Comments by "" (@neutronalchemist3241) on "Forgotten Weapons" channel.

  1. The Marine Corp adopted the M9A1 actually. Some special unit was given that Colt, without any competition, mostly due to Gen. William M. Keys connections, and had little else than just problems with those. That's why it had been replaced after only four years of service.
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  2. They got carried by their own dreams. For one and half million rifles, ammo availability would have been a problem. For 15.000, 50.000 or even 200.000 rifles, there were plenty of ammos already available. Better issuing a repeater with 400 rounds and call it a day (hardly a Volkssturm militian would have survived enough to fire all of them anyway) than issuing a single shooter even with 10.000 rounds.
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  3. It's actually a very simple design. Pistol-like simple. MG34 bolt: 24 parts MG42 bolt: 16 parts BAR bolt: 18 parts BREN bolt: 30 parts! Breda 30 bolt, 4 parts. Probably even too much simple. Some parts more, to provide some primary extraction, and the oiler would not have been encessary.
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  4. Only fascists.
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  5.  @pierluigiadreani2159  According to what sources, please? Not by distrust, but internet made possible to everyone to pull some number out of his ass.
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  6. It's one of those that probably will never be made. First, it's quite complicate, second, Fedorov himself admitted it had reliability issues. But the purchaser of a modern repro would want MODERN reliability (not even 1917 reliability) from it. He wouldn't accept "it seldomly work because the originals were like that too". For the designer of the repro, it's like a nightmare. To him is like designing a completely new weapon, with the adjunctive constraint that he can't choose the solutions he KNOWS will work flawlessly. He has to keep it consistent with original solutions that he knows work "so-so".
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  7. Actually this is a simple action even by modern standards. In WWI, only the Hotchkiss was simpler than this.
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  8. With any service rifle ammo since the invention of the smokeless powder the target is dead before hearing the bang. All of them are largely supersonic.
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  9. It's still on the italian site and on the international catalogue.
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  10. It's not cause they were planning to issue them to 15 and 12 YO soldiers that much of the SMGs designed after the war uses some kind of automatic bolt locking safety. It's that the experience of WWII taught that the main sources of incidents with those weapons is a hit in the back, that makes the bolt retreat enough to catch a round, and not enough to catch the sear, so cycling and accidentally discharging it. That's ony a very simple (it's a last ditch weapon after all) way to solve that problem that, by 1945, was well known.
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  11. I've seen reactivated LMGs (so way simpler actions) of models known for their reliability jam a round out of three. It requires a lot of work to put the parts together correctly.
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  12. Well, some year before Tanfoglio reverse-engineered the CZ75. They surely didn't have the blueprints, they had not government aid, and I would be really surprised if they had more than half a dozen samples to study.
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  13.  @denzilvenske6315  Now they don't interchange, because Tanfoglio, starting from its original clone (the TZ-75) followed a different evolutionary line than CZ did. The TZ-75 was slightly different from the CZ-75 too (both aesthetically, and mechanically, since it had a beretta-style slide mounted decocker) but all those changes were intended as improvements, not dictated by an incapability to copy the original gun. Infact, placing the slide assembly of a gun over the frame of the other, it still worked flawlessly.
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  14. This is a visit to the Pietta factory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdnbNJKJ9ZE As you can see, they use the same tooling to make their repro revolvers and their modern line of semiauto rifles and shotguns. They work in batches. "today revolvers, tomorrow semiauto rifles". It's obvious that those machines can make anything in between. A Fyodorov Avtomat like a M1 Carbine. They only need the right imput. They can make them BETTER actually. With more consistent tolerances than the originals EVER had. So why they don't do it? Because, while manufacturing is not really a problem, designing is. Manual repeaters (revolvers, lever actions...) solve a lot of problems, because timing is decided and force is applied by the shooter. In a semiauto/auto weapon there are a lot of bits that have to work togheter for the weapon to work. Much of those old designs required handfitting, because the admitted tolerances were so that, in a batch of supposedly identical parts, the right ones had to be chosen and coupled for the weapon to work. Worse, there was the "cascade matching" problem. When you took, IE, three parts that matched toghether, because they were all at one end of the tolerance scale, and then there was no fourth part that matched with them, because it should have been beyond the scale. It was a so common issue that, for the Winchester .224 prototype (the competitor of the AR15 in the CONARC competition) Winchester explicitly stated that they designed their rifle so that it couldn't happen. And we were in the late '50s. It was still a severe problem for the M60 MG. Modern CNC machines can't work like that. so the modern designer has to come out with his own completely different, set of admitted tolerances. Not to say that steel of the original composition is often unobtanium. The REAL problem is that most of those designs were not that great to begin with. Even the most successful ones, (IE, the M1 Carbine, just to say one) were good FOR THEIR TIME. But the eventual purchaser of a modern repro would expect form it MODERN reliability and durability, otherwise "This is shit! The manufcturer scammed me!". It doesn't exist "it seldomly work because the originals were like that too". For the designer of the repro, it's like a nightmare. To him is like designing a completely new weapon, with the adjunctive constraint that he can't choose the solutions he KNOWS will work flawlessly. He has to keep it consistent with original solutions that he know work "so-so". That's why modern repros, even when existing, mostly dont' have part interchangeability with the originals.
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  15. The rifle is very simple actually. This is a disassembly, not a field strip.
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  16. Because they were thinking of replacing the Carcano with semiautos, or even with select fire rifles, since the end of WWI (See the Terni 1921, for which four different intermediate cartridges were developed, and then the experimental semiauto models of the '30s), and, when it was clear that there were not funds for that, they decided to switch to spitzer 7.35X51. In the end WWII begun too early, and they found themself stuck with the same ammos of WWI.
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  17.  @jubuttib  The Finns actually worsened the sights, asking for them to be zeroed at 100m instead of 200m before the rifles being delivered. That way they were practicaly useless past 150m, well into combat distance. BTW the M16 had a two aperture sight, where the battle sight was zeroed at 250m and served 0 to 300m. The long range sight (300m to 400m) was practically never used (the US army didn't, and doesn't, train past 300m).
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  18.  @M.M.83-U  But Beretta outsourced the manufacturing of many parts.
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  19. Useless? You kill the enemy soldier with the first round, and shoot down the helicopter hovering over him with the rest.
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  20.  @Jargolf86  The Breda 30 was surely slower reloading, had a more open shroud and a ridged barrel to aid cooling and, after the first battles, it was seen that its two spare barrel provision wasn't enought, and it had been increased to four. May be this barrel could resist a little more than that of the BAR (whose overheating was a common occurrence in WWII despite the open bolt that at least avoided the cook-off of an entire magazine), but it could surely overheat.
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  21. it has a 320mm barrel, longer than the Thompson SMG (267mm) and way longer than the grease gun (203mm)
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  22. Far too heavy to be a battle rifle.
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  23. That's what happens when someone gets attached to an idea. There is really no reason for a revolver to work with sprockets. Even wanting it to be DAO and striker fired, a standard straight rod to rotate the cylinder and and flat springs contained in the handle to actuate the striker would be far simpler and more compact, but tyhe creator evidently got attached to his original idea.
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  24. The other nations started the war with comparably complex ir even more complex SMGs. Thompson, MP35, Lanchester, KP31...
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  25.  @bobmcbob49  Really? As Ian stated, the Italians adopted several much simplified versions of this, along with other, stamped, SMGs. The Thompson instead, at the end of WWII, still outnumbered the M3 grease gun by three to one. The MP35 was still in production by 1944. The Lanchester was still in production in 1945. The production of the Kp31 ended in 1998.
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  26. The Astra 400 is a straight blowback in 9x23mm largo.
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  27. The safety lever had never been a issue IRL. None used this one-handed. The front safety solved a real issue of early SMGs, and had never been a problem in combat situations. The fact that a design is unusual does not mean that's failed.
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  28. "designed by a committee".
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  29.  @richardsmith4794  Please, you can't draw conclusions from a single 100 years old sample tested using a magazine of the same period. Over 90% of jammings are magazine-related and, to me, the conclusion of THAT test was decided in advance. If you WANT a weapon to fail, it's easy to obtain the desired result. You can see countless tests on the tube of the weapon running flawlessly, and it had been the sight of the Chauchat used on assault en masse that inspired Vladimir Grigoryevich Fyodorov to build the Fedorov Avtomat. The Chauchat had some well known drawback (IE the action locking due to overheat) but it's strong point had been that France was able to manufacture over 260.000 samples in a partially invaded country while UK built 50.000 Lewis guns in the same time span. Individually the Lewis Gun was a better weapon. 1 vs. 5? No way.
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  30. It's a simple and effective design, that had been higly appreciated by the users.
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  31.  @eloiseharbeson2483  The Western Cartridge ammos were not "specially loaded". They had been made to original Italian specs even in bullet construction. They only used modern propellants, because Western Cartridge, obviously, didn't have access to the original Solenite. The 6.5 Italian Carcano cartridge has much in common with modern 6.5 and not only 6.5. Being the first one to be adopted, it influenced many of them, both dimensionally and power-wise. IE back in the days when surplus Carcano cartridges were common, and 7.62X39 were unobtanium in the west, 7.62X39 were obtained by shortening and necking Carcano cartridges. The .264 USA of the US Army Marksmanship Unit still uses a shortened Carcano case. You can't put a 162gr round in a Grendel case, otherwise the muzzle velocity would have been practically identical to a 6.5 Carcano, and infact PPU 123 grains Carcano rounds achieve 2690 fps from a 21" barrel, that's even more than a Grendel does. The .264 USA, with 123gr bullet, produces 2,657 fps from 16.5" barrel. Still not that different.
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  32. The rear sight is dovetailed for windage. For the front one, once the two parts are welded, it only needs a template to file it to the correct height (few seconds of work for a skilled worker). Due to the longer sight radius, the SMG will always be more accurate than a pistol anyway, and at 50m it doesn't need a higher accuracy.
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  33. the other nations started the war with comparably expensive or even more expensive SMGs. Thompson, MP35, Lanchester, KP31...
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  34.  @drxym  Really? As Ian said, the Italians adopted several much simplified versions of this, along with other, stamped, SMGs. The Thompson instead, at the end of WWII, still outnumbered the M3 grease gun by three to one. The MP35 was still in production by 1944. The Lanchester was still in production in 1945. The production of the Kp31 ended in 1998.
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  35.  @ihcfn  99% of semiauto pistol jams are magazine related.
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  36. The MG34 was adopted by the Germans only in 1938. Only it's bolt was composed of 28 precision machined parts, the barrel change took way longer than that of the Breda and, when used as an LMG, to reload one of its "drum" 50 rounds magazines required more time and actions than to reload the magazine of a Breda 30 three times. The only thing that the Germans had better was industrial capacity.
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  37. Oswald was not a professional sniper. That was simply his rifle. When he bought it, he didn't think to hit the President from the 6th floor of a book depository. Fortunately for him, it was a fairly easy shot. A good shot could have done it with a pistol. Had military rifles not been able to hit slowly moving human-sized targets at 80m, WWI would have been fought with bows and arrows.
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  38. As Ian just explained the Romanians ordered the rifle directly to Beretta, and received them in 1940. At Stalingrad the Romanian 3rd and 4th armies simply dissolved in Operation Uranus well before the Italian 8th army, that resisted for a month more and was defeated in Operation Little Saturn. They couldn't have taken control of anything.
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  39.  @BewareTheLiveWire  Certainly not with the Italian 8th Army weapons, since what little remained of the Rumenians 3rd and 4th armies left Stalingrad a month before the italians, and it's not likely they came back there to collect the weapons after the front advanced for some hundred kms. However it doesn't seem they had been rebuilt and rearmed at a level even remotely comparable to what they were before Operation Saturn.
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  40. It had been described as "mechanically superior to the Bren gun under dusty conditions" too.
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  41. It's an out-of-battery disconnect safety.
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  42. Elbonia is a fictional piss-poor country in "Dilbert" comic strip. Ian is doing this series of "elbonian firearms" by describing what really are badly bubbaed weapons that he did put his hands on.
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  43. They got carried by their own dreams. For one and half million rifles, ammo availability would have been a problem. For 15.000, 50.000 or even 200.000 rifles, there were plenty of Italian made ammos already available. Better issuing a repeater with 400 rounds and call it a day (hardly a Volkssturm militian would have survived enough to fire all of them anyway) than issuing a single shooter even with 10.000 rounds.
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  44. ​ @edwardscott3262  About at the end of WWI it was decided that 500-600 RPM was the best compromise between effectiveness, ammo consumption and barrel heating for an infantry automatic firearm. That's why, IE, all the Italian pistol and rifle caliber infantry automatic weapons in WWII (from the MAB38 to the Breda 37) had that fire-rate, regardless of the action.
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  45. Walther P38 and Beretta 92/M9 series have a separate locking block. This allow the barrel to recoil in a straight line instead of tilting
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  46. Already did by Tanfoglio (EAA Witness).
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  47. Power comes with weight, that's not hilarious.
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  48.  @chuckschillingvideos  A 8mm Kurz weights 17.05 grams. A 7.92 Mauser patrone 98 weights 27 Grams. I would not call 37% less "negligible".
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  49. Or markets where AR15s are regularly available, but buyers are not obsessed with them like Americans are.
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  50. The ejection port was there so that a right handed shooter could see into the chamber without moving the gun. The charging handle was there to be operated with the right hand while mantaining the weapon in line with the left one.
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