Quotulatiousness

March 18, 2024

Moore’s Patent Revolver (Swing-Out Cylinder)

Filed under: History, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published Feb 13, 2015

Manufactured in Brooklyn from 1861 until 1863, Moore’s revolver was a 7-shot single-action piece firing .32 rimfire cartridges. What makes it unique is its swing-out cylinder design — the first commercial revolver in the US to use this mechanism. A latch on the back of the frame released the entire barrel and cylinder assembly, allowing it to tip over to the right, exposing the chambers for loading and unloading. The ejector rod is stored under the barrel, but must be removed and used by hand when needed. Moore’s revolvers were popular with New Yorkers heading off to the Civil War and almost 8000 were made, but production was halted when Rollin White successfully sued for patent infringement (over his patent on the bored-though cylinder).

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March 15, 2024

Starr DA & SA Revolvers

Filed under: History, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published Feb 4, 2015

Starr revolvers are one of the less recognized designs used in the US Civil War, although tens of thousands of them were made and issued. Indeed, in many ways they were superior to the much more common Colt and Remington revolvers of the period. One of the interesting facts about the Starr is that the double action design came first, and was only replaced with the more typical single action design several years into the war (due to problems with price and complexity). Today we’re taking a look at a pair of Starrs, one single action and one double action. Ultimately the company shut down after the end of the war, and Colt would go on to dominate the revolver market in the United States.
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March 12, 2024

Vektor CP-1: Recalled to the Mother Ship

Filed under: Africa, History, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published Dec 8, 2023

The Vektor CP-1 was developed by Lyttleton Engineering Works (who owned the Vektor brand) in 1995 for a South African Police contract. They lost that contract to the Republic Arms RAP-401, but decided to put the CP-1 onto the civilian market instead. It was a pretty decent seller for them, and after a couple years they started importing it into the US. Things went bad when it turned out the the gun wasn’t quite drop-safe, and in late 2000 they were recalled for a repair. Some were repaired and returned to owners, but a great many were simply repurchased by Vektor instead. In light of the recall and potential future problems with the US legal outlook, Vektor USA was dissolved circa 2001.

Mechanically, the CP1 is a gas-delayed blowback pistol in 9mm Parabellum. It came with 12- and 13-round magazines (10 rounds in the US, because of the Assault Weapons Ban). It was hammer fired, and used a polymer frame (the first such made in South Africa). Its futuristic design lines are very deliberate, and its biggest shortcoming is a fairly heavy trigger, for being single action only. It has a somewhat unorthodox trigger safety, and also a Garand-style manual safety in the front of the trigger guard.

In today’s video, we will take a look at both an original configuration example and also one rebuilt after the recall, with a new firing pin block mechanism.
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March 9, 2024

1871 Spencer Rifle Conversion

Filed under: History, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published Nov 12, 2014

The Spencer repeating rifle was a major leap forward in infantry firepower, and more than one hundred thousand of them were purchased by the US military during the Civil War. The Spencer offered a 7-round magazine of rimfire .56 caliber cartridges in an era when the single-shot muzzle-loading rifle was still predominant. This particular Spencer is a long rifle which was one of roughly 1100 rebuilt from damaged carbines in 1871 at Springfield Arsenal.
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March 6, 2024

Venezuelan FN49: The First FN49 Contract

Filed under: Americas, Europe, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published Dec 1, 2023

Venezuela was the first nation to purchase the FN-49 rifle, before even the Belgian military. In fact, the Venezuelan contract was signed in 1948, before the “FN-49” designation was even in place. Venezuela bought a total of 8,012 rifles in two batches — 4,000 rifles plus 12 cutaway training examples delivered in 1949 and a further 4,000 more rifles delivered in June 1951. All of them included the integral muzzle brake and scope mounting cuts, although no scopes were ever procured. They were all semiautomatic models.

Some of the rifles were issued and used, but some appear to have remained in depots their entire life. Venezuela was also an early adopter of the FAL, and the FN-49 was only used for a short time. In 1966, all of them (or virtually all) were sold as surplus to InterArms, and brought onto the US collector market.
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March 3, 2024

Argentine Brass Maxim: A Machine Gun of the Steampunk Age

Forgotten Weapons
Published Nov 29, 2023

The Maxim Gun was the first successful true machine gun, and it became extremely popular worldwide. Maxim sent his first two working models to Enfield for testing in 1887, and by 1889 he had what he termed the “World Standard” model. No two contracts were quite identical, as the gun was constantly being tweaked and improved, but the 200 guns sold to Argentina in 1895 (50), 1898 (130) and 1902 (20) are a great time capsule into the configuration of the early Maxim guns in military service.

The Argentine Maxims had gorgeous brass jackets, along with ball grips, triggers, feed blocks, and fusee spring covers. The have the early 1889 pattern lock, complete with a walnut roller to assist belt feeding into the action. These guns were in Argentine military service until 1929 (which included a retrofit at DWM in 1909 to use the new Spitzer 7.65mm Mauser cartridge). They then passed into police use until 1956, and 91 were sold to Sam Cummings of InterArms in 1960. Of those, 8 were exported out of the US, 28 went to government agencies and museums, and the remaining 55 were sold onto the US collector market. They are the single largest group of early Maxims in the country today, and make fantastic collectors’ pieces.
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February 29, 2024

Arizona GOP pushes to legalize hunting down suspected illegal immigrants with deadly force! Film at 11!

Filed under: Government, Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Chris Bray reports on this utterly abhorrent piece of proposed legislation that will literally condemn any brown person in the state of Arizona to be murdered out of hand by evil red-hatted Trump supporters … or will it?

Republicans in the Arizona legislature have advanced a bill that would allow anyone in the state to just casually gun down any migrant anytime they feel like that filthy brown person might be trespassing. You can trust that this is really happening, because it’s in the news.

Delightfully, Axios reporter April Rubin trained at the New York Times. Here’s how she starts this story:

    Arizona Republicans are advancing a bill that would allow people to legally kill someone accused of attempting to trespass or actively trespassing on their property.

    The big picture: The legislation, which is expected to be vetoed if it reaches the state’s Democratic governor, would legalize the murder of undocumented immigrants, who often have to cross ranches that sit on the state’s border with Mexico.

These monsters, they’re legalizing the murder of undocumented migrants.

So, as always, let’s read the actual bill:

A person in lawful possession of property can threaten deadly force, or potentially use deadly force, in response to an act of criminal trespassing: You can go out on your property with a gun and tell a trespasser to get lost.

But Subsection B is the key to the actual use of deadly force, and journalists aren’t saying anything about it (emphasis added): “A person may use deadly physical force under subsection A only in the defense of himself or third persons as described in sections 13-405 and 13-406,” existing sections of Arizona state law. The bill explicitly references an existing legal standard for the use of deadly force.

Hotchkiss Portative: Clunky But Durable

Filed under: Britain, France, History, Military, USA, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published Nov 27, 2023

The Portative was an attempt by the Hotchkiss company to make a light machine gun companion to their heavy model (which had found significant commercial success). The Portative used the same feed strips, albeit loaded upside down, and the same gas piston operation, but a very different locking system. Instead of a tilting locking block the Portative had a “fermeture nut” that rotated to lock onto the bolt with three sets of interrupted thread locking lugs. In addition, many of the traditionally internal parts were mounted externally on the Portative, and it was quite the awkward gun to use.

The Portative was adopted by the American Army as the Model 1909 Benet-MerciƩ, and by the British early in World War One as a cavalry and tank-mounted gun. The remainder of Portative contracts were relatively small from second-tier military forces, including several South American countries.
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February 26, 2024

FN Model 30: The First Belgian BAR

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, USA, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published Nov 22, 2023

FN played a role in the production of Polish wz.28 BARs, and in the process obtained a copy of the technical package for the weapon, and converted it to metric measurements. Under the supervision of Dieudonne Saive, this was used as the basis for FN’s own BAR production, called the ModelĆ© 30. Production was done with a license from Colt, who owned the rights to Browning’s patents on the BAR.

The Model 30 was basically a Colt R75 (Model 1925), but incorporated a few improvements. Most significantly, the male and female parts of the gas system were swapped, which prevented carbon from building up and eventually jamming the gas piston. In addition, the bolt removal latch was improved from the US pattern, and the Polish wz.28-style rear sight was used. Lastly, a rate-reduction mechanism on the fire control group gave the gun “slow” and “fast” settings, of roughly 350rpm and 600rpm instead of the traditional semi and full auto settings.

Production began in 7.65mm, and the Belgian Army adopted the weapon, taking deliveries from 1930 until occupation in 1940. The Model 30 was also made in 8mm Mauser, and exported to China and Ethiopia. The design was fairly quickly supplanted in 1932 by the FN ModelƩ D, which added a quick-change barrel mechanism to the design, and this pattern sold more widely.
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February 25, 2024

QotD: From the M1903 Springfield to the M1 Garand

Filed under: History, Military, Quotations, USA, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The M1 Garand is correctly considered the best battle rifle of World War II. It was the only semi-automatic rifle — meaning that it fired each time the operator pulled the trigger — to be the standard issue infantry rifle of any army during the war. Other forces were equipped with bolt-action rifles — the British Lee Enfield, Soviet Mosin Nagant, Japanese Type 99, German K98k, etc. — that required the operator to manually pull back a bolt to eject the [expended cartridge], and then push it forward again to insert a fresh cartridge into the chamber. The most obvious advantage was an increased rate of fire: a semiautomatic rifleman with an M1 had an official aimed rate of fire of 24 shots per minute.1 Compare this to the 15 aimed shots that British soldiers were expected to pop off with a bolt-action Lee Enfield in a “mad minute” drill. And the Lee Enfield was one of the fastest bolt-action rifles ever produced! In a pinch, a GI could blast out a clip in a few seconds, approximating a burst from an automatic weapon.2 Furthermore, with semi-automatic fire, the shooter could stay focused on his target, whereas working the bolt generally forced the shooter off target, requiring time to reacquire a proper sight picture.

Lt. General George Patton famously called the M1 Garand “the greatest battle implement ever devised“, a quote often repeated reverently in the context of World War II nostalgia. The US Government after the war gave away millions of M1 Garands, making it a popular civilian rifle for hunting and competitive shooting.

But nostalgia aside, it is also possible to view, from the high perch of hindsight, the M1 Garand as a missed opportunity. The most advanced battle rifle of World War II ultimately looked back too much to the past rather than pointing the way to the future. During its development, senior military officials applied the perceived lessons of the Spanish American War to a rifle designed to solve the problems of the Great War. This intervention prevented the M1 Garand from becoming something closer to a modern assault rifle, with an intermediate power cartridge and higher magazine capacity. The army was in no hurry to ditch the rifle that had won World War II, meaning that the United States did not field its first true assault rifle until two decades after the concept had been invented by the Germans in 1943 and soon successfully adapted by the Soviets in 1947. The first American assault rifle, the M16, would not debut until 1965.

First a necessary caveat: rifles were not the decisive weapon in World War II. For the most part the small arms deployed by the United States had been designed to fight World War I: the Browning Automatic Rifle (1918), the M1919 Browning Medium Machine Gun (as the date implies, first fielded in 1919) and the M2 Browning heavy machine gun, designed in 1918 and so good it is still used over a century later. In contrast, German machine guns were somewhat more recent in design: the MG 34 (as the name implies, first fielded 1934) and the MG 42. During the war, the Germans invented the first true assault rifle, the StG 44.

The secret sauce of the US Army by 1944-45 had little to do with firearms at all: it was a combination of ready mobility through motorization combined with deadly artillery and close air support, enabled by an unmatched communication system that allowed forward observers to direct and adjust fires to lethal effect. The American way of war was rooted in fleets of trucks and jeeps, networks of radios and heaps of shells. Having a nice semi-automatic rifle was ancillary to a conflict like World War II. But the M1 Garand is a useful window into the vagaries of military procurement and technological innovation, which require developers to at once predict the operational environment of the future and analyze the lessons of the past.

Throughout the 1920s, officers at the Infantry School in Fort Benning experimented with new tactics that they hoped would again allow for mobile infantry combat and avoid the trench stalemate of World War I. The basic solution was some form of “fire and maneuver”, in which one section of a unit (say a squad or platoon) would lay down a sufficient base of small arms fire to suppress the enemy so as to facilitate the other section’s advance. By alternating suppression and assault the element might leapfrog its way forward, even against entrenched enemy machine guns.

For such a tactic to work, infantry platoons needed a lot of firepower. Some might come from light machine guns, like the Browning Automatic Rifle, which was issued to individual infantry squads. But it was generally realized that individual infantrymen needed to be capable of a far higher rate of fire than could be provided by the standard issue rifle, the bolt-action M1903 Springfield, fed from a five round magazine. To this end, the US government set about developing a semi-automatic rifle.

The charge was taken up by John C. Garand, a Canadian-born, self taught firearms designer who worked for the Springfield Armory in Massachusetts. Garand’s solution to make the rifle self-loading was to insert a piston beneath the barrel. When the gunpowder exploded in the cartridge, the gas produced in the explosion propelled the bullet out the barrel. But some gas was bled off into a cylinder below the barrel (which gives the M1 its peculiar appearance of seeming to have two barrels); the pressure of the gas in the cylinder drove a piston.3 This piston attached to an operating rod which pushed the bolt of the rifle back, ejecting the spent casing, and allowing a spring in the internal magazine to insert another cartridge into the chamber before a separate spring pushed the operating rod forward and closed the bolt for the next shot, all in a fraction of a second.

Garand had initially worked on a rifle chambering the standard .30-06 cartridge used by the M1903 Springfield rifle (the .30 indicates that the bullet had a diameter of .30 inches, while the 06 indicates that the cartridge had been adopted in 1906; the round is often pronounced “thirty-ought-six”. But when a rival designer named John Pedersen, also affiliated with Springfield Armory, developed a semi-automatic design that chambered a lighter .276 (7mm) round, Garand retooled his project for the lighter round as well, producing a prototype known as the T3, with subsequent refinements labeled the T3E1 and T3E2. The smaller round meant that the internal magazine of the T3E1/2 could accept clips of 10 bullets, doubling the magazine capacity of the M1903 Springfield.

Army officials were very interested in the new round, but wanted proof that a lighter bullet would be sufficiently lethal in combat. A series of grisly ballistic tests were therefore ordered, pitting the .276 round against the traditional .30-06. In 1928, anesthetized pigs were shot through with both rounds. To the surprise and consternation of traditionalists, the .276 did far more damage in the so-called “Pig Board”. This is not paradoxical: the lighter round was more likely to “tumble”, precisely because it was lighter and so more likely to have its trajectory disrupted by bone and tissue; the tumble meant that more of the kinetic energy was expended inside the target, causing far more damage. The .30-06, meanwhile, as a more powerful round, was more likely to punch clean through, retaining its kinetic energy to keep moving forward after passing through the target. Eventually, tests of this sort would be used to sell the army on the lethality of the 5.56mm round used by the M16/M4, which has an even greater tumble, and causes even more grievous injuries. Out of concern that the fat bodies of pigs did not accurately replicate the human teenagers that the new round was designed to kill, a new test was inflicted upon goats, seen as more appropriately lean and therefore better analogs. The result was the same in favor of the .276 (a lighter .256 performed even better). With two rounds of tests vindicating the .276, the Army demanded that its new rifle chamber the .30-06. The final decision was made by Douglas MacArthur himself.

The .30-06 round itself had been the product of a painful lesson learned during the Spanish American War. Here, American troops, armed with Krag M1892 rifles, had found themselves badly out-ranged by Spanish troops armed with Mausers; the famous charge up San Juan Hill occurred after US troops had advanced for some distance under a hail of unanswered rifle fire. Given the importance of sharp shooting to the American military mythos, getting handily outranged and outshot by Spanish forces was a painful embarrassment. The first order of business had been to adopt the Mauser design: the M1903 Springfield was essentially a modified Mauser, as the US government had licensed a number of Mauser’s patents. By upgrading the M1903 to take the heavy .30-06 round, the Army ensured that soldiers could engage targets over a kilometer away. Beyond the deeply ingrained “lessons learned” from the Spanish American War, the mythos of the deadly American sharpshooter was strongly entrenched. Even as disruptors at Benning developed new infantry tactics that stressed volume of fire over accuracy, the phantoms of buck skinned frontiersmen sniping at British redcoats from a thousand paces still occupied the headspace of military leaders; they wanted a rifle with long distance accuracy. The sights on the M1 Garand adjust out to 1200 yards.

But MacArthur’s reasoning seems to have been primarily motivated by administrative and logistical concerns, as he cited the generic difficulties of fielding a lighter round. Some of these challenges may have been related to production and distribution of a sufficient stockpile of new caliber ammunition. There may have also been a concern with the new round complicating the logistics of line companies. The army also used .30-06 for the BAR and Browning medium machine gun, and having all of these shoot the same round in theory simplified the supply of line companies, and allowed for cross-leveling between weapons systems. Similar concerns have the US Army maintaining a policy of only having 5.56mm weapons at the squad level (thus the M4 and M249 Squad Automatic Weapon both shoot 5.56, and the SAW can shoot from M4 magazines).4 Still, MacArthur’s concerns seem unfounded in hindsight. The United States was about to produce billions of bullets during World War II. American troops were about to be so lavishly supplied that distributing two types of bullets would have been readily feasible given the soon to be proven quality of American logistics.5

With MacArthur’s edict, Garand retooled his rifle back to the .30-06 caliber, and his design was finally accepted in 1936. But the larger and more powerful round required a design change: the internal magazine now took clips of eight bullets instead of ten. Two rounds may not sound like much, but every bullet can be precious in a firefight, and this represented a 20% reduction in magazine capacity. Spread over a company sized element, the reduced clip capacity represented over two-thousand fewer rounds that a company commander could expect to fire and maneuver with. Indeed, the M1’s volume of fire proved generally insufficient to suppress the enemy on its own during the war, evidenced by the habit of equipping rifle squads with two Browning Automatic Rifles, instead of one. Marine divisions by the end of the war often deployed three BARs per squad.6

Michael Taylor, “Michael Taylor on The Development of the M1 Garand and its Implications”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-09-08.


    1. TM 9-1005-222-12.

    2. Thus George Wilson, a platoon leader and later company commander in the Fourth Infantry Division, describing a platoon scout stumbling upon the enemy: “The second scout emptied the eight round clip in his M-1 so fast it seemed like a machine gun … the rest of us moved very cautiously and found three dead enemy soldiers in the road.” (G. Wilson. If You Survive. Ivy, 1987).

    3. John Garand’s initial design, and early production M1s, had a gas trap inserted over the muzzle to catch the gas after the bullet had exited; when this proved prone to fouling, a design modification drilled a small hole in the barrel just before the muzzle to allow the gas to bleed into the cylinder, most M1 Garands had this “gas port” system.

    4. In 2023, US Army infantry will begin transition to the M7 carbine and M250 Squad Automatic weapon, which will both use a 6.8mm bullet, out of concerns that the 5.56 NATO is insufficient to penetrate body armor.

    5. Editor’s Note: I agree with Michael here in principle: US logistics could have managed this. But I would also note that part of the reason American logistics were so good is that they applied MacArthur’s reasoning to everything, reusing vehicle chassis, limiting the number of different ammunition calibers and demanding interchangeable parts across the whole range of military equipment. Take one of those decisions away and the whole still functions. Take all of them away and one ends up with the mess that was German production and logistics.

    6. Editor’s Note: BAR goes BARRRRRRRRRRR.

February 23, 2024

The Gun Science Says Can’t Work – Madsen LMG Mechanics

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 21 Nov 2023

The Madsen LMG is generally considered an extremely complex and confusing system — but is it really? Today we are taking one apart to see just how it actually works. Because in fact, it’s a very unusual system, but not really any more complicated than any other easy self-loading action.
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February 20, 2024

Belt-fed Madsen LMG: When the Weird Get Weirder

Forgotten Weapons
Published Nov 15, 2023

First produced in 1902, the Madsen was one of the first practical light machine guns, and it remained in production for nearly 5 decades. The Madsen system is a rather unusual recoil-operated mechanism with a tilting bolt and a remarkably short receiver. The most unusual variation on the system was the belt-fed, high rate-of-fire pattern developed for aircraft use. This program was initiated by the Danish Air Force in the mid 1920s, and several different patterns were built by the time World War Two erupted.

The model here was actually a pattern that was under production for Hungary when German forces occupied Denmark. Taking over the factory, they continued the production and the guns went to the Luftwaffe for airfield defensive use.

In order to use disintegrating links instead of box magazines, some very odd modifications had to be made to the Madsen. One set of feed packs are actually built into the belt box itself, and the gun cannot function without the box attached. The only feasible path for empty link ejection is directly upwards, and so a horseshoe-shaped link chute was attached to the top cover, guiding links up over the gun and dropping them out the right side of the receiver. Very weird!

While several thousand of these were made under German occupation, very few survive today and they are extremely rare on the US registry.
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February 17, 2024

Breda 37: Italy’s Forgotten Heavy Machine Gun

Filed under: History, Italy, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published Nov 11, 2023

The Breda Model 37 was Italy’s standard heavy machine gun (which meant a rifle-caliber gun fired only from a tripod) during World War Two. It was chambered for the 8x59mm cartridge, as Italy used a two-cartridge system at the time, with 6.5mm for rifles and the heavier 8mm for machine guns to exploit their longer effective range. Production began in 1937 and continued until the end of the war, with a batch being made for German use after the Italian armistice in 1943. Pre-war it was also sold to Portugal as the m/938. It remained in Italian use after the war as well, eventually replaced by the MG42/59.

The Breda 37 is a durable, reliable, and overall very good design. It uses 20-round feed strips, with the quite unusual feature of placing fired cases back into the strips rather than ejecting them out of the gun. It is a relatively unknown gun today, but this is not because of any inferiority on its part.
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February 11, 2024

Inkunzi PAW aka Neopup – 20mm Direct-Fire Grenade Launcher

Filed under: Africa, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published Jun 22, 2018

The Inkunzi PAW (Personal Assault Weapon) is a 20mm shoulder fired semiautomatic grenade launcher designed by Tony Neophytou (and previously known as the Neopup). It is a creative and very interesting weapon system, both from a mechanical perspective and also from a question of practical application.

The PAW has a 6-round detachable rotary magazine, and an effective range of 1000m for area targets and 600m for point targets. Its purpose is to give the individual soldier an explosive area-effect weapon that fires like a rifle. To this end, the ammunition has been developed to give a muzzle velocity of 1000fps (310m/s), giving it a far flatter trajectory and shorter flight time than a 40mm grenade, either low pressure or high. It allows rapid repeat shots, rapid reloading, and easy target transition. The high muzzle velocity (for a grenade launcher) makes range estimation and engagement of moving targets much simpler than with the rainbow-like trajectory of 40mm systems. For specialized modern applications like guarding against one or more vehicle suicide bombs, fast-moving pirate skiffs, it seems extremely compelling. That utility extends to typical targets as well, like light armored vehicles, buildings, gun emplacements, and even something as simply as a patch of brush with an enemy hiding within somewhere. Typical small arms fire requires a substantial expenditure of ammunition for targets like those, while an explosive 20mm projectile can neutralize them in one or two rounds, without the need for a direct hit. The lethal radius of a 20mm HEI shell is between 6 and 18 feet (2m – 6m) depending on who you ask. That’s a significant margin of error.

Mechanically, the PAW is a simple system to disassemble, and it uses a quite clever inertial locking system which is clean and reliable. The unique layout with the grip on the right side is done to accommodate the hydraulic recoil system, which allows the action to slide back into the stock assembly on each shot. This absorbs much of the recoil and spreads its effect out on the shooter, making it not unpleasant to shoot. An easy stowage feature allows the gun to be locked in its compressed configuration, shortening it for transit and also offering a way for the gun to be carried with a round chambered and ready to use, but with the trigger safely disconnected to prevent accidental firing for troops in armored vehicles or helicopters.

Compared to the American XM-25, the PAW strips away the overcomplications of laser designation and complex projectile fusing, which are arguably not really necessary anyway. It offers a simple and effective system, with tremendous firepower as well as suppression capability (nothing says go away quite like rapid fire explosives). It does this with a larger magazine and more compact and lighter weight design, no less.

It is rare to find a truly unique and innovative firearm these days, but that is exactly what Tony Neophytou has done here. The design is elegant in its simplicity, and well refined. It truly offers a unique set of capabilities — while it has been purchased in limited numbers by several smaller militaries, I hope to see it given serious consideration by some first-tier forces, as I think it has tremendous potential.
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February 8, 2024

Beretta 1915: The first of the Beretta pistols

Filed under: History, Italy, Military, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published Jun 22, 2016

The Italian military went into WWI having already adopted a semiautomatic sidearm — the Model 1910 Glisenti (and its somewhat simplified Brixia cousin). However, the 1910 Glisenti was a very complex design, and much too expensive to be practical for the needs of the global cataclysm that was the Great War. In response to a need for something cheaper, Tulio Marengoni of the Beretta company designed the Model 1915, a simple blowback handgun chambered for the 9mm Glisenti cartridge.

Only 15,300 of the Model 1915 pistol were made, because even they proved to be a bit more than the military really needed. One of their most interesting mechanical features is a pair of manual safeties — one on the back of the frame to lock the hammer and one on the left side to block the trigger. This proved a bit redundant, and the gun overall was rather large and heavy. In 1917 a scaled-down version in .32 ACP (7.65mm) was introduced which would be produced in much larger numbers. The 1915/17 would also omit the rather unnecessary hammer safety.

It is important to note that while the 9mm Glisenti cartridge is dimensionally interchangeable with 9×19 Parabellum, pistols designed for the Glisenti cartridge should never be used with standard 9×19 ammunition, as it is nearly 50% more powerful than the Glisenti specs, and doing so will quickly cause damage (and potentially catastrophic failure).

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