Comments by "ZGryphon" (@ZGryphon) on "Royal Armouries" channel.

  1. "Experimental Charlton" should have been the designer's nickname, like Carbine Williams. "Oh dear, here comes old Experimental Charlton again, wonder what mad gadget he's come up with this time."
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  2. I love that they made it out of camouflage-print material... and then went ahead and put a huge, bold, instantly resolvable pattern of evenly spaced parallel stripes on it with all the strapping. I know that in practice the idea was that most of it would be covered up with pouches and equipment, but even so...
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  3. A lot of Canadian signage does things with their two languages, English and French, similar to the "ABL" monogram on this rifle. My personal favorite is the ice hockey arena in Ottawa, which used to be called the Corel Centre several sponsors back. Because the name in French is the same two words in the other order, they painted a circular design at center ice that just said COREL CENTRE COREL CENTRE over and over again, so that it read both ways at the same time. (It's now the Centre Canadian Tire Centre, which doesn't trip off the tongue quite as readily. :)
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  4. The scene: a Victorian gentleman's club. One man observes with curiosity and concern as another lowers himself gingerly into an armchair, muttering in obvious discomfort. "I say, what's the trouble, Sir Edward? Lumbago acting up?" "No, I shot a brigand last night, and it's quite done in my back."
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  5. Fortunately, Webley had the good taste not to turn around and copy Enfield's No. 2 Mk I* version, possibly because they recognized that double-action-only revolvers are daft. :) I've long had a fondness for the Webley top-break revolvers. I have one of the .380 Mk IVs, but I don't shoot it any more, as it's pretty worn and doesn't quite keep proper time any longer. Would love to have one of the later marks in .455, but sadly I'm in the US, where virtually all of those that are to be found have been ruined.
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  6. Addendum: It's also the name of the special class of federal firearms license which makes the list relevant (formally the 03 FFL, "Collector of Curios and Relics", as opposed to the 01 class held by dealers). If the buyer doesn't hold an 03 FFL, guns on the C&R list are subject to the same transfer rules as everything else. (Technically it's not just the list; any firearm becomes C&R-eligible 50 years after its date of manufacture, regardless of whether its model is specifically mentioned in the document.)
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  7. "Disperse in the name of His Majesty's Imperial Fruit Company!"
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  8. To expand a little on "SGDG", the phrase translates to "without guarantee of the government," and essentially means that by granting the patent, the French government certified only that the invention was novel, not that it worked. Basically a limitation of liability--vintage CYA. :)
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  9. The Mauser HSc (parallel-universe Walther PP) does that "magazine insertion closes the slide" thing on purpose, too. They're pretty odd little guns.
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  10. Is it just me, or do all the names of these rifles sound like DLCs for a tactical game? Accuracy International: Arctic Warfare, in particular, sounds like one I'd have played.
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  11. "This is outrageous! I shall write to my MP." "You don't have an MP, Rick, you're an anarchist." "Then I shall write to the lead singer of Echo and the Bunnymen. 'Dear... Mister... Echo.'"
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  12. Nifty. Does your institution have one of the Solothurn anti-tank rifles as well? I think there are a few more of those floating around than these, but still, a pretty uncommon beast nowadays.
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  13. Third hypothesis: it's designed to be wielded by the pincer hands of human-sized LEGO minifigures, with an eye toward export sales to Denmark.
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  14. I remember first seeing the Vector on FutureWeapons with the late Richard Machowicz, ages ago, and thinking "well, that's cool as heck, but no agency is going to buy it, because it looks like it came from a video game." And lo, these many years later, here we are. :)
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  15. "Something of a hold-my-beer-moment" is going right on the list of favorite phrases.
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  16. Fun fact, which I'm sure Jonathan knows, but since he didn't mention it: the M1A1 carbine needed that little bracket for the oiler on the back of the ersatz cheek rest because in the regular M1, that same cylindrical vial is housed in a slot in the wooden buttstock--and does double duty as a sort of retaining pin for the sling, which is also threaded through that slot. Also, I've just remembered a use of those metal crickets from when I was a kid in the '70s--they were part of a game my family had. I think it was the home version of a television game show, possibly Jeopardy! A handful of crickets came with the set to stand in for the electronic buttons contestants on the real thing used to "buzz in" during play. Obviously that's not their original use, since there were no TV game shows in the 1940s, but maybe there was something similar on the radio?
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  17.  @nemesis2264  I know they're in games, what I'm saying is that their names also sound like they are games. :)
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  18. Why would anyone consider a full auto rifle with such a large cartridge? (Don't try to hide behind the curtains, M14, I'm looking at you too.)
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  19. "Sergeant Benton! The lizardy-looking chap, five rounds, rapid."
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  20. Seeing Jonathan take a modern two-handed grip on this thing gave me a real giggle.
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  21. And all of those plastic filler panels between the fenders and bumpers, many of which have now disintegrated and left weird-looking gaps on the surviving cars of that era...
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  22. To be fair, a PPK would also look puny in Bond's hands--which is why the prop gun the actors say is a PPK is really a PP. :)
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  23.  @Ogaitnas900  Yes--the PP (short for Polizeipistole, "police pistol") is the first model. The PPK is a smaller version, originally developed to be issued to detectives.
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  24. In terms of the aesthetics question, it's like they used to say in aircraft design: if it looks right, it probably flies right.* * guns are probably not actually like that at all
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  25. The "War Office" guesses are intuitive, but I think it's likely this was originally made for the little-known postwar counterespionage agency W.O.O.C.(P).
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  26. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungerford_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunblane_massacre et al.
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  27. This brings back a surprising memory: When I was a kid, a friend of mine had a toy Thompson that was about that size. It was the best-made toy gun I've ever seen in my life--almost more of a model than a toy, in terms of how detailed it was, but as rugged as a toy ought to be. It even had the detachable shoulder stock.
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  28. ... Herstal?
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  29. I really don't think I would be all that keen to have the chamber of a firearm that close to my face. I mean, sure, it's .22 Hornet, not .55 Boys or something, but even so.
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  30. I feel like the utility of these things would be almost entirely psychological. I mean, if a man actually did fire it into a crowd dense enough to hit anyone with it and hostile enough that he would want to shoot them, he'd wound or kill up to four of them, and then the other 200 would overrun his position and beat him to death.
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  31. Pish-tosh, dear boy and/or girl. In the days when cartridges like .455 Webley and .577 Spencer were developed, the English still scorned the metric system as so much subversive French claptrap. Rather, a lot of early cartridges and their descendants use peculiarly sized bullets because they were developed to be used in converted muzzle-loading firearms, which historically had bore sizes based on all sorts of arcane systems of measurement. Sometimes, as with the modern .38 Special cartridge, they don't even have bullets of the actual diameter mentioned in their names, because of the weird evolutions their ancestors went through in the mid-1800s. Somewhat related to the above, the gauge of a shotgun barrel is--hang onto your hat for this one--the number of spheres of that barrel's inside diameter you can make from one pound of lead. So, for instance, a 12-gauge (or "12-bore" if it's a rifle, though rifles that big aren't really a thing any more) has a barrel of a diameter such that 12 lead balls that size would weigh a pound. Hey, it made sense to English gunsmiths. :) (.410 is the outlier there, in that even though it's a shotgun cartridge, the number refers to a nominal bore diameter in decimal inches, so technically ".410 gauge" is incorrect.)
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  32.  @clearsailing7993  No, I was just in an imperial mood because of the subject. :)
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  33. Oh hey, Jonathan is filming today in the "guns, lots of guns" room from The Matrix. Neat.
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  34. It seems like the gun itself is a lot less unwieldy in action, but the accountants can't have been happy about the much-increased chances that operatives would lose their very expensive spy briefcases. :)
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  35. Unfortunately, this innovation would do nothing to address the Thompson's other major ergonomic fault--in fact, if anything, the stretched receiver would make its astonishing length of pull even worse. Great news about Jonathan and Dave working together again! I was quite sad to see Firearms Expert Reacts go the way of so much superior content in this bleak and savage decade.
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  36. Relatable. I was made in 1973 and I don't feel that old either, except on the increasingly frequent days when my back goes out on me.
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  37. "I don't understand why everyone is so upset about salt rifles. Surely salt is less dangerous as a projectile than--what? Oh! Never mind."
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  38. I took a couple of semesters of German in college, and one day we talked about the spelling reform that got rid of ß. One of the slides showed a probably-unintended consequence of the change, which was that places formerly named things like "Weißstrasse" (White Street) became "Weissstrasse", which is, with the best will in the world, quite silly.
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  39.  @butwhataboutdragons7768  I have a Mk III* SMLE with a similarly dark stock, but I doubt the 17th-century Dutch used quite as much cosmoline as I suspect my Lee-Enfield spent much of the 20th century marinating in. :)
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  40. Chauchat LMGs were also made by a bicycle factory, which you can kind of tell when you notice the gauge of steel tubing most of a Chauchat is made from. :)
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  41.  @Simon_Nonymous  Hey, now. Von Braun came willingly, It was us or the Soviets, after all.
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  42. Also, they were very expensive.
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  43. I was gonna say, the cultural rundown didn't include the fact that M200 is one of the cutest T-dolls. :)
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  44. Forgotten Weapons also did a video about a... well, HK will probably put me on some kind of list for calling it a competing product, but... a similar sort of thing made for one of the Ingram submachine guns, I forget which one. It's... rather less German in its design and execution. :)
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  45. All thanks to our old friend, F=ma . :)
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  46. There aren't enough bowling balls, mouse traps, or boots on sticks for it to be a proper Rube Goldberg mechanism. :)
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  47.  @brittakriep2938  Most people buying a 1911 these days probably aren't planning to carry it for self-defense; in modern clothing, a handgun that big and square would be as obvious as trying to shoplift a microwave oven.
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  48. "The one that used to be called Twitter" is still called Twitter, just not by the schmuck who owns it.
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  49. Gun jousting would be a little anticlimactic. Sort of the horseback equivalent of the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indy shoots the swordsman.
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  50.  @JohnSmith-pl2bk  There's an early Auto-Ordnance magazine ad I've seen reprinted in a number of books that features an illustration of a man in a cowboy hat and chaps standing on his porch, blazing away with a Thompson gun at an assortment of men and horses in his front yard, with copy underneath explaining that you, yes you need a machine gun to defend your ranch against... whoever.
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