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 catbarf wrote:
Happy new year all. I have acquired something I never thought I'd own- a Mateba 6 Unica autorevolver. It's effectively a semi-automatic revolver;

The ultimate range toy.

Although I think there's another revolver out there of newer vintage that fires out of the bottom of the cylinder.

People scoffed when they saw models of the Votann with pump action revolver shotguns. I bring to you the tactical lever action 9mm with box magazine and stock from a Remington 870.

https://www.offgridweb.com/gear/new-pof-tombstone-9mm-lever-action-rifle/amp/

The tactical cowboy

I'm considering a Charles Daly 1911, anyone dealt with these before?

 cuda1179 wrote:
People scoffed when they saw models of the Votann with pump action revolver shotguns. I bring to you the tactical lever action 9mm with box magazine and stock from a Remington 870.

https://www.offgridweb.com/gear/new-pof-tombstone-9mm-lever-action-rifle/amp/

I can see those being v popular in the UK if someone imports them!

 Slinky wrote:

 cuda1179 wrote:
People scoffed when they saw models of the Votann with pump action revolver shotguns. I bring to you the tactical lever action 9mm with box magazine and stock from a Remington 870.

https://www.offgridweb.com/gear/new-pof-tombstone-9mm-lever-action-rifle/amp/

I can see those being v popular in the UK if someone imports them!

Those would skirt UK gun laws? Huh, didn't even consider that. What are your magazine capacity limits?

 Slinky wrote:


I can see those being v popular in the UK if someone imports them!

I've been looking for something like this for a while - and you see "Cowboy Assault Rifles" in certain circles where they take an economy model lever-action and make it totally tactical.

It is also interesting from a legal standpoint because if you chambered it in 9mm Steyr or .32 ACP, it would be legal in lots of places.

The magazines could be an issue, but I think the solution there would be a fixed magazine with stripper clips.

How about a bullpup belt-fed lever action?

 Grey Templar wrote:
How about a bullpup belt-fed lever action?

Looks like it should’ve been a shotgun to my idiot eyes.

 Grey Templar wrote:
How about a bullpup belt-fed lever action?

Bullpups remain a solution looking for a problem. They were really never good for anything other than range toys, which is why so many countries that adopted them have subsequently dropped them.

Yes, I know the UK is oddly wedded to its German-refurbed bullpups, but that's British thinking for you: when every other army (including Spain and France) were developing auto-loading handguns, they re-equipped their troops with an underpowered .38 revolver, subsequently making it DAO because they wanted something even more useless. When your army procurement is playing catch-up with Nationalist China, you've got a problem.

 cuda1179 wrote:

 Slinky wrote:

 cuda1179 wrote:
People scoffed when they saw models of the Votann with pump action revolver shotguns. I bring to you the tactical lever action 9mm with box magazine and stock from a Remington 870.

https://www.offgridweb.com/gear/new-pof-tombstone-9mm-lever-action-rifle/amp/

I can see those being v popular in the UK if someone imports them!

Those would skirt UK gun laws? Huh, didn't even consider that. What are your magazine capacity limits?

Would still need a gun licence to buy it, alien as that is to US thinking

There are no magazine limits here, though.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:
Bullpups remain a solution looking for a problem.

Bullpups are a response to readily observable problems. In just the last two decades, the problem of 20"-barrel rifles being unsuitable for room-clearing and entering/exiting vehicles was seen in Fallujah, and the problem of shorter .223 carbines lacking the muzzle velocity to effectively engage (and produce terminal effect) at 500+yds was seen in Kandahar.

They're regarded poorly in civilian circles that focus on short-ranged competition shooting and aping door-kickers, where the benefits of longer barrels are irrelevant but the tradeoffs of reload time and heavy triggers are significant. If all you're doing is shooting silhouettes at 50yds, yeah, a bullpup is just a novelty.

NATO members have been moving away from bullpups as their military doctrine shifts to mechanized warfare and expecting infantry to only fight inside of 200yds, rather than expecting troops to be capable of engaging at long range in the Fulda Gap in the morning, and going door-to-door in Berlin in the evening. Even still, we are currently seeing bullpup AK conversions in active procurement in Ukraine, where mechanized/urban warfare favors shorter overall length but maintaining velocity helps defeat Ratnik body armor.

Ironically, the US's ongoing .277 Fury project is the perfect application for a bullpup. It's a cartridge that requires a decent barrel length plus a suppressor, and is intended to be flat-shooting and ballistically effective at 500yds, while also used by mechanized units in MOUT. But Army is only capable of entertaining one or maybe two new ideas at a time, and the barrel-burner cartridge with sci-fi fire control is already novel enough.

The main issue with bullpups is that a lot of the designs out there are hack jobs. Taking an existing rifle and forcing it to be a bullpup. This results in bad triggers because you are doing weird linkages to get it to work. Brass ejection is also an issue as if the bullpup doesn't match the user's handed-ness you get brass in the face.

Making a rifle shorter, but still maintaining full barrel length, is a major benefit so people are always going to try to make them work. But you do need to design the weapon from the ground up as a bullpup otherwise you might have teething issues. The AUG is perhaps the best example of a bullpup that works.

 catbarf wrote:
[

Ironically, the US's ongoing .277 Fury project is the perfect application for a bullpup. It's a cartridge that requires a decent barrel length plus a suppressor, and is intended to be flat-shooting and ballistically effective at 500yds, while also used by mechanized units in MOUT. But Army is only capable of entertaining one or maybe two new ideas at a time, and the barrel-burner cartridge with sci-fi fire control is already novel enough.

That rifle is a complete boondoggle. It weighs more than the M14, requires an unprecedentedly complex logistical chain to support its ammunition and will require a huge percentage of the force to use something else anyway. And this at a time when rising interest rates will cripple defense spending. But I digress.

You also left out another reason why bullpups failed, which was that they were supposed to replace SMGs. The UK, France and Austria were looking at ways to economize and the notion of getting rid of SMGs and just having an all-in-one rifle was very seductive. Obviously, it didn't work. SMGs are tremendously popular because they serve a very useful purpose. It's interesting that China arrived late to the bullpup party and didn't stick around, choosing to go back to a more conventional design.

I think I found a loophole in US law in which a bullpup would technically allow you to skirt US law and effectively allow you to have an otherwise illegal firearm.

Normally, a rifle needs to be a minimum of 26 inches with a minimum of 16 inches of barrel. This is measured with stocks extended.

I happen to have a carbine conversion of a Glock 23 with a collapsible stock, and it's only 24 inches long when collapsed. It also has a picatinny rail in front of the trigger.

I've thought about making a removable mount using that rail. Basically a forward vertical grip with a secondary trigger with a linkage back to the real trigger. This would allow me to shoulder and fire the weapon with the stock collapsed. However, if I extended the stock I could still shoot it using my left hand as the trigger finger.

As far as I can tell, this does conform to all US laws, although I can see the ATF frowning on it.

 cuda1179 wrote:
I think I found a loophole in US law in which a bullpup would technically allow you to skirt US law and effectively allow you to have an otherwise illegal firearm.

Short-barreled rifles are legal, but you have to pay a tax stamp. It's a bizarre judicial creation and I don't think any other country has anything like it. For those of you abroad, it treats pistols with stocks as a uniquely dangerous things. This has nothing to do with its rate of fire, magazine capacity, etc. It's purely a barrel length thing.

Which makes no sense, because shorter barrels are less accurate and impart less velocity. The reason it exists was to ban "gangster guns" during the Prohibition Era (another remarkably stupid idea).

Because it makes no sense and serves no discernible purpose, its enforcement is haphazard. For example, there are "braces" which look like stocks but have a strap on then, so that the pistol is "braced" against the forearm. Are they legal? Well, so long as you don't use them as a stock, apparently.

There are also exceptions for weapons whose manufacture predated the ban. Stocked pistols were once quite common, particularly in the Old West, but also in various European pistols. The Mauser C96 famously could take a shoulder stock, and so could Browning Hi Powers, Lugers, etc. All of those are legal.

You can also legally have a modern pistol with a stock, but it will cost $200 and requires special markings on it because reasons.

Alternatively, you can weld a flash hider/muzzle break at the muzzle to increase overall length. This does nothing to boost velocity, it's simply cosmetic, and here again we come up with the stupidity of the rule.

A new take on this is to build polymer "clamshell" adapters, much like the ones movie propmasters use to make guns look strange and futuristic (see also "Aliens" hiding Tommy guns inside polymer shells). The outer covering retains access to the firing controls, but it adds a stock. Is it legal?

All of this because in the 1930s some judges made rulings that essentially boiled down to "I'll know it when I see it."

For the US legal schenangans, a bullpup does let you make the overall weapon shorter while maintaining a full length barrel.

There are 3 ways a weapon becomes an SBR.

1) A rifled weapon with a stock and a barrel length of less than 16"

2) A rifled weapon with an overall length of less than 26"

3) A pistol with a barrel less than 16" and overall length less than 26"

Bullpups usually take advantage of maintaining a 16"+ barrel while being just above 26" total length. That is how they avoid being SBRs, and indeed that is the purpose of a bullpup. Keeping a full length barrel.

Putting an extra trigger linkage on a Rony(or equivalent device) chassis for a Glock does not let you get around SBR laws. If there is an actual Stock and not a pistol brace it is an SBR(assuming it has the normal Glock 23 barrel and not some 16" weirdness)

 Grey Templar wrote:
The main issue with bullpups is that a lot of the designs out there are hack jobs. Taking an existing rifle and forcing it to be a bullpup. This results in bad triggers because you are doing weird linkages to get it to work. Brass ejection is also an issue as if the bullpup doesn't match the user's handed-ness you get brass in the face.

Making a rifle shorter, but still maintaining full barrel length, is a major benefit so people are always going to try to make them work. But you do need to design the weapon from the ground up as a bullpup otherwise you might have teething issues. The AUG is perhaps the best example of a bullpup that works.

There's also balance, malfunction-clearing, optics support (particularly height over bore), safety, and heat concerns. Purpose-built bullpups generally do better in all of these respects than conversions.

I've shot a number of them and ended up buying an AUG. It'll never be as fast as my ARs for competition shooting, but it isn't rear-heavy like a Tavor, impossible to clear like an F2000, or as long as an M16A1/A2/A4. It's a gimmick for my uses, but an exemplar as far as that gimmick goes.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:You also left out another reason why bullpups failed, which was that they were supposed to replace SMGs. The UK, France and Austria were looking at ways to economize and the notion of getting rid of SMGs and just having an all-in-one rifle was very seductive. Obviously, it didn't work.

Er, historically speaking, that's pretty much exactly what happened. Even countries that didn't adopt bullpups replaced SMGs in most roles as intermediate-caliber carbines became standard.

The UK, France, and Austria all stopped issuing submachine guns as PDWs for squad leaders and non-combat personnel after adopting bullpup service rifles, cutting the biggest use case for submachine guns. The UK stopped manufacturing the Sterling in '88 and retired its use from reserve units by the late '90s, retaining really only MP5s for limited (eg SAS) use. France entirely replaced the MAT-49 with the FAMAS in the '80s, and while Austria kept the MPi-81 in service for special forces and a particular APC variant, the AUG replaced it in all conventional combat roles. Croatia adopted the VHS rifles to replace a slew of different indigenous submachine gun designs, Israel replaced both the Uzi and hand-me-down Menusar carbines with the Tavor, and West Germany was all set to adopt the G11 to replace both the G3 and MP5 until their defense budget disintegrated with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile the bullpup-phobic US stopped developing new submachine gun designs after WW2, with the M14 originally intended by the Ordnance Board as a 'universal rifle' (re-issuing M3s when that didn't work), the M16 actually achieving that goal in practice, and the 653/723/727/XM4/M4 refining it to something a little more ideal (and coincidentally nearly exactly the same size as an L85, FAMAS, or AUG). The Soviet Union got a head start with the AK starting to replace both rifles and submachine guns as early as the 1950s, and the Soviet answer to the need for a smaller weapon for vehicle crews and SF was the AKS-74U, a compact carbine.

Nowadays what few submachine guns remain in military and police use (MP5s, mostly, along with the oddball PDWs like the MP7 and P90) are gradually on the way out because compact carbines- particularly suppressed and in short-barrel-optimized calibers (eg .300BLK)- offer better range, terminal effect, and particularly armor penetration, with no significant downsides.

It wasn't strictly bullpups that killed the submachine gun, but their widespread adoption did significantly hasten its demise.

cuda1179 wrote:I think I found a loophole in US law in which a bullpup would technically allow you to skirt US law and effectively allow you to have an otherwise illegal firearm.

Normally, a rifle needs to be a minimum of 26 inches with a minimum of 16 inches of barrel. This is measured with stocks extended.

I happen to have a carbine conversion of a Glock 23 with a collapsible stock, and it's only 24 inches long when collapsed. It also has a picatinny rail in front of the trigger.

I've thought about making a removable mount using that rail. Basically a forward vertical grip with a secondary trigger with a linkage back to the real trigger. This would allow me to shoulder and fire the weapon with the stock collapsed. However, if I extended the stock I could still shoot it using my left hand as the trigger finger.

As far as I can tell, this does conform to all US laws, although I can see the ATF frowning on it.

Yeah, that would be legal. There's a similar application where a bullpup kit applied to a pistol theoretically maybe possibly allows you to brace the pistol against your body. Not with a recoil pad or anything, because obviously that would constitute designing it to fire from the shoulder and thus manufacturing an SBR, but at the moment there's no policy preventing use of a pistol in this manner.

 Grey Templar wrote:


Putting an extra trigger linkage on a Rony(or equivalent device) chassis for a Glock does not let you get around SBR laws. If there is an actual Stock and not a pistol brace it is an SBR(assuming it has the normal Glock 23 barrel and not some 16" weirdness)

This conversion carbine kit replaces the entire upper of the pistol, and includes a 16 inch barrel. Since the 26 inch minimal overall length is measured with stocks extended, the collapsible stock means it can fold down to under 26 inches, even if the gun can still be fired in that configuration.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

Bullpups remain a solution looking for a problem. .

As others have pointed out, they are to provide 'rifle' performance from a carbine length of weapon. The Brits actually wanted a different calibre but decided to follow the yanks which arguably undermined what they were going for. Eventually even America has decided they want something different.

But all that ignores the part about the military being a system. Small arms are a small part of it. The calculations for an individual are about matching a gun to a need or range of needs. For an army it is how do we get all these different cogs spinning together.

The US has been happy with a carbine for years. One of their (many) strengths when it comes to people is crew served weapons. They are expensive and need excellent logistics. But the US can do that and leverage its other advantages. The M4 is fine. With scale also comes better specialisation. US troops need far less training than a military like the British where individuals have to be able to do more things. With that higher training overhead a more complex rifle can be accommodated. It remains to be seen if they can change to a more complex longer ranged weapon.

The UK doctrine for infantry is mechanised riflemen. They are expected to be able to engage targets individually at a longer range. Tasks that would be taken up with heavier weapons in the US system end up with individual soldiers in the British army and they are also expected to do far more CQB.

You will see militaries shift between short ranged, long ranged, small, big, etc. as budget and doctrine change.

 Grey Templar wrote:


Putting an extra trigger linkage on a Rony(or equivalent device) chassis for a Glock does not let you get around SBR laws. If there is an actual Stock and not a pistol brace it is an SBR(assuming it has the normal Glock 23 barrel and not some 16" weirdness)

I've seen some absurdly long pistol barrels that can be dropped into the frame as well. I think there is a 1911 package where you can put in a crazy long barrel and a stock and now it's a PCC. Obviously, you have to add in one of those ludicrously long magazines for full effect.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:


Putting an extra trigger linkage on a Rony(or equivalent device) chassis for a Glock does not let you get around SBR laws. If there is an actual Stock and not a pistol brace it is an SBR(assuming it has the normal Glock 23 barrel and not some 16" weirdness)

I've seen some absurdly long pistol barrels that can be dropped into the frame as well. I think there is a 1911 package where you can put in a crazy long barrel and a stock and now it's a PCC. Obviously, you have to add in one of those ludicrously long magazines for full effect.

Yes, if you swap to a 16" barrel you are fine because then it's now rifle length, but if you've got a short barrel cough up the $200 to Uncle Sam pls.

Bullpup revolver anyone?

https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2022/12/21/wheelgun-wednesday-zenk-rzmk-357-bullpup-revolver/

 cuda1179 wrote:
Bullpup revolver anyone?

https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2022/12/21/wheelgun-wednesday-zenk-rzmk-357-bullpup-revolver/

Rapid reload seems completely out of the question.

And for the same dimensions, you could carry a lot more dakka with a magazine in the grip.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

Rapid reload seems completely out of the question.

And for the same dimensions, you could carry a lot more dakka with a magazine in the grip.

Depends on if you can remove the whole cylinder. A reloader wouldn't work, but if you can just swap out cylinders, it might come close.

Revolvers have their uses, don't get me wrong, but if you're looking to spread lead so much that magazine capacity is an issue, you probably shouldn't be using a side arm.

 BaronIveagh wrote:

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

Rapid reload seems completely out of the question.

And for the same dimensions, you could carry a lot more dakka with a magazine in the grip.

Depends on if you can remove the whole cylinder. A reloader wouldn't work, but if you can just swap out cylinders, it might come close.

Revolvers have their uses, don't get me wrong, but if you're looking to spread lead so much that magazine capacity is an issue, you probably shouldn't be using a side arm.

If this can hot-swap cylinders, has decent reliably, and isn't a wallet crusher, I might get one. I've fancied break top revolvers for some time.

 BaronIveagh wrote:


Depends on if you can remove the whole cylinder. A reloader wouldn't work, but if you can just swap out cylinders, it might come close.

Revolvers have their uses, don't get me wrong, but if you're looking to spread lead so much that magazine capacity is an issue, you probably shouldn't be using a side arm.

I'm a huge fan of revolvers. The primary advantage of revolvers is their simplicity - both in operation and in use. The tradeoff is that autoloaders can be more compact, have higher magazine capacities and much faster reloads.

This revolver seems to have none of the advantages and all of the disadvantages. It's an exotic engineering project, reminiscent of the Darden.

I'm curious as to what the various laws/regulations are pertaining to black powder weapons - and this would of course include revolvers.

Under federal law in the U.S., black powder weapons aren't regulated as firearms. There are also "kit guns" which you can buy and assemble (often applying your own finish to the wood parts) without much (if any) regulation.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:
I'm curious as to what the various laws/regulations are pertaining to black powder weapons - and this would of course include revolvers.

Under federal law in the U.S., black powder weapons aren't regulated as firearms. There are also "kit guns" which you can buy and assemble (often applying your own finish to the wood parts) without much (if any) regulation.

Here in the US Bass Pro Shop and Cabela's used to have black powder revolvers on the rack in plastic clampacks like they used to do with pellet guns. You could buy one easily. You could also buy a conversion cylinder to convert it to 45 Long Colt. Neither are firearms unless you combine them.

They're not legally firearms anywhere in the US as far as I know.