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 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:
What in the name of God is this monstrosity?

I've watched the video, but I still don't get it.

I hope none of my fellow dakka members ever bought one of these.

I, sadly, DO own one of those. Let me give you the rundown of this POS. First, it's not all bad. I got mine for $140 new, and it came with a 25 round Ruger mag. So, even though I hate the gun, I got a quality mag for my 10-22. Second, it is accurate. Pretty dang accurate. The only pistol I have that shoots better is my 8-inch slab side barrel Ruger Mk3 target pistol. If you have large hands it is also not nearly as uncomfortable to hold as it looks. The trigger is predictable, but feels as spongy as a Tavor.

This thing is a jam-o-matic 5000. When I first got it I could not get more than 3 shots off in a row before a jam. Also, I had one out of battery detonation. Hurt like hell. I tried to fix all these problems by finding the absolute best ammo (gun is really picky). I also disassembled it, polished all the metal parts to a hi sheen with a buffer wheel on my Dremel tool, and used a copper brush attachment in my power drill to ever so slightly increase the diameter of the breach, then buffed it to a high sheen. I then used graphite (instructions indicate no oil ever be used) to lube all internals. I then switched to factory 10-round 10-22 mags as they are the most reliable.

After all that I can get about 12-13 shots in between jams. The problems? Some ammo is a little to big for the gun and doesn't slide in easily. The ejection port is way too small and makes jams happen more frequently. The rate of fire of this weapon is WAY too hi. If it didn't jam and you got used to the trigger this thing could be confused for a micro UZI. This means lower-quality mags can't keep up with the cyclical rate, and you get misfeeds and hang-ups.

If they made the ejection port about 1/4 inch taller and wider, and flared the opening, and made the whole weapon 1/2 an inch longer for a longer bolt travel to reduce cyclical rate this gun would have been awesome. Now I only keep it around in case there is a gun buy-back program.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Wonder if I could get an aluminum bolt for this this milled out? could help slow things down a bit.

Would aluminium help that much, it'd still be pretty light? That thing looks to me like it's got so many problems that should have been sorted out at a prototype stage, it just looks so uncomfortable to shoot as well. I heard Ian's description of what happened to the company, but was there a reason the Zip went into production with all those issues still not ironed out? Did they have to rush it for any reason? Even the practical failings aside, the gun just looks aesthetically and ergonomically awful.

Reminds me of a Biker Scout’s pistol from ROTJ.

It looks like a 1980's GI-Joe plastic toy ray gun.

I love the pic of that thing stuck to the underside of a SCAR. "yeah slap this monstrously nonfunctional .22lr chunk of plastic to your $3k combat rifle!"

 Grey Templar wrote:

 LumenPraebeo wrote:


Did people really make guns out of black walnut? That stuff absorbs and stores heat easier and longer than any other wood.

Well that was when a gun would only be firing 3-4 shots a minute. More time to cool between shots.

Actually they *still* make them. I've always found them a nice and very comfortable material to shoot with, though heavier than flimsy wire stocks, carbon composite, or, ugh, plastic.

1911's, for example, were originally designed with American black walnut grips. It's a pretty common grip materiel for this iconic weapon.

I also have a 1745 light Dragoon that has a black walnut stock. In it's day, tiny ass .50 cal was for ladies and wimps.

Just out of curiosity, I've heard a rumor and I'm not sure it's true that Mosin Nagant once produced a .58 cal revolver (as in, a modern one)? Anyone heard of this thing?

 simonr1978 wrote:
Would aluminium help that much, it'd still be pretty light? That thing looks to me like it's got so many problems that should have been sorted out at a prototype stage, it just looks so uncomfortable to shoot as well. I heard Ian's description of what happened to the company, but was there a reason the Zip went into production with all those issues still not ironed out? Did they have to rush it for any reason? Even the practical failings aside, the gun just looks aesthetically and ergonomically awful.

Aluminum isn't all that heavy, but still noticeably heavier than the plastic part. Any extra weight would help, even a 5% increase in mass would help with the feeding issues tremendously I'd wager.

As for what use you'd want for this thing, I was hoping to use it as a backpacking gun. It's hellishly light, fairly compact, and uses a reliable mag.

Thanks Cuda, I was more wondering why the problems weren't fixed before it went into production. I can understand the appeal for it since it does look very light and compact, but it just seems like there are a fair few modifications that could be made that would have improved the Zip's dismal reliability, even if you probably couldn't do a great deal about the ergonomics, which is why I was wondering if they had to rush the production without properly testing or modifying it.

 BaronIveagh wrote:


Just out of curiosity, I've heard a rumor and I'm not sure it's true that Mosin Nagant once produced a .58 cal revolver (as in, a modern one)? Anyone heard of this thing?

Maybe you are thinking of this?

https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2014/09/17/meet-rsh-12-powerful-revolver-world-russian/

Seems like a hilariously overpowered pistol. 12.7x55mm

 Grey Templar wrote:

 BaronIveagh wrote:


Just out of curiosity, I've heard a rumor and I'm not sure it's true that Mosin Nagant once produced a .58 cal revolver (as in, a modern one)? Anyone heard of this thing?

Maybe you are thinking of this?

https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2014/09/17/meet-rsh-12-powerful-revolver-world-russian/

Seems like a hilariously overpowered pistol. 12.7x55mm

Might be, but that's only a .50 cal, and this was supposedly even bigger. Might just have been a rumor though.

Well black powder weapons sometimes come in larger than 50 cal. .58 is actually a fairly common black powder rifle caliber. But I've never heard of a cartridge is something that large. Once you get to 12.7mm/.50 cal the scale jumps up to light artillery shells.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Well black powder weapons sometimes come in larger than 50 cal. .58 is actually a fairly common black powder rifle caliber. But I've never heard of a cartridge is something that large. Once you get to 12.7mm/.50 cal the scale jumps up to light artillery shells.

Other than hanging on to it, and over-penetration of the target, there's nothing wrong with light artillery shells.

14.5mm Russian and 20mm Oerlikon are both rifle and autocannon rounds.

And I know, my light dragoon pistol is a .69 flintlock. Load with double buck and ball and cut someone in half. If you hit them.

No kill like overkill eh?

 Grey Templar wrote:
No kill like overkill eh?

There are three things you can never be:

Too Rich,

Too Good Looking.

Too Heavily Armed.


To be honest though being a big guy I just prefer weapons that feel 'my size'. My first gun my parents trained me with was a sawed off 1828 Prussian. I can still stick my thumb down the barrel.

Whooo:
https://gazette.com/military/army-might-have-found-its-new-rifle-in-colorado-springs/article_96cd214c-c290-11e8-9d41-27b5a0e767a4.html

I'll take 2 please!

It's cool, though multibarrel/extreme RoF and electronically fired shoulder weapons have all been done before.

Whether they can be proof against what ravages new-boot teenagers can subject them to, feed quickly and reliably (and economically) with those 4shot packs, and remain accurate, and be produced economically, while offering a meaningful performance advantage over an M16 remains to be seen. Historically such attempts have failed in one or all of these areas.

Still super neat though, I'd love to see more.

https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2018/09/daniel-zimmerman/is-the-ribbon-gun-the-armys-next-rifle/

Alternative link for those who'd rather not pay out to read about it, looks interesting at any rate.

"Is The ‘Ribbon Gun’ The Army’s Next Rifle?"

Whenever the headline ends in a question mark, the answer is always "no".

This doesn't seem to offer very much improvement over an existing M4 while adding an enormous of complexity. The system is novel but the actual application seems like a reach.

He kept saying that you get better accuracy because the action has to move only 2mm (instead of the length of a bolt carrier sliding back to the buffer) but they gloss over that you're potentially going to have 4x the recoil since you're now burning 4 chambers worth of powder simultaneously.

Firing 250 rounds per second (which I don't believe since I bet it can't chamber the blocks fast enough) only sounds awesome until you have dudes who have to actually carry the ammo.

The actual blocks have to be made of steel, presumably, since it has chamber pressure. That means they are going to be much, much heavier than standard magazines.

And so on, and so forth.

My concern would be wearing out the barrels so fast you go through tons of replacements. There is also the battery life to consider.

The funny thing is that this weapon would get around every firearm law out there because it doesn’t use centerfire ammo. Technically it wouldn’t even be a firearm legally speaking. Legal full auto folks!

I don't think the barrels would wear out faster- if anything, they'd wear out slower, since you're spreading the firing through 4 instead of 1. You'd have to check the specific full-auto times vs conventional full-auto feed rates, but the Ribbon's would be divided by 4 in any case.

The ammo, at least in the shown picture, looks like either a ceramic, or aluminum. Both of which would be lightweight enough and probably strong enough. Bulk would be an issue, but I'm thinking weight might not.

The thing is, a block with holes in it is going to have more structural integrity than a thin-walled cylinder, meaning that overall I'm betting this system would actually have MUCH higher general durability.

Heck, even the whole battery issue is probably NOT, considering how little energy the firing probably needs, and the electronicalization of the modern soldier. Hehe. You could even put a little wind-up handle on there to manually crank-charge it.

The biggest issue for deployment would be re-usability or disposability. If a soldier drops or loses a bunch of bullets, or even a whole magazine or ammo box nowadays, it's not a big deal. Some brass, powder, and stamped sheet metal. But if these blocks need specialized machining or expensive composites, that might be a sticking point.

If we take the given rof as accurate, even spread over 4 barrels each would be subjected to up to 3750 rounds per minute. Unless the article meant to say 250 rounds per minute and not second.

Put me firmly in the 'cool, but not anything I want to see my son and his buddies carry into battle' camp, and I'm sure glad it was nothing my troopers or I were issued.

I have to admit, I don't really see what's supposed to be so great about this. I can see why firing an extremely fast 4 round burst being useful in close quarters, but it does seem like that might come at the not insignificant sacrifice of having a greatly reduced magazine capacity (Although the picture seems to show a side loading magazine which I guess would carry multiple blocks). As far as the accuracy goes, I was under the impression that most current infantry rifles are considerably more accurate than their users in combat conditions so that point seems somewhat irrelevant.

The article I read mentioned that it fires caseless ammunition, but the cutaway seems to suggest that the magazine-blocks effectively act as very large, thick, multi-round, reusable cases, with the extra complication that the primers, bullets and propellants look to be separate rather than really being true caseless like the failed G-11 was supposed to have been. To me that appears to suggest that the PBI could end up having to make up the ammunition manually from separate components, which sounds nightmarish if you run out of pre-loaded mag-blocks in the middle of a contact and seems reminiscent of more of an 19th century firearm than even a 20th century one, assuming that they even can be reloaded in the field which is not at all apparent.

I wonder how the weight and bulk of 100 rounds of "caseless" ammunition in its steel blocks would compare to 100 rounds of 5.56mm in conventional magazines or carried loose. I'm 100% guessing from looking at it, but I'd imagine not good, especially if it turns out each individual soldier would be getting through ammunition quicker.

The real innovation seems to be the electric firing mechanism, I can see how reducing the number of mechanical components could be a distinct advantage since there's fewer points of potential failure, although I did note the phrase "electromagnetic actuator" which does still sound fairly mechanical.

Overall it does seem fairly novel, but somehow I'll be surprised if it even gets as far as the ACR projects did.

I think that electronic firing with 100% caseless ammo is the future for sure, but the "caseless ammo" is probably just going to be slugs that get fired down rails. So, we're a while off from that in terms of rail longevity and getting a power source both potent and small enough.

Of course, by the time we have a power source potent and small enough to drive a handheld railgun, we'll also probably have lasers to match.

I think primer + gunpower + bullet won't make it the next 100 years as a first world small arms weapon system. Mixing that system with electronics seems to add complexity without really making it better in any significant way.

The usual hype-train over something that'll never be a service rifle. The reality is that we, as a species, have yet to design something better than the self-contained cartridge which in essence is our current way of hurling "stones" at each other with enough speed to break each other's bodies.

Even when first world nations start to experiment with something that may slowly replace our firearms in the next 30-40-50 years, other countries and the world will still be using the self-contained cartridge in a mechanically operated firearm for hundreds if not thousands of years. It's cool gadget tech to read about, but it's always under the usual media garbage headlines.

As technology advances, you lose the ability to crimp blocks of ammunition into a case, store it in the dirt for 100 years...and then pull a rifle packed in grease out of a box that is equally old, clean it, load it, and fire it. The logistical simplicity offered by standard firearms is the largest hurdle new technologies have. Particularly in an industry which does seek to sell to all nations and not just first world nations.

 Grey Templar wrote:
The funny thing is that this weapon would get around every firearm law out there because it doesn’t use centerfire ammo. Technically it wouldn’t even be a firearm legally speaking. Legal full auto folks!

The primer configuration is not how the Gun Control Act defines firearms, unfortunately. Centerfire, rimfire, flintlock, whatever - none of that matters. Any weapon that expels a projectile by action of an explosion is considered a firearm, and any weapon that fired more than one shot with a single trigger pull would be considered a machine gun.

Anvildude wrote:
The ammo, at least in the shown picture, looks like either a ceramic, or aluminum. Both of which would be lightweight enough and probably strong enough.

I'm not a metallurgist but I don't think an aluminum chamber can stand up to the stresses of firing a 6mm cartridge - probably something like 60k psi. I don't know of any firearms that have a chamber made of aluminum; correct me if I am wrong.

 Ouze wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
The funny thing is that this weapon would get around every firearm law out there because it doesn’t use centerfire ammo. Technically it wouldn’t even be a firearm legally speaking. Legal full auto folks!

The primer configuration is not how the Gun Control Act defines firearms, unfortunately. Centerfire, rimfire, flintlock, whatever - none of that matters. Any weapon that expels a projectile by action of an explosion is considered a firearm, and any weapon that fired more than one shot with a single trigger pull would be considered a machine gun.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Anvildude wrote:
The ammo, at least in the shown picture, looks like either a ceramic, or aluminum. Both of which would be lightweight enough and probably strong enough.

I'm not a metallurgist but I don't think an aluminum chamber can stand up to the stresses of firing a 6mm cartridge - probably something like 60k psi. I don't know of any firearms that have a chamber made of aluminum.

Wait would that make roman candles a firearm? that or any sort of firework. (which i guess has fire in the name so maybe)

Nah, cause roman candles are not "weapons".

Although my friends and I definitely shot them at each other when we were teenagers.

 Ouze wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
The funny thing is that this weapon would get around every firearm law out there because it doesn’t use centerfire ammo. Technically it wouldn’t even be a firearm legally speaking. Legal full auto folks!

The primer configuration is not how the Gun Control Act defines firearms, unfortunately. Centerfire, rimfire, flintlock, whatever - none of that matters. Any weapon that expels a projectile by action of an explosion is considered a firearm, and any weapon that fired more than one shot with a single trigger pull would be considered a machine gun

As far as I could tell from the article, this is a rail gun. It doesn’t use an explosion, it uses electromagnetic acceleration.

OK, now I see where the disconnect is.

No, the blocks are full of gunpowder. There is a single line in the article alluding to this; the video makes it more apparent.



So the blocks are essentially a combination magazine and chamber.

I would agree that a 100% electrically driven gun, a railgun, would not fall under any firearms legislation that exists. This is just an electronically fired hammer though, functionally - that's what I think they mean by "2mm of movement".

This is why I'm saying I think that ROF is bs (or true, but stripping out the context to make it a lie of omission).

I believe their system can fire electrical impulses that fast, I bet you can even drop and reset an electronically driven firing pin that fast, but I do not believe you can feed those ammo blocks through the firearm that fast; you would need to somehow actuate 50 of those 5 round blocks through the gun on one second.

The video (Which I should have watched before posting earlier) also shows stacks of the blocks loading from a side feeding magazine, oddly the gun in the video at the show seems to have five bores and five round blocks rather than four. I'm guessing that it may have a very high rate of fire over a four round burst since it can fire all four bores at once (I'm assuming that the five round/bore gun was the very first prototype and for some reason they dropped to four), but even so I'd agree it does seem doubtful. Especially as the idea is supposed to be that the guns will run cooler and so will be able to fire continuously.

The company rep also mentions that for the military spec gun the blocks would come pre-loaded from the factory, so no reloading from loose ammunition, but then reloading the caseless ammunition in combat's probably not practical anyway, unless the powder, primer and bullet was neatly secured for carrying in a casing of some sort, perhaps made of some type of non-ferrous metal...

Personally I'd bet that these blocks will be significantly more expensive than traditional brass cartridge cases per shot as they'll inevitably take more work to produce. Combine that with the extra bulk and weight of them compared to standard brass, the quantities that will be required and the untested electromagnetic firing system (plus I'm guessing soldiers will probably want to carry a spare battery or two for that), those all seem to be significant minuses and will probably outweigh any benefits the system might have (Would firing four bullets at once really be that much of an advantage?), regardless of how fragile or robust it turns out to be.

(I'm also still not convinced that combining four or five rounds into what is effectively a single case makes the ammunition "caseless" in any meaningful sense, except maybe as a marketing gimmick)

I believe their system can fire electrical impulses that fast, I bet you can even drop and reset an electronically driven firing pin that fast, but I do not believe you can feed those ammo blocks through the firearm that fast; you would need to somehow actuate 50 of those 5 round blocks through the gun on one second.

Or over 60 blocks per second for the quad bore model, which is IIRC around six times the cyclic rate of the Kalashnikov. I guess if you were firing all four bores all the time and didn't have the delay of the action travelling back, ejecting and chambering the next round it could be possible (Although even taking that into account, it still seems high), how useful it would be is another matter entirely.