Forgotten Weapons

Ian's vide on the M55 and on the M50 on which it was based....

The Khyber Pass is a well known center of arms production, with gunmaking there going back at least 100 years. The quality of craftsmanship varies greatly, from excellent and safe weapons to thoroughly unsafe guns made with little more than hand files and drills. In the last decade or so, much of the production has centered...

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/d0c966ae-4e2b-4b37-a71d-8647c5329abb.jpeg...

Besides looking like it has a beard this machine gun has a number of other weird features like a bicycle seat and the ability to fire at a staggeringly slow 8 rounds a minute....

AG-026 is a simple/direct blowback firearm firing from an open bolt with a fixed firing pin. The bolt itself is fairly compact and low profile with a small cross-sectional area for decreased resistance while cycling in water, however, it is linked to а pair of rotating gears/flywheels enclosed in the circular housings mounted...

John Dillinger's 1911 converted to full auto and .38 Super, complete with a Thompson submachine gun forearm....

https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2024/01/16/hot-gat-fudd-crap-khyber-pass-ill-bid-last/

When the German attack into Russia stagnated in late 1942, some areas of the front returned to a trench-and-sniper sort of warfare that was reminiscent of World War One. The German military actually went so far as to design and issue a periscopic tech rifle mount, the “deckungszielgerät” (DZG). Stereotypically German in...

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/0544b9cd-ad80-41a1-b0af-cd7588cf4c3a.jpeg...

You might be thinking how could this bullpup pan-fed automatic pistol possibly be worse. It is also a blow forward design. Meaning the barrel physically moves forward to operate the gun each shot. This significantly increases recoil, and in theory decreases accuracy....

Kel-Tec has long been renown as the most innovative (but not necessarily good) manufacturer of firearms. This prototype was designed during the 1994 AW ban, that's why it has a oddly cut barrel....

https://www.armyrecognition.com/news/army-news/2024/ukraine-adopts-turkish-bts-12-shotgun-for-anti-drone-warfare...

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/e48bf38a-e4ee-4a42-a5c4-e90eb1a9e72d.jpeg...

One of the very last, most common, and best looking of the Austrian manually operated pistols is the Bittner. Designed by Gustav Bittner in 1893 and going into production in 1896 (the known examples were proofed in 1897 and 1898)... Several hundred were made; possibly as many as 500. They were produced for the civilian market...

Fake it till you make it I guess.

The Walther WA 2000, is arguably the finest made precision rifle to be ever crafted in Germany. It was designed following the Munich Olympics Attack of 1972, in response to police marksmen being forced to take precision shots with an iron sighted G3 rifle....

This is the Erika, developed by Franz Pfannl and chambered for the 4.25mm Liliput cartridge (which develops approximately 1/4 the energy of the .25 ACP)....

A barrel release mechanism slid into the mag well and allowed you to open the gun’s barrel and load a single rifle round into place....

The President of the Czech Republic, Petr Pavel, visited Ukraine together with the President of Slovakia, Zuzana Čaputová on April 28, 2023. Both met with the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv. On that occasion, President Pavel presented President Zelenskyy with a hand-engraved CZ 75 pistol from the Order of the...

This one was made in Nuremberg by Hans Stopler, so I suppose raise a stein to German engineering. Once again it never fails to impress. Revolvers wouldn't become commercially successful & produced in mass quantities until the 1800s....