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Yeah, actually France was close to get a semi rifle in ww1 but ended up not for many reasons that had nothing to do with military.

The worst of the worst must have been nagant revolvers though. Reloading a revolver in battle is already probably going to get you killed, but the nagant is probably even worse.

Only advantage to revolvers is really how good they look, so for a range and fun shooting rifle, that's neat. Never got why they issued them to the police though.

 Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote:
Never got why they issued them to the police though.

Because they're cheap. Most police in the US even into the 80s were being issued crappy revolvers in woefully wimpy cartridges and, if they were lucky, a few shotguns simply because the budget wouldn't allow for anything else.

Ok, should have suspected that

In WWI Lt Paul Jurgen Vollmer famously surrendered his whole company to Alvin York after emptying his pistol at York and missing with all of his shots. I suppose with a better gun he might have scored a hit or even been willing to reload it and keep fighting. York had killed 25 men (6 with his own 1911 handgun) but you have to believe the remaining 132 Germans would have eventually got him.

That one time aside, you have to wonder how much if any difference handgun quality made during that or any war. I understand these guys need to create these kinds of videos to maintain their livelihood. Maybe they will compare officer swords next.

I wonder if his thought process was more “their gear is great, and ours is crap. I don’t want my men to die aimlessly”?

I would imagine that everybody involved in war always tends to think the other side has better stuff, and if that is reinforced by you mag dumping some crazy American and failing to so much as scratch him I expect it would be rather demoralizing.

But practically speaking handguns are small potatoes in terms of equipment for warfare, its not going to be a deciding factor.

Trenches might’ve changed that though. It’s fine and well having a rifle which is good at range. But if your foe is in your trench with shotguns and accurate, dependable pistols?

Except unlike the last time there was a big trench war, rifles had to be manually rechambered, unlike the rifles we use today, furthermore, shotguns have 5 to 8 rounds capacity and only some of them are semi auto. I'll take the 30 rounds with the option to turn on the fun switch in a trench. Ideally the rifle's actually a carbine, in that case, but otherwise, I'll take one over a shotgun.

I’m going off sources which suggest the American troops in WW1 put their combat shotguns to exceptional use. To the point Germany wanted them banned.

Against bolt action rifles, and the occasional SMG. That is my point, you're not facing bolt action rifles that are over a meter in length anymore nor are short-ish weapon capable of fully automatic firing just ''occasional''

Edit: Nevermind, I think I saw a word that wasn't there, whoops.

Yeah, pistols and shotguns were much more effective in trench raids then bolt action rifles, but the effectiveness of trench raids themselves to the war overall is debatable. Raids couldn't really be relied on to take ground.

So my understanding was that strategically, raids did very little.

What they were intended to do, and arguably did, was keep the enemy edgy and demoralised, enable capture of low level intel, and keep your own soldiers active, and in fighting mode - rather than guys sitting in trenches not that far apart talking, or doing nothing.

Indeed. They weren't useless. They just weren't a major war ending factor.

 Bobthehero wrote:
Against bolt action rifles, and the occasional SMG. That is my point, you're not facing bolt action rifles that are over a meter in length anymore nor are short-ish weapon capable of fully automatic firing just ''occasional''

Edit: Nevermind, I think I saw a word that wasn't there, whoops.

Well, even today, you'll see pistols carried as side arms, and the occasional shotgun for CQC and breaching.

 Farseer Anath'lan wrote:
So my understanding was that strategically, raids did very little.

What they were intended to do, and arguably did, was keep the enemy edgy and demoralised, enable capture of low level intel, and keep your own soldiers active, and in fighting mode - rather than guys sitting in trenches not that far apart talking, or doing nothing.

Yes. If one reads accounts of the front, it's clear that they were "shaping" events for future action. Robert Graves served in a "county" regiment as well as with the Guards, and the contrast was striking. The "county" troops built up very high parapets, kept their heads down as much as possible, and were just trying to make it through the war alive. This meant very little situational awareness, little intel (since their raids were tentative and halting) so that along that sector, the Germans would hold the initiative.

The Guards, by contrast, had a policy of sniper dominance, absolute control over the battlespace, and constant offensive action to terrify the enemy. Their morale remained high and they had excellent intelligence.

So when major offensive action took place, both areas could be overrun, but one type of unit would surrender as opposed to inflicting punishing losses and conducting an orderly retreat.

Getting back to the question, I'm going to again point out that in terms of reloading and handling, the 1911 and perhaps the Luger are close to modern ergonomics, but nothing else in the autoloader side is. Dropping a mag while using a heel release actually takes more effort than dumping half moon clips out of a 1917, and you can actually have your clips in hand when you do it. Obviously, practice makes perfect, but autoloaders were not the slam-dunk winner of fast-handling that they are today.

That being said, yes, revolvers were on their way out as combat weapons (or should have been). The M1917s were put into service because the machining already existed and could not be converted to 1911 production.

Comparing them side by side, the Colt 1917 I shot is really nice, points well, smooth action and accurate. The vintage autoloaders I've played with had some challenges, which goes back to the reliability angle. One can argue that it's unfair to judge performance with an antique vs fresh off the assembly line, but doing a like with like, the revolvers aged better.

And while I'm at it, the Webley is a true disappointment. You'd think .455 (which sounds big and scary) would be a dominating cartridge, but it's not. Very mild to shoot, really (partly because it's so heavy).

 BaronIveagh wrote:

 Bobthehero wrote:
Against bolt action rifles, and the occasional SMG. That is my point, you're not facing bolt action rifles that are over a meter in length anymore nor are short-ish weapon capable of fully automatic firing just ''occasional''

Edit: Nevermind, I think I saw a word that wasn't there, whoops.

the occasional shotgun for CQC and breaching.

When it's used for breaching, the shotgun is a tool to breach, the breacher will still have a rifle (ideally a carbine) for self defense. The shotgun is used to break doors first and foremost, and you use it to shoot someone if that someone pops in your face when you got the shotgun in hand, but otherwise, it's a tool, like breaching charges or the battering ram. As for CQC, it's roughly similar to trenches, I'd go for a carbine over a shotgun

Think I’ve asked this before, but can’t be arsed to check.

The Biker Scout pistol from Return of the Jedi. What shooter is it based off?

IIRC it was based on a Liberator

A very cursory search suggests it was just carved from wood and greeblied up.

https://www.studiocreations.com/howto/bikerscout/theblaster.html

https://www.julienslive.com/lot-details/index/catalog/270/lot/104680/RETURN-OF-THE-JEDI-IMPERIAL-SCOUT-TROOPER-BIKER-SCOUT-SCOUT-BLASTER-MOVIE-PROP-WEAPON#:~:text=An%20original%20production%20used%20BlasTech,made%20with%20formed%20resin%20pieces.

Probably explains why I couldn’t get the answer I was looking for!

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Probably explains why I couldn’t get the answer I was looking for!

If you're interested in movie props based on actual firearms, I did a series of articles on the topic a few years ago:

https://www.ahlloyd.com/2020/12/geek-guns-at-bleedingfoolcom.html

What sets it apart is that in addition to telling you what it was made from, I actually took the piece out to the range so you can get my totally biased opinion on it.

Oh sweet! I’ll give that a read/watch!

 Grey Templar wrote:

This is generally why people hadn't switched over to semi-auto rifles either. Nobody was willing to put $ into trying to get a design off the ground despite it being technically feasible and quite obvious to everybody that everybody would eventually switch. Particularly by WW2 there was no justification other than "Its expensive" for people not having tried to switch over.

Interestingly while there is a high degree of existing stocks and training regimes factoring in, there was also a belief going back the 19th century about not letting soldiers fire too many bullets for a host of logistics and cost reasons, though perhaps that died out in WW1. You then had the rapid rise of machine guns and then squad portable machine guns with tactics soon being around those weapons and the firepower of the ammo carriers being less important. I wonder if had everyone going into WW2 had semi auto weapons if that would have impacted the subsequent focus on those squad support weapons.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Grey Templar wrote:
It is kinda surprising there hasn't really been a bunch of scopes with integrated rangefinders built into them. Given that you can get a handheld laser range finder for super cheap, integrating one into a scope should be no big deal. It would be a lot bulkier than a normal scope, but not excessively so.

Then you could have a scope that in theory you could zero at a fixed distance(like 100 meters), get the windage dialed in, and then with the rangefinder and built in distance ticks you can adjust to just about any distance. Or even possibly have a scope that automatically adjusted to the distance measured. Should at least be doable for most rifle calibers and most distances within 5-600 meters.

Has there been a push from the military for this? It might be a bit much for the civilian market. Crew served weapons certainly have range finding options, sniper teams have it, but on the spotter, so do a fire team need it? Looking at their expected engagement range for personal weapons, perhaps not?


Automatically Appended Next Post:
So anyone get anything good for Christmas? I got to do stuff with a MP7 (I don't get to keep it). And it was interesting getting a chat about the ethos behind the procurement.

Did lead me to wonder why, in more militarised societies, portable machine pistols aren't used more widely by police. Is it cost? A perceived mismatch in firepower VS threat? (Where you can always get a rifle from a patrol car.) The training overhead seems in many ways to be less than a pistol with its risk of jams from not being correctly handled. A public perception thing? Would that change if body armour become more prevalent mirroring the fears of the late 80's soviet get up?

Yup. Prior to WW2 really there was a huge reluctance from the budget offices of most countries which prevented large ammo expenditures.

Heck, even the burst fire mechanism on M16s and a lot of other rifles exists only because governments were worried about soldiers mag dumping and wasting ammo.

Issuing machine pistols to police seems more likely than not to lead to excessive civilian casualties as collateral damage.

I actually would say that machine pistols are primarily used by police forces. They are rarely used by military forces, because just get a real SMG ya dork. Most of them are police/bodyguard issued where the primary advantage is their low weight while still having firepower.

Its honestly probably the only thing keeping SMGs/Machine pistols in production, because most militaries have totally ditched SMGs as normal rifles can mostly do the same job.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Yup. Prior to WW2 really there was a huge reluctance from the budget offices of most countries which prevented large ammo expenditures.

Heck, even the burst fire mechanism on M16s and a lot of other rifles exists only because governments were worried about soldiers mag dumping and wasting ammo.

Full-auto on battle rifles is pointless. There's no reason for it. Three-round bursts are more controllable and you can do suppressive fire on semi-auto.

It's hard for us to understand this now, when just about every government runs peacetime deficits, but back when countries used currency backed by gold, budgets were a lot tighter.

There was also a question of scale. You have 4 million magazine-fed bolt-action rifles. Replacing them will be expensive. Your generals grew up shooting single-shot blackpowder weapons. You have various types of machinegun. How much more lead do you need to throw downrange?

SMGs, on the other hand, were cheap. Really cheap. And used cheap ammo. So they were popular.

The US could push ahead with the Garand because the cost to re-equip the tiny peacetime army was negligible, and once the tooling was developed, wartime bond drives would take care of everything. For everyone else, it was a tough sell.

Honestly, we're in the same position in a lot of ways. The AR platform is in a very similar place to the bolt-action rifle of a century ago, where models remained in production for decades.

As for firearms activity, I've got an appointment tomorrow to try out a Type 38 Arisaka. Looking forward to it.

Yeah, but it was to the point where soldiers couldn't even establish proficiency with their weapons. And this was when most people just had bolt actions.

Heck, the US stuck with the trapdoor springfield over a bolt action for so long because you couldn't have those soldiers dumping their ammo with those repeaters

If the US congress hadn't been such spendthrifts in the late 1800s we might have seen a US army equipped with lever actions enter WW1. Germans might have filed complaints over that too.


Fullauto on battlerifles is definitely silly, but that is more because you can't control the damn thing AND don't have enough ammo to make suppression worthwhile. I think the only full auto battlerifle that made sense was the BAR(yeah, technically its an LMG, but lets be honest it was more like a Battlerifle before that was a thing). It was actually controllable in its slow fire mode.

For those interested in the range report, my daughter loved the Arisaka and it was only with difficulty that I was able to prevent her from shooting off the entirety of our meager ammo supply.

I managed to pry it away from her for a couple of rounds to contrast it with the Mosin 91/30 I was using, which was clearly its inferior in terms of smoothness of action and recoil.

Nice you had a great time! Arosakas are so so rare here.