Q&A 50: Disagreeing With the Premise of the Question

hey guys thanks for tuning in to another q a on forgottenweapons.com i'm going to pour myself a wee bit of kiro rai here for today and we can get into our questions as usual this is uh brought to you by the fine folks on patreon who support forgotten weapons make sure that this channel continues to happen every day uh and this is actually q a number 50. that's quite a lot of q's and a's q and a's so uh i as is kind of typical at this point got a lot more questions than i was able to fit into a single q a video so i'm actually going to go ahead and use a second batch of questions from this set for a second q a i'm not sure yet if it'll be later this month or if it'll be next month but with that aside let's jump right in our first question is from kd who says what is the status of the chinese warlord period pistol book uh obviously he asked this question or she i'm not sure asked this question before i announced the launch of the kickstarter for the chinese pistol book yesterday so i'm also filming this before the kickstarter has launched so when you are seeing this it has already been going for a day and i have no idea how it's doing so hopefully it's doing very well i'm really excited about the book it is it's less of a sort of factual that's a really bad way to put it it is less of a detailed historical historical account than it is a catalog a photographic catalog but we're able to take a look at a couple hundred of uh these chinese mystery pistols so to speak and put them together into a book that i think is really fantastic and will really help people put these guns into context and understand on one hand understand what what's going on what's what can be found in the context of chinese domestic handguns of the warlord era on the other hand it's also i think just a really cool book to flip through because no two examples of these pistols are the same and some of them are quite interesting and sometimes quite entertaining so anyway that kickstarter will be running uh for approximately 30 days it will end in uh i believe it is the 18th of june it ends so if you're interested definitely check it out we've got some really cool stuff like the awesome chinese mystery cover of the book that i'm really happy to uh to have i know people are going to ask what the next project after that is for head stamp um i am hoping that it will be max popeyencker's book on uh the the of the russian optima federov's through modern day aks we're still working through some of the last bits of that book but i'm hoping that that's the next one we'll be able to do sort of our next cycle in probably about six months our second question is from tyler says i know that open bolt guns are inherently more inaccurate because of the human component but are they more mechanically inaccurate or is it simply because of the bolt slamming forward in the user's reaction to this as a side note the fg42 would be a wonderful gun to test this with it would be if i had more access to an original select fire fg42 that would be a fun thing to try uh however i don't um also it's the sort of thing you would really need a ransom rest for to properly test the accuracy of the gun in open bolt mode now i can tell you that mechanically it's not that the open bolt systems mechanically are not necessarily any less accurate than closed bolt it is the difference in practical effectiveness of the two is due to the shooter's ability to react to and control the weight of the bolts slamming forward when they pull the trigger a good example of this would be well it's not strictly speaking true the mythology surrounding the bren gun that it was too accurate to be a machine gun and it was used as a sniper rifle sometimes well the bren gun is open bolt it's open bolt only even in semi-auto and so that's i suppose one piece of anecdotal evidence but uh no the idea with the open bolt open bolt self-loading locked breech guns is that they lock just the same way in open bolt mode that they do in closed bolt mode they just then immediately fire so mechanically speaking no no no necessary reduction in accuracy just because it's open bolt all right our next question is from andrew says i would like to know if you think mr johnson was inspired by the rsc i don't think so it's possible what is more more easily shown is that john garand was absolutely influenced by the rsc and you can in fact see a lot of elements of the garand in the rsc 1917. that was a rifle that us ordinance was aware of the u.s military aberdeen springfield had examples of the gun they tested them they photographed them they were well aware of them and garend copied a lot of well maybe not copied but garen was influenced by a lot of elements from the rsc the operating rod is an obvious one the rotating bolt system he of course made his own changes and improved on them for the m1 but there is an absolute undeniable link between the rsc and the m1 garand as for the johnson i don't see quite so much going on there the johnson is a recoil operated gun um the way that the bolt is set up is a bit different than in the rsc so i can't you can never say 100 that something didn't happen that something wasn't influenced by something else but it is unlikely to me that there was much crossover from the rsc to the johnson rifles uh next question is from craig who says how does military firearms development occur in totalitarian societies where free thought and speech are suppressed and criticism of the state is illegal or culturally unacceptable i understand the point that craig is trying to take here but it's really just not accurate the fact of the matter is no matter how much suppression of individual freedom there is in a country the people who are working on military equipment for that country are like firearms design is apolitical it's engineering it is just numbers and i think there is not to turn this into a political thing but i think there is a common misconception that firearms development in the soviet union must have been far inferior to that in the u.s because they didn't have the individual freedoms that are required for creativity and developing engineering systems in reality actually the soviet union's firearms development system program uh like their general method of organization had a lot of potential benefits that one would perhaps be wise to consider and perhaps adopt the soviets had a number of competing design bureaus that would each independently come up with designs they would have a chief engineer and a bunch of supporting assistants and these the names of these chief design engineers are fairly well-known names in the firearms community today we have dektrev we have sudayev we have kalashnikov we have federov these guys aren't individuals working in home shop they're guys running major design bureaus at large factories and the soviet union had a competitive system of developing firearms they would put out a request for a particular gun whether it's a new uh whether it's the gun that became the ak whether it's the gun that became the pps43 or anything else and they would get submissions from different design bureaus those would compete with each other and then once one was chosen it became a collaborative effort to to improve and finalize and put that gun into production so there was an interesting combination of competitive individual work and then collaborative group work that went into develop firearms development in the soviet union um we of course have some of that sort of thing in western countries but not really to the extent that you see it in the soviet union so um i think it's the political circumstances of a country don't necessarily do that much to influence firearms design as long as the country itself as long as the government is interested in having military arms designed it can be done regardless of the the type of society that it's being done in uh that one 1911 guy asks this is a question that's come up in the in youtube comments a lot and i figured i should at least i'll answer it here hopefully maybe that'll get some more people familiar with it ian what is hashtag 36270s xero it appears on like every third upload on youtube that is my p.o box number uh i have contact information in the video description of every video it's in the like the default description text that youtube puts that i had i set up for youtube to put into every video before i write description text and it is a po box and so i put in the street number and the box number well like a year two years after i started doing that youtube decided to start recognizing hashtags and like highlighting them in video descriptions to sort of get on that bandwagon and it interprets anything following a pound sign as a hashtag so it's now looking at my address and just pulling out hashtag 36270 that's all it is once i discovered what was happening with it i changed the default upload settings so it no longer has the the pound sign so i don't think it's happening anymore but i'm not going to go back and change the couple hundred videos because it's not that big a deal but that is what that hashtag is it's just part of my address that's now getting reinterpreted by youtube tristan says what are some modifications or designs that make a firearm more reliable in extreme cold or dusty desert or wet and steamy jungle what are the pros and cons of these changes and are there any developments for hardening firearms for extreme environments so there are a number of specific modifications or specific design characteristics that i can point out that were done for specific environments a good one of course are the sand cuts as they were called on the fnfal there are a series of diagonal grooves cut inside of the bolt carrier that are there to basically give sand a place to accumulate and without actually impairing the firearms functionality or reliability until the user has a chance to clean it you see a similar sort of thing on the sterling submachine gun there's a set of rotating ridges on the bolt for that same reason enough to keep it in proper contact with the receiver but give some space for gunk to get into this is pretty similar to what we would have with black powder revolvers where there are grooves in the cylinder access pin to give black powder fouling a place to accumulate that was on those revolvers it was done for black powder on modern firearms smokeless powder firearms it's typically done in recognition of sand environments a good example of one for the jungle would be the japanese use of chrome-lined barrels in the type 99 arisaka the japanese were fighting extensively in china as well as a bunch of other places throughout the asian pacific realm and the ability that the chrome lining that they put in those barrels allowed them to be used in southern jungley very humid areas without needing the regular maintenance and without actually corroding barrels so um and did a great job japanese chromelined arisaka bores are typically in excellent shape even today by the way they have metford pattern rifling so you will not see sharp grooves in the bore that's how they were designed and does a really good job of it some of the a lot of these things don't really have any downside those are the ones that come to mind offhand typically a lot of rough environments kind of impact guns the same way you want to have clearances that will parts that will the interface such that they will continue to cycle reliably when they get stuff in them whether that stuff is sand or dirt or powder fowling or snow or water rgb says if the m1 carbine was as reliable as the m1 garand would it have been a better general issue rifle moving the state of the art forward faster i'm going to take a bit of a contrarian point on this question and suggests that perhaps the m1 carbine was a um a more influential rifle than the m1 garand i think in a lot of ways we see the m1 carbine staying in active military service in actual combat use longer than we see the m1 garand there the m1 carbine would remain popular with a huge number of different uh organizations you know the italians had them the french had them the french in particular loved the m1 carbine used it in algeria used in indochina much more than they used the m1 garand i think the reliability issues you get with the m1 carbine really did nothing to hold it back and if they hadn't existed i don't think it actually would have made the m1 carbine any more influential of a firearm mechanically speaking the carbine and the garand are very very similar they differ only in the details of the gas system basically a long stroke piston versus a short stroke tap it style piston and i don't think one is if anything the m1 the garand is perhaps a better technological driver because it's operating at higher pressures with a larger cartridge doing essentially the same thing that the m1 carbine is but the carbine is doing it on lower pressure cartridges and thus it's easier to deal with so no i don't think improving that last bit of reliability on the carbine would have had any substantial impact on how how it affected firearms development eric says have you considered doing more brewery or distillery tours pairing the national alcohol with the historic firearms of a country that would be cool but it's there's kind of a limited um there aren't that many options there there aren't that many countries that both have distinctive national alcohol and also a substantial history of firearms manufacturing some certainly but i have certainly considered doing more distillery tours in particular the thing that holds me up on that a bit aside from the fact that i have to travel obviously to do them and travel has been a bit limited in the last year year and a half is that a lot of distilleries are pretty much the same i've been to a couple scotch distilleries and the products are different the products have different subtle characteristics but the process of making them is essentially identical with the exception of just a few you know subtle differences you know if it's a scotch distillery do they use peat to dry the the grain or do they not and that's not a particular like if they don't use peat they're using something else um do they dry it on the floor or do they dry it in a tumbler there's not that beyond that like they all work the same way if you saw the kiro the ride distillery tour you pretty much saw a scotch distillery at the same time that said i won't turn down the opportunity to tour a few more but i need to figure out ways to make them distinct and interesting as distillery tours if i'm going to publish them and they will be future ones will probably be on apocrypha just for patrons it was fun to do a couple of them in public partly to remind people that apocrypha is a thing some behind the scenes video for patrons and partly to get a little bit publicity for those distilleries but future ones are probably going to be less publicized because they're not going to be that much different hunter says which service revolver pre-1940 is your favorite the webley perhaps the swiss waffenfabrik burn with apologies to my french collection i'm really a sucker for webley's especially the pre-military adoption webley stuff like the webley wg target i think it's just a really cool revolver so yeah webley but not not the the mark blank pattern of military webley's those are cool and all but there's i think there's a little more character to some of the earlier ones let's see blaze says besides a sazerac do you have any absinthe cocktails you enjoy i've been trying to find some but haven't had much luck with anything that isn't overwhelmingly with the anise flavor i honestly don't really like absinthe um i like some anise flavored stuff i've got no problem with ouzo but i've just never found an absinthe that i liked and i do also find that that flavor tends to predominate any cocktail that you put it in i'm really not even a fan of the sazerac because it's got too much of the absinthe flavor in it and if it doesn't then it's not really a sazerac so i can't really help you there uh i if anything tend to avoid absinthe cocktails rather than search out good ones eric says in watching your slow motion shooting of submachine guns some seem to be not impacting the back of the receiver the grease gun comes to mind are there any guns that accidentally benefit from constant recoil no not really there's constant recoil is more than just the bolt not hitting the back of the receiver there is also a an element of timing in there an element of bolt weight and the idea that the force going forward and the force coming backwards are balancing each other out to the point that the gun isn't getting a lot of push in either direction or a lot of i should say it because it always will have push in the rear direction because mass is leaving the gun going forward what constant recoil does is instead of having a called like a sine wave of recoil impulse hitting the shooter it smooths everything out so you have a essentially a constant force pushing back on you with the submachine guns yes by not having the bolt impact the back of the receiver you avoid the worst of the the sort of jarring recoil impact but you're you still have a lot of mass in the bolt coming back typically on a simple blowback submachine gun and the guns still have this rocking pattern to them even if it's more easily controllable than on say a rifle or a more compact submachine gun where the bolt's impacting the receiver so they're getting a benefit submachine guns that don't impact the receiver are getting a benefit in controllability but that's not quite the same thing as constant recoil rebel alliance shooter says is there a reason that most military forces preferred the notch site like the ak or the car 98 over the aperture site from what i've seen only the british and americans were using aperture sites early on and it would seem like they would have an advantage with quicker site acquisition and longer site radius i would tend to agree i would remind you the french also used aperture sites starting with the mass 36 which is about when well the u.s started them a little bit earlier with the 1917 enfields that we got from the british the british didn't start using them till world war ii there are pros and cons to them it came to light when i was in finland in the winter that snow packing into an aperture site is actually a lot trickier and time consuming to clean out and make usable than snow getting into an open notch site uh in fact when i did some shooting in the snow with my m39 mosin over there and bloke on the range and chap on the range we're doing the same thing with a moss 36 and a number four lee enfield and they had a lot of when they got snow into that rear aperture site it was time consuming and tricky for them to clear those apertures out i actually had a couple of instances where the rear notch of the rifle was packed full of snow but i could see enough over the top of the site and i could see the front sight that i was able to make hits not not just you know reasonably accurate shots but i was actually able to make hits without having to clean the site out and half the time the recoil popped the snow out of the site anyway so there are in fact advantages to open notch sites i would also point out that the seriously considered going back to open notch sites in the 1970s on their rk-62 rifles those became the m-71 pattern of valmak commercial rifle it was developed by the factory the military decided not to adopt it but they did sell them on the civilian market and you'll see them out there from time to time so the open knot sites are simpler they are sometimes more rugged and they align themselves better to some designs of rifle like bolt action rifles that have you know the rear of the receiver bridge open it's harder not impossible but it's harder to mount an aperture sight back there so everything is pros and cons i do agree that aperture sites tend to be better for precision shooting but not everything in the military is about precision shooting ryan says what is the biggest dead end in gun development something that seemed viable or even or even was viable for a time but ended up going nowhere long term i thought about this and the best answer i can come up with i think would be either pin fire cartridges or the long recoil operating system long recoil so pin fire of course seemed like a good idea because it gives you a nice metallic case the primer is protected inside but you've got this pin sticking out the side of the cartridge case it has transportation issues and of course there's no way that it would ever have worked in a box magazine with this asymmetric pin sticking out not too terrible in a revolver because you were able to use the pins align the pins radially to the outside of the cylinder and then have the hammer hit on them without needing an opening in the back of the recoil shield that's kind of cool ultimately with the introduction of modern centrifier priming pin fire goes away very quickly and then long recoil had some benefits early on it was it was a viable thing for a while the main benefit is it's a very safe system especially if you have risk of inconsistently loaded ammunition with long recoil you've got the barrel and the bolt traveling backwards while the cartridges while the bullets flying out the barrel they travel backwards locked together so there is a lot of mass which means inconsistency in ammo is going to have proportionately less effect on the velocity of the bolt and the barrel coming back they're a little more tolerant of that sort of thing and by the time the system unlocks everything has recoiled all the way to its full extent of travel and pressure is really quite low so it's a very safe system in that way the problem is it's also a very complicated system you need an extra recoil spring for the barrel which you don't need in a gas operated system there tends to be a lot more friction because you've got this big chunk of mass recoiling back and you'll see them used in like half a dozen total firearms now some of those were manufactured in large numbers and some of them were quite popular the browning auto 5 shotgun is long recoil the winchester 1911 is long recoil obviously the remington model 8 is basically john browning took the auto 5 and made it a rifle and um well not quite remington model 8 is a long recoil john browning system uh and then of course the show shot you know the most common uh automatic firearm of world war one is a long recoil system but once you get past about 1920 uh better systems become available the gas operated and the short recoil operated systems really take over and today there's really no good reason to have a long recoil system you see them pop up every once in a while but really very rarely next up lost my place here erica says you mentioned not liking the hk rotating barrel aperture sights what others do you dislike what iron sights are your favorite kind of touched on this already my favorite are a good rear aperture sight i really like the m1 garand sights and all the guns that are along those lines the 1917 enfield m1917 rifles have fantastic sights i really like those frankly the the finnish galil uh the israeli velmat or the the finnish uh velmet the israeli golial i both i like both of their sights because they are that same style of rear aperture uh others that i don't like so much are really barley corn post and notch if you've got a v-notch and a v a barley corn v-shaped post that's probably my least favorite of the the really common sights and i just don't like those hk drums i think the issue with the hk drums like i mentioned last time is the the rear sight is on this angled plane it's not square to your eye it's an angled plane and it's a curved angled plane and so i just never get a good sight picture through those the worst of them is the rear notch on the drum because it's way too close for a rear notch i don't know how anyone can use that effectively but i guess some people do next up matthew says do you know of any major power that has actually succeeded over a multi-year time frame at replacing three different primary weapons with a single do-it-all thing or is this just one of those ideas that always sounds great in principle but has never actually worked in practice i'm not aware of anyone that's been able to pull it off that i can think of in a sort of three for one mode the us was planning to do that with the m14 to replace the grease gun the garand and the bar that that didn't work the places really the only places that it's worked have been twofers where an intermediate caliber rifle replaced a a rifle and a submachine gun we see that with the british the l85 was a dubious effectiveness itself but it did replace the sterling and the fal on the slr in british parlance the french did it very well the famas replacing the moss 4956 and the map 49 the french in some ways did it better than anyone else or more effectively in that they never actually went and made a carbine version of the famas most of the other bullpup users decided to make a submachine gun out of their bullpup anyway so you'll see like pistol caliber short versions of the aug there are short carbine versions of the l85 there are short carbine versions of the israeli tavor but there never was one for the famas it did the job that it was asked to do um but it couldn't replace like there isn't that third gun that you can effectively replace at the same time nothing that is handy and light enough to replace the submachine gun is going to have the volume of firepower necessary to replace a light machine gun so the m14 was not going to be able to effectively replace the bar the m15 version with a bipod and a pistol grip could have done a little better but that got dropped from service really almost before it was adopted basically before it was adopted um yeah no one you just the problem is the light machine gun and the submachine gun are too far apart in terms of the essential characteristics of the gun to be done by to have both of their jobs done by the same single gun uh next up martin says i've seen in a few of your videos that the navy has historically been more willing to adopt or trial new or experimental ideas any idea why this is i think it's probably because navies typically have smaller requirements for small arms and the small arms are a less substantial portion of the navy's overall operating premise when a naval force is looking for rifles and pistols and submachine guns it's typically for a small contingent of boarding parties or landing forces because they don't need to buy as many they're willing to consider perhaps technologies that cost more they're also naval landing parties are more likely to be just kind of by definition outnumbered you don't have that many of them to work with and sooner or later they're going to end up in a fight against a numerically superior opponent and between that and the fact that there aren't as many of them it's perhaps more viable to buy higher tech more more fancy firearms for them so this would come to light i think in repeating firearms so given that my primary interest is french firearms if you look at the french navy adopting magazine rifles before the army it's because well hey our colonial marines are going to be vastly outnumbered by uh the native forces that they're fighting we don't have that many of them it's much more useful to us to have those guys equipped with eight round repeating tube fed guns than to have the line infantry companies where they can you know you've got a couple of ranks of guys you got plenty of men you can just well one rank's reloading the next rank is firing the repeating firearms don't give you as much comparative advantage as they do when you have a very limited number of marines who need all the firepower they can get um i think a similar thing yeah well one of the other good examples of navies adopting something substantially different would be the us navy with the six millimeter lee navy cartridge and the straight pull the navy rifles you get the same sort of thing there the idea was to give them a faster operating rifle one that had a longer point-blank range better barrier penetration and there weren't that many of them so why not experiment with it i think next up we have christopher who says which prototype firearm that you've handled was a tweak and a dollar away from being something really good uh fairly recently i had a chance to take a look at a gun that perfectly matches this description it was in finland it was actually in uh the sako factories reference collection they have an l-34 sample light machine gun and it is a gun that was developed by imo lottie who is like the one predominant firearms developer from finland uh he's better known well no one knows about the l-34 because i only made something like 10 of them total what he did design first was the lotti salaranti light machine gun that was used by the finns in the winter war and was pretty much a catastrophe in field use and was dropped basically as quickly as guys could capture degterev dp27 light machine guns well lottie was required with the ls26 the lady salaranti to use a gas out or to use a recoil operated system and the idea was the finnish military had been using the recoil operated maxim guns for some time and that worked great and so well we want another machine gun we like recoil operation therefore we will have our new machine gun recoil operated without the understanding of the differences between light and heavy guns and recognizing that a gas operated gun would be much superior for a light machine gun well in the early 30s lottie put together a gas-operated gun that is it looks very much like a brand gun it operates similarly to a brand gun but it's not quite a straight copy and it is a gun that had something like half as many parts as the ls26 it was a lighter gun it was a much simpler gun it could have been a thoroughly successful uh very effective magazine fed light machine gun to compete with guns like the nambu and the bran or the zb at the time and it just never quite happened it was shot down pretty much for political reasons more than anything else so in this case the gun itself doesn't even really need any changes they developed it for a variety of different calibers 762 by 54 rimmed for the fins using ls26 magazines they also developed it in they built some prototypes in eight millimeter um using i don't know what magazine actually the one i looked at the magazine was missing but essentially a zb26 magazine i expect could have been a great gun for the finns and for their for seiko sako to export internationally but politics never happened they did actually test it after world war ii and found that it was really pretty darn good but at that point they weren't looking for a box fed full power rifle cartridge machine gun they were looking for a belt fed intermediate gun instead it's a really good ride i like it uh austin says if you were designing a competition and stage for lmgs what would that look like i.e focusing on suppressive fire instead of hits on target therein lies the problem i have put some thought into this i would love to do a competition involving light machine guns now that's a little tricky because you have to find enough people who have them in the same place at the same time to have a competition but failing that any sort of like standardized course of fire to assess light machine guns and the problem that always comes up is and this is particular pertaining to competition if you are on the clock there's not much you have to make the thing quantifiable you have to make the you have to have a quantifiable score in order to compete uh effectively and so you can quantify time you can quantify hits it's hard to quantify much else and if it comes down to just making hits in the least amount of time possible you almost always are best off in semi-automatic mode which is realistic in some ways but it doesn't there is a very real benefit to full auto from a machine gun in real world scenarios where like suppressing fire is a thing well how do you quantify suppression and it might be a matter of having a large target and counting total hits on that target but then what qualifies as effective you're going to run into things where maybe you require five or six hits on the target someone has to be confident in their own shooting to know when they've made those hits if you're using steel targets instead of paper it becomes very difficult for a judge to count rapid fire you know machine gun bursts how many hits did that guy make you know he fired ten rounds or he fired five rounds did he make three hits or four hits do you make six or seven there are a lot of practical problems with trying to figure out how to assess that now i did have a cool person send me a copy of a u.s military basically a trials standard for light machine gun or for machine guns which i'm still working my way through some of this stuff there are some elements that could simplify this like having targets that automatically fall when they've been hit because that that dictates your hits much more easily than putting a paper target at 500 meters and then assessing whether or not someone hit it maybe you know do you hike out to that target between every single competitor and re-tape it if you had targets that just automatically fall when they've been hit that helps especially if they're electronic and you can hit a button and have them pop back up but i don't know of any ranges that i have access to that have that sort of equipment that would be interested in putting on a match so it's something i'd like to do i'm still thinking about if you have any pertinent thoughts on how best to assess light machine guns and their relative performance let me know down in the comments because it'd be i'd really like to put together something to do this uh guido it has a question on revolver revolving rifles and the dagon seal i'm a revolver fan i've always liked the idea of a wheel gun carbine format as well the cylinder gap isn't great in general and there's always a possibility of a hang fire that could go off although it's never happened to me wouldn't under cylinder face to forcing cone in a better executed modernized form maybe without the setback special ammo address these issues gases and hang fire risks with a rifle and make revolvers better in general how come nobody has done a gas seal more often so why is no one done gas steel more often the answer is the ammunition because in order to actually have a an effective gas seal you have to have the brass cover that gap even the best mechanical seal isn't going to be gas tight and the better the mechanical sealed the less gunk it takes to gum it up and make it not work anymore so that's what makes the nagant revolver special is it's got extended brass that covers the gap between the cylinder and the barrel and then the follow-on problem to that is you don't actually really gain that much you gain a little bit of velocity because you're not losing it right you know to the cylinder gap but it's kind of inconsequential the that little bit of velocity just doesn't matter if you really need it you can make the barrel a little bit longer and get the same benefit without having the added mechanical complexity and the unusual ammunition for why people don't do these in rifles it's because really the only thing you gain is the neatness of it's a rifle with a revolving cylinder because if you want just a convenient handy rifle that holds a couple of rounds or even one round there are lots of other systems that are mechanically far simpler and don't have any sort of cylinder gap issue to deal with at all if you want a rifle that's got more ammunition six eight ten rounds box magazines just work better uh people are more familiar with them there's they're gonna weigh a lot less because you don't have ten six or eight or ten pressure bearing chambers all simultaneously you've only got one and then you've got a box magazine that can be light sheet metal or an internal magazine that perhaps even removes weight from the gun by having by being a hollow space inside the stock you just don't get much of a real economic value from a revolving rifle design and so the market to be able to sell them is really quite limited it's only people who want one because of the cool factor and that doesn't cut it for a company to really tool up and produce them alex another alex says because of how far out you have to go to do your filming have you ever looked at amateur radio for communications outside of cell range no well yes and no i did actually have a ham radio license for a little while like 15 years ago i was interested in it i got set up to do it i actually have most of the equipment i got the license at the time though i had i just then moved into an apartment that was really not conducive to setting up any sort of antenna and i just kind of let the whole thing lapse and never really used it even after going through the process to get the license as far as using it while i'm out shooting my shooting range is kind of out in the boonies but it still has great cell service so there's really no need to uh lubosh would like to know why is there a myriad of 32 acp pistols but only one submachine gun that is because 32 acp is today considered too lightweight of a cartridge to be a militarily viable cartridge any submachine gun you can make in 32 acp you can do in nine parabellum just as well uh there generally aren't the sort of size restrictions on submachine guns that would require you to scale down to a 32 auto cartridge the one example you're talking about i assume is the scorpion which is really meant to be more of a pdw sidearm where there is a size constraint and that's why it uses 32 auto it doesn't help that 32auto is a semi-rimmed cartridge which makes it trickier to use in box magazines especially double stack magazines not impossible certainly there are plenty of examples the scorpion magazines the savage automatic pistols have a 10 round double stack magazine in them but the cartridge isn't super conducive to it frankly if you wanted a 32 caliber submachine gun i would suggest 32 french long which the french made a submachine gun out of you have more power but you've got the same small diameter straight walled cartridge without the semi-rimmed case design so yeah that's it because 32 auto means you're doing a pdw not a true proper submachine gun and pdws today people are looking for armor penetration which means you want a higher velocity and a smaller diameter bullet aka 4.6 by 30 or 5.7 by 28. the the fnp 90 or the mp7 are kind of the go-to pdws paul says i've become interested in the patterson rifle but apart from your videos and articles and hatcher's book of the garand i can't find much else on the subject can you recommend a good book on the rifle and or patterson's other works and life if not could you lure an author to the offices of headstamp publishing with a trail of waxed 276 cartridges we'll try that out unfortunately i don't know of any good book on john patterson's work or the patterson rifle in particular as you say in hatcher's book of garen there is probably the most discussion that there is anywhere several other books on the garen bruce canfield's book on the garand has some discussion of the pederson but generally that's in the context of its competition with the m1 finding for example information about the japanese copy of the patterson is extremely difficult there's almost nothing written about it maybe someday we'll get someone to do that book there's certainly enough material to do a properly good book on john patterson any guy who john browning says is the best firearms designer he knows about that's a guy worth writing a book about but no one has yet ben says would you be willing to extensively photograph the guns you do videos on ideally including a metric ruler possibly selling the photographs in bundles on gumroad or giving them to certain patreon tiers digital artists would be very interested in quality reference photographs particularly rare items or parts that are uncommon to see photographs of typically things that require disassembly i get this sort of question comment request quite a lot usually it's more along the lines of disassembled photographs or detailed photographs for people to do digital models of or 3d print parts from the problem i have is that the time it would take to do that it doesn't sound like much but when i'm on the road filming i'm typically doing four to six videos per day and if i were to take the time to do this sort of photography in addition to actually probably having to take a proper real still camera which i don't actually own it would probably double the amount of time required for processing through shall we say each gun which means it's going to have the number of videos i can do and the content is primarily video based that is what appeals to the most people and i think gives the most value for the amount of time that i put into it and i just can't justify cutting the video production in half to do photographs um i'm sorry like i wish i could do all of it but it's just not feasible for me to do uh maybe someday maybe with some particular guns uh but at this point i i just i'm not in a position where i can do that i don't have a team that i work with and frankly if i did have a team that would also severely restrict the amount of travel and the amount of work that we could get done scott says what state do you think western rifle design would be in if nato adopted an intermediate cartridge instead of 762 by 51 in the 1950s do you think the near decade of clinging to the obsolescent concept of the full-powered rifle cartridge stunted western rifle development especially as numerous other countries waited much longer to adopt the 556. it is true that other countries waited longer than the u.s despite adopting 762 nato in the 1950s we ended up with the ar which was basically a rifle that was around from the late 1950s so it didn't really slow down american small arms development or american military equipment in that way i would also point out that kind of we did that cartridge well enough despite despite the time that was spent under 762 nato it was still the 556 cartridge that inspired the soviet 545 it is it was a cartridge that was leading the pack for a very long time even though we weren't even though we didn't we weren't adopting an intermediate cartridge as quickly as the soviet union and its allies usually the question is like what if we had adopted something like the the british you know the the seven millimeter uh british cartridges that are a little bit lower powered instead of full on 762 nato i really think that regardless of what was adopted in the 50s today we would still be using 556 or some analog of it 5 8 chinese 545 soviet 556 nato they're all pretty parallel the idea of a small caliber high velocity bullet has really been shown to be the ideal individual rifle cartridge so it's not necessarily the best machine gun cartridge and that's why we still see almost every country out there using a full power rifle cartridge for their supporting machine guns be they pks or fn mags but yeah i don't think the nato adoption really slowed us down much john says can you recommend a good uh a good getting started book for someone interested in collecting israeli weapons statehood through present mostly looks like they used whatever they could get their hands on during the war of independence they did but there's actually some really interesting stuff that the israelis were developing on their own uh during like right at 1948 they had their own copy sort of modified copy of the johnson light machine gun the drawer and they had a number of other developmental guns that were pretty darn cool and i would love to get to israel at some point and be able to film basically the developmental predecessors to the uzi and the galileo the other guns that the idf tested some of the other unusual stuff that was developed but not adopted all that sort of stuff unfortunately there is no good book on this subject at the present time at least not in english there might be one written in hebrew that i'm not aware of the one book that is available in english is a was published a few years ago on the uzi specifically it's a very good book um i'll have a link to it in the description text below but it's specific to the uzi and it's less about the development than it is about the long-term like the the adoption and the use and the production of the uzi and it covers the use of the uzi by countries other than israel the germans used it as did a bunch of other people so again like a book on the johnson there just isn't there's nothing out there that i can point you to unfortunately that's another one where if an author would like to write that book has access to the guns and you know and the ability and time to do it headstamp would love to publish a book on israeli small arms that would be great so if that's you drop me a line in the comments email us info headstamp publishing dot com toby has a bit of a long question there stock up here all right as you've covered before the eight millimeter label cartridge is the result of the quick development the cartridge was forced to go through if the french use the early discovery of smokeless powder to instead get as much extra time into research what do you think the resulting cartridge would have been also seeing as the label was the result of the same rushed development with some extra time to wait as the cartridge was made what do you think the eventual french rifle would have been do you think the french would have had a semi-auto rifle in world war one or world war ii with a better cartridge all right so the biggest problem with the eight millimeter lebel cartridge is that it is essentially 11 millimeter graw neck down to eight millimeter which means it has a tremendous amount of taper now it also has a rim the question is in 1886 is it realistic to think that anyone would have been developing a rimless cartridge and the answer is yeah they could have but there wasn't the obvious uh rationale for it a rimmed cartridge gives you this really cool benefit of being able to head space off the rim which is an easy that's easy for large scale production and quality control having a rimless cartridge means you have to head space off the shoulder typically the shoulder or maybe the neck but the shoulder of the cartridge is what's generally used that's harder uh for mass production stuff and i think before semi-automatic rifles were really a viable thing there wasn't as much there wasn't necessarily such an obvious reason to go with a rimless cartridge so had the french had the french had the foresight to go with a rimless cartridge then i think there is a very good chance that they could have had a semi-auto rifle at least in world war ii and quite possibly in world war one they were developing they had a bunch of semi-auto developmental rifles at the beginning of world war one none of them were in a position to be adopted of course they put something they put a project into into development into rushed development that did give them the rsc 1917 made in quantity during world war one but it was significantly hindered by the cartridge and that's why that cartridge is why they didn't have a semi-auto rifle ready in world war ii is because they couldn't take the rsc and just update it from rimless to from rimmed to rimless ammunition because there were so many sort of workarounds and clutches in the rsc design to accommodate this heavily tapered rimmed eight lebel cartridge that adapting it to seven five rimless that was developed in the 20s would was not an efficient effective thing to do you really just had to scrap it and start from scratch which is what they did on machine guns which is why the show shot completely disappeared and gave way to the chatelairo 2429 they were working on the rifle as well but politics and money prevented it from happening in time what would the rifle have so let me go back to the question um if they had had the time to put in and the proper foresight they basically would have developed something parallel to eight millimeter mauser 6'5 swede uh 6'5 japanese 30.6 any one of those well not the japanese because that was semi-rimmed but they would have developed a full power rimless cartridge case if they'd had the foresight to do it in six and a half or seven millimeter so much the better even eight millimeter think about france going into world war one with eight millimeter mauser they would have been in a much better position to be doing semi-auto rifle development as for the rifle itself we have a decent idea of what it would have been because we know what the french were considering uh when the timeline was moved up and i think the most likely thing that they would have ended up with was a lee action rifle uh essentially a french lee enfield a li santetian perhaps a lee moss rifle it was that detachable magazine bolt action system that they were seriously considering like that was on the the top of the short list going for they went for the lebel because the time frame got shut down to about six months and the best they could do was taking an existing krapachek style of gun they had and adapting it to a necked down 11 millimeter graw cartridge so i can see the french beating essentially developing the lee mattford really in a rimless french cartridge and then i could see them maintaining that same rifle through world war ii until they developed their first standard issue semi-auto which is essentially what the british did they took the lee enfield action and didn't change the basic action from the late 1880s until the 1950s and the french could have done the same thing uh it would have meant that they had a five or ten round capacity rifle in world war one uh even through the end of world war one instead of having to sort of clutch up a cavalry three-round bertier would this have been a fundamental like would have changed the fortunes of war no probably not um not in world war one not in world war ii either but it's an interesting thought experiment all right travis says would the ptrd be a good candidate for a small batch reproduction in 50 bmg its simplicity really keeps the production costs relatively low there's a decent amount of interest in world war ii russian arms and it would not currently fall under the nfa all of those things are true but my answer is no it would not be i don't think um boy i'm just getting all sorts of negative answers today sorry uh the problem is there is not enough of a market for reproduction like there's not much market for reproduction firearms period you have to have a substantial demand for them to justify the cost of product design and development and tooling up guns a gun will take five years to properly develop and so any company that's willing to put five years of r d money into a firearm going like totally leveraging it because you can't make any money uh because pre-selling is an idea that effective companies don't do um you can't make any money until you actually have the thing ready to go and it had better be pretty darn perfect because the american firearms community is not willing to accept uh much in the way of unreliability these days you just they're very very few firearms that can demand that have that much demand to justify production there is very low demand for 50 bmg rifles today just look at how many of the regular ones like the stuff that's out there some of which is less expensive than you would be able to make a reproduction ptrd uh they're still very expensive and they don't sell in all that much volume the number of people who would take a ptrd which is substantially uh less convenient to have and to shoot and to use than a modern 50. keep in mind the pdrd is about an eight foot long rifle the thing is massive uh part of that is because it's chambered for a cartridge much larger than 50 bmg these are chambered for 14.5 by 114 i think a very powerful cartridge uh but the guns the barrel is huge the gun's like eight feet long you get logistical problems like can you fit it in a car nobody makes a case that will fit a ptrd or ptrs if you wanted to go really over the top and make those and then company liability of making civilian 50 cal rifles that say people may shoot weird hot loads through the ptrd is not exactly a fail-safe kind of gun either in fact it's deliberately designed to blow the bolt open on recoil every time you fire it it's not a really liability friendly sort of design no there's just no market for it i can totally see an individual hobbyist spending a couple years and making one and loving it and people being very jealous of it and wanting them but there are not enough people who want them to justify any commercial company producing them i wish i was wrong i would love to be proven wrong on that but i don't think i am and our last question is from shane who says what are the most interesting delayed blowback mechanisms you have seen and why do some nine millimeter pccs have a delaying system when direct blowback is cheaper and works just fine we'll start with that question the reason that some nine millimeter pccs use a delayed blowback system is because it makes the gun lighter and it makes recoil more pleasant undoubtedly so the the delayed blowback guns like the cmmgs hnks are noticeably nicer to shoot than the simple blowback pccs as for the most interesting delay blowback mechanisms the best one is an easy one for me and that's a developmental gun that i filmed oh i think about a year ago that is like headspace stretching delayed where the case the cartridge case is literally that the chamber is given deliberately long headspace and the cartridge case stretches when it fires and that impact opens the gun um that one is just kind of bonkers beyond that probably the next the next one would be the ring delay where you're expanding your cartridge case into an annular ring in the chamber the kimbel pistols did it as well as the man 1920 1921 little pocket pistols those are cool but delayed blowback is really one of the most fertile areas of firearms mechanism design there are a lot of different sub-variations so levers rollers gas systems you know gas delay systems rotating barrels lots of neat stuff but that headspace delayed is about the most unusual one that i think i've ever seen so that is all of our questions for today hopefully you enjoyed the video uh if you didn't get your question into today's video i am going to be using another batch of questions from this same request uh for a second q a like i said i'm not sure exactly when uh if you are a member of the forgotten weapons patreon page thank you very much when i am getting ready to do one of these videos i put a request for questions on the patreon page visible to you guys so if you're wondering how to get a question in that's how you do it thanks for watching you

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 154,777

Rating: 4.9558258 out of 5

Keywords: history, development, mccollum, forgotten weapons, design, disassembly, q&a, question, answer, Israel, israeli, pedersen, aperture, notch, tangent, sights, bullpup, smg, submachine gun, ptrd, 50 bmg, delayed blowback, nato, 5.56mm, 7.62mm, ar15, m16, Garand, 8mm Lebel, Lebel, france, French, firearm, small arms, 32acp, navy, lee navy, kropatschek, constant recoil, lmg, light machine gun, johnson, m1941, distillery, tour, revolver, webley, open bolt, closed bolt, fg42

Id: zFCwMFWKz_o

Length: 62min 25sec (3745 seconds)

Published: Thu May 20 2021