation is if I'm able to both exam the gun learn its history and do some shooting with it unless it's a really nice gun to shoot or French to me that's usually enough at that point to say I understand a lot about this and I can be perfectly happy going on with my life without needing to own it myself a lot of guns are really cool until you actually shoot them if that's part of what you want to do with a collection and a little bit less appealing after that or you know me personally I really find I have an interest in novelty so I'm particularly interested in something when it's brand new to me and being able to look at it disassemble it study it go shoot it that takes care of a lot of my reasons that I would want to buy it in the first place so it's a roundabout way of saying yes I have come to sort of a Buddhist Zen state of being happy having looked at them and handled them and not actually owned them myself next question is from Jian hi Ian I'm going to keep asking this until you tell me to go jump in a lake anyhow in your view given the similarities in design double action only blowback nine by nineteen striker-fired are the Mauser roots and the Mauser roots of HK in general are is there any real connection between the Mauser 1945 Volks pistol and the HK vp70 or are the similarities just coincidental I think the similarities are pretty much just coincidental although I do not have any direct knowledge of like exactly what HK intended when they created the vp70 striker-fired is not particularly unusual I think striker-fired makes sense in the vp70 because they designed it as a machine pistol and it just seems to me to be a cleaner design without having hammer sticking out the back nine by nineteen is very common and easily chalked up to just coincidence and simple blowback is also understandable in that way I think I think they're basically just coincidental I don't think there was any direct connection if I am proven wrong I'll be happy to change my story and hopefully I will actually get a chance to do some shooting with the p7e into a video on a proper full-auto vp70 in the coming months so talking with the people who have that maybe I'll find out differently I'll let you know if I do Vina says as a female fan of the channel I've been curious as to what the gender and age demographics of your audience are well so we'll start with age I actually looked these up on YouTube YouTube has a really pretty good demographics tool in fact a lot of YouTube analytics are really quite good in detail so the biggest age bracket of the Forgotten weapons audience of you guys are 25 to 34 year olds that's 37% so over a full third of the audience next is a slightly younger demographic we have 22% of the audience falling between 18 and 24 years of age and then we have 17% 35 to 44 and then an even steady drop in percentage of viewership as age goes up from 45 so I don't know that there's a good or a bad for this but that's those are the age demographics the gender demographics are 97.5 percent male and 2.5 percent female so consider yourself in an elite subgroup Tina and then just for kicks I went and pulled out the geographical demographics as well the majority of the audience is in the u.s. at 52 percent which is actually lower than I think some people would suspect the next biggest group is the UK with nine percent of the audience followed by five percent Canadian four percent German and then we drop down a few percent each for Australia Sweden Finland South Africa and the Netherlands and Norway and after that we have countries that are less than 1% of the audience so this makes sense if you recognize that if you're going to be watching the channel you pretty much have to speak English or understand English so we're going to have over representation of english-speaking countries on here which is why the UK and Canada and Australia are all relatively high on that list Germany took me by surprise actually I didn't wouldn't have necessarily guessed that one and for those of you who are interested France is way down the list it's like 0.6 or 0.7 percent of the audience in France a lot of French people don't speak English nope you know no matter how much I'm into French guns if I'm not presenting it in French I'm not going to have a particularly large audience in France next question is Dustin says what is your favorite and least favorite belt-fed semi-auto and why I'll be honest I'm not a big fan of belt-fed semi autos my opinion there has changed over the years I have a couple because they were really cool at one point to me I have kind of come to the conclusion that they're just too much of a pain in the rear to deal with and the benefits not worth it so a belt-fed machine gun is awesome and there are a couple of those that I would love to have if money weren't an object unfortunately money is an object I had at one point a belt-fed semi-auto RPP that was so there okay I mean let me back up a bit here there are open bolt and closed bolt belt-fed machine guns in semi-auto the open boat ones are a huge pain in the rear because like the RPD they're designed for you know in order to do any manipulation on the gun the first thing you do is lock the bolt open because that's it fires from an open bolt so you pull the bolt back and it just stays there well to convert that to legal semi-auto you have to also convert it to closed bolt which means usually there's no bolt hold-open device on the guns because there was never a bolt hold-open lever you didn't need it the sear held the bolt open so on the RP D for example this would apply to a lot of others like semi-auto PKM if you're going to clear a malfunction you have to hold the bolt open with one hand and then do all of your malfunction clearance with the other hand open the top cover and manipulate whatever has to be done same thing goes for loading or unloading if you have to have the bolt open to do it you kind of need three hands to manipulate the gun and to me that was just kind of annoying semi-auto belt feds have a generally relatively poor reputation for reliability cause of usually what they've done is also cut the back end of the bolt off turned it into a striker with its own separate recoil spring and those are always a little bit finicky sometimes that people get them to work but my experience has never been great with them know there are some closed bolt belt feds most notably the Browning 1919 and 1917 those are different because those are actually in their original guys intended to be operated and you know worked on with the bolt closed so they're generally much easier to manipulate and to clear malfunctions on but with an browning you end up with like what is this like a 25 or a 30 pound gun that is still semi-auto and usually the triggers in these sorts of things are not particularly great so if I had to I had to to come up with a favorite and a least favorite my favorite would actually be Rick Smith's belt-fed RP 46 because it actually has a really good trigger it's designed for use well it's a closed bolt gun but the way that thing works you don't really have to mess with the bolt too much to use it because of the way it is a conversion on to an existing magazine-fed gun my least favorite it's kind of like all the others next question is Gregory it says what is your opinion on folding guns do you ever see them becoming a viable option for concealed carry no I think they're a gimmick and I don't think they'll ever take off their vin folding guns in the past never really been all that great I don't think they will be today we're kind of gonna do a little bit of a lightning round here at the end kevin says what's the deal with semi rimmed pistol cartridges like 25 32 and 38 acp the answer there is its headspace if you're curious about this I would recommend the cien Arsenal anvil video on heads facing which does a really good job of describing it basically semi rimmed allows you to easily headspace on a rim without having so much of a rim that it becomes a real problem feeding in a magazine Scot says I'll react this since it seems somewhat feasible to me regarding caseless ammunition has anyone ever tried using flammable gas as a propellant I'm sure someone has tried it's never taken off it probably won't ever take off because you get issues of explosion versus deflagration and look that up if you're not familiar with what it is and there's not as much energy and gas because you have a lot less mass than you do in powder seems powerful but I think there are too many technical issues to make it easily feasible next question is from Samuel says I have noticed in some of your videos that you wear different country's military clothing as a collector of European military clothing combat work rather than dress I'm curious if you collect that as well as the firearms not really but I've kind of ended up with a bunch of it I find it interesting I kind of like having it and when I'm able to find sets that actually fit me I tend to buy them if they're not expensive so my I don't really have a collection of it I have an accumulation of it that has come over many years and it's fun to wear that in videos or in shooting matches especially when it gets to the point where like oh I'm using a gun from Eastern elbonia and I happen to have Eastern elbonian camo to go with it yeah that always it's a fun thing to do on video I'm sure it looks a little bit odd to the outside observer who doesn't know that it's primarily for video but next question in fact our last question is from comrade Clayton says why have we seen a gradual move away from bullpup firearms to more conventionally laid out rifles a few decades ago bullpup seemed to be all the rage with the agua mas and so on what changed I think it was largely a recognition of what the bullpup is and is not good at so yeah in the 70s late 70s early 80s that's when the bullpup thing really took off and the one of the guiding goals of the bullpup and military service was to reduce the number of firearms that were necessary or the number of different designs so the idea in pretty much universally was we'll replace the submachine gun and the rifle both with this bullpup and it'll be short enough that you can use it like a submachine gun but it's got the barrel length and the ballistics of a rifle and it'll be great and almost everybody who developed a bullpup in fact a French with the FAMAS are really the only exception to this everybody else then almost immediately went on to develop a short submachine gun version of their bullpup rifle and if you're gonna do that well I guess it's a little bit better because they're both based on the same fundamental action but I think what a lot of countries discovered is they don't really need the barrel length Bullpups do have some downsides especially in terms of left-handed soldiers you need a gun that can be shot left-handed or else you really are in are putting about 10% of your military force at a real disadvantage if you're forcing them to shoot light-handed when they're out right-handed and so what we see now are conventionally laid out rifles which are easily ambidextrous and they are guns typically with shorter barrels so look at the US m4 carbines fourteen and a half inch barrels look at the French replacing the FAMAS with the 416 those troops are getting mostly like fourteen five and even a lot of them are getting like 10 to 11 inch barrel of rifles if you're cutting the barrel down that much you're getting close to the overall length of the bullpup when the bullpup has a 20 inch barrel on it so if you don't think that you need that barrel length how important is the whole bullpup system to begin with the conventional layout solves a few problems and when you shorten the barrel it becomes just as compact overall so I do not suspect we will see a lot of major militaries adopting Bullpups again for at least a generation there are some that that will the Israelis have the Tavor the the VHS has has been adopted by a couple of smaller countries but I think those will really be the exception rather than the main trend like they were in the early 80s late seventies that takes care of all of our questions for this episode hopefully you guys enjoyed it as I mentioned at the beginning if your question didn't get answered please do submit it again next time I'm setting up for Q&A and I will do my best to get it in if you didn't see that I was asking for Q&A questions it is most likely because you are not signed up supporting the channel on patreon the Q&A is open when I submit for when I ask for questions submissions that's open to everybody at the $1 and up level on patreon and i truly appreciate you guys because you are the thing that keeps this channel going thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 274,618

Rating: 4.8909974 out of 5

Keywords: hcar, ohio ordnance, mccollum, firearms, history, development, disassembly, q&a, question answer, forgotten weapons, travel, airline, semirimmed, headspace, drum, quad-stack, rhodesian, feed strip, tokarev, cz82, tt33, reference book, writing, suomi, uniforms, camoflauge, bullpup, volkspistole, vp70, high power, browning, kasarda, inrange, inrangetv, tsa, customs, story, gun jesus, book review

Id: jqe4Pu522B8

Length: 80min 21sec (4821 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 04 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/ArcHeavyGunner]

The questions about demographics really piqued my interest. As someone who is a part of a demographic, that is probably incredibly small viewer wise (being a trans woman), I'm very curious what other demographics look like. Religion, Race, Sexuality, etc!

[u/mikestp]

I was super happy to hear the Owen gun singled out as being one of the guns Ian would like to revisit. The gun is very interesting to me but is hard to find good content about it.

I’d sacrifice a limb for an inrange mud test of it to see if it lives up to it’s reputation, but thats never going to happen.