Impractical weapons, armour, and equipment - Mike Sparks spinoff

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Reynard said:
Last time I checked it was called the Armsel Protecta/Striker. Or is this a different gun that looks the same?
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At the beginning of the video I included, McCollum mentions that the Streetsweeper was essentially the cut rate version of the Proteca/Striker.
 
The Japanese Type 94 pistol of WWII vintage is infamously prone to accidental discharge due to its flawed design. Firmly pinching the receiver in the middle will drop the sear and set off the firing pin, so these things would go off when people squeezed them into tight holsters or grabbed them the wrong way. The Type 94s were so shitty and dangerous to their users that the 94s were almost exclusively issued to Japanese aircrews and tankers for committing suicide in case of being trapped in a burning tank or plane. There's lots of videos online of people purposely pinching their Type 94s to show off the reliability with which they can trigger the accidental discharge via the design flaw.
 
Cato said:
At the beginning of the video I included, McCollum mentions that the Streetsweeper was essentially the cut rate version of the Proteca/Striker.
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Ah! So it's basically the Chinese knock-off not from China. Makes sense. Because I was like "Why didn't I hear this about the Striker?"

millais said:
The Japanese Type 94 pistol of WWII vintage is infamously prone to accidental discharge due to its flawed design. Firmly pinching the receiver in the middle will drop the sear and set off the firing pin, so these things would go off when people squeezed them into tight holsters or grabbed them the wrong way. The Type 94s were so shitty and dangerous to their users that the 94s were almost exclusively issued to Japanese aircrews and tankers for committing suicide in case of being trapped in a burning tank or plane. There's lots of videos online of people purposely pinching their Type 94s to show off the reliability with which they can trigger the accidental discharge via the design flaw.
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The Nambu pistols were pretty much guaranteed to make this thread! I've heard it also wasn't powerful at all, so add that to the terrible reliability and it's an all-around piece of shit.
 
Reynard said:
The Nambu pistols were pretty much guaranteed to make this thread! I've heard it also wasn't powerful at all, so add that to the terrible reliability and it's an all-around piece of shit.
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The 8mm Nambu cartridge is roughly equivalent to .32 ACP in terms of stopping power, so it was actually a decent round for the era in which it was invented, i.e. the First World War. The problem is that by the 1940s, the Japanese were still using it when everyone else had already moved on to bigger and better things. In fact, most of their small arms design was basically unimproved from the First World War, with the exception of their LMGs, which were some of the best of the Second World War.
 
millais said:
The 8mm Nambu cartridge is roughly equivalent to .32 ACP in terms of stopping power, so it was actually a decent round for the era in which it was invented, i.e. the First World War. The problem is that by the 1940s, the Japanese were still using it when everyone else had already moved on to bigger and better things. In fact, most of their small arms design was basically unimproved from the First World War, with the exception of their LMGs, which were some of the best of the Second World War.
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Exactly. When I said that, I was meaning compared to what everyone else was using. You had the Enfield .38, the .45 ACP, and the 9x19mm, the only one I'm not familiar with being the .38 unless the Enfield .38 was similar to a .38 Special. If that's the case, I've shot all of these rounds. Regardless, the latter two especially being much more powerful than the 8mm Nambu.

Here's a more modern weapon failure: the L85A1/SA80.
l85a1.jpg

l85a1_l1.jpg

I need to make a distinction here. I'm talking about the L85A1, not the L85A2. I've heard the A2 is pretty good, but I'll get into why in a bit. This is somewhat similar to a rifle I mentioned earlier, the EM-1/EM-2, except where the EM-2 saw very little production and I don't think saw any combat despite being, to my knowledge, a good weapon, the L85A1 was an unreliable mess that might as well have been as dangerous to the user as it was to the person it was pointed at, and that's implying that it was a consistent danger to those it was pointed at. The weapon's magazine release was poorly placed, meaning that people would unknowingly drop their magazines and have nothing but a bullet in the chamber when they fired it, it would jam, it would break, it would fall apart, and it weighed about as much as the higher-caliber FN FALs that it was meant to replace when it had the SUSAT scope and a fully loaded magazine. After the Gulf War in 1991, Britain tried to cover up how terrible they were until eventually they got Heckler & Koch to redesign it. And what I mean by that isn't that they changed things here and there, they changed practically everything. And thanks to the power of German engineering, the L85A2 turned out to be a good rifle. Despite that, people won't touch any form of this rifle after the horror stories of the A1 variant. Not only did this gun lead to to death of its own legacy, it led to the death of an actually good weapon that fixed everything about it before the improved variant even came into existence.
 
I'm not sure how this thread has gone without mentioning the Gyrojet.
A classic case of an awesome idea executed terribly, the Gyrojet line was a series of firearms that fired not bullets, but tiny rockets.
The idea was that a self propelled round like that didn't require heavy barrels, thus reducing the weight.
Unfortunately, it was inaccurate, unreliable, prone to issues, and took forever to load.
It was not a success.
 
Dr. Boe Jangles Esq. said:
I'm not sure how this thread has gone without mentioning the Gyrojet.
A classic case of an awesome idea executed terribly, the Gyrojet line was a series of firearms that fired not bullets, but tiny rockets.
The idea was that a self propelled round like that didn't require heavy barrels, thus reducing the weight.
Unfortunately, it was inaccurate, unreliable, prone to issues, and took forever to load.
It was not a success.
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Kind of reminds me of the futuristic G11 from the early 80s that Heckler & Coch made for the US Army trials for the main assault weapon. Thing is, the only real issue to my knowledge was the cost. It's a case of a good idea, good execution, but too far ahead of its time. (Fun fact, in German, G11 is pronounced "gay elf.")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckler_&_Koch_G11
Honestly, if someone were to make a subsonic caseless round with less sound than a standard suppressor (which are still decently loud), the lack of leaving casings behind would be great for a covert operations/stealth weapon. Who knows, maybe technology will bring us there someday.
 
Francis E. Dec Esc. said:
Here's some scans from a book of weird weapons I have:
GXzshRP.jpg

ADaToKL.jpg


BH4SERC.jpg
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Apache revolvers weren't bad weapons at all in the context they were used (French gangs of the late 19th century). Their extremely small size makes them easy to conceal until you've sneaked up on the target to rob or murder him. They were never meant for use on the battlefield.
 
The Cybermen hit rock botttom when they started using plastic BDSM armour.
cybe chick.jpg
 
Count groudon said:
Holy shit, gunblades were real? And they actually look pretty cool. Here I thought they were only a product of the wild imaginations down at Square enix.
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Squall's gunblade was probably inspired by the Elgin cutlass pistol. The US Navy actually issued it to sailors in the 1830s.

Elgin_cutlass_pistol.jpg
 
cKg0YFZ.jpg


In terms of real world weaponry, probably the early Cold War (up until the mid 80's) obsession with making nuclear EVERYTHING. Proposed projects included nuclear powered tanks, bombers, ships, submarines, rockets, and cruise missiles. Aside from the ships and submarines, none of the other concepts got beyond either the drawing board, small scale tests, or in the case of rockets and cruise missiles, were actually feasible but were not implemented due to fallout concerns and cost. There's also the wonderful world of nuclear warhead equipped artillery shells, landmines, depth charges, air to air missiles, and torpedoes, all of which potentially would have seen use if needed.


If we're going for fictional stuff along with modern stuff, there's a whole rabid base of Pierre Sprey and/or Colonel John Boyd worshiping nuts who want to dump the F-35 for some kind of miracle fighter program that will somehow have none of the problems associated with every other modern fighter design program and be cheaper and better. This F-41 "Mustang II" proposal made me giggle, because it'll supposedly be cheaper to produce than modern F-16's. How it does it is strip everything that makes the F-16 relevant and makes it a fighter incapable of performing the same roles. Passive sensors make you harder to find yes, but generally if you're picking up their emissions you're probably going to be detected soon anyway, and if you want to strike BVR you need to go active with radar systems more often than not unless you have another fighter data linked with you or a data link from another emitter. Part of the reason the F-35 is going to be an absolute murder machine is because it has the capability to network with everything, a radar suite that can perform both some jamming and is harder to jam then most others, and can operate relatively unseen even by systems actively trying to find it - even while it's emitting. His F-41 can't do any of that, and possessing a 'Light, compact radar' and no apparent attempt to actually give it the BVR ability, and a 'light compact radar' probably won't be capable of doing important things such as actually detecting the enemy before he detects you. There's also no mention of any air to ground ability in this thing, nor actual radar reducing stuff.

Also his chart makes me lol.

"Critics might say that the above table makes the F-45 look like some kind of fantastical super-plane, but it most certainly is not," directly follows this.

I've got a good amount more of this sort of stuff if anyone's interested in it in the long run.
 
Reynard said:
Kind of reminds me of the futuristic G11 from the early 80s that Heckler & Coch made for the US Army trials for the main assault weapon. Thing is, the only real issue to my knowledge was the cost. It's a case of a good idea, good execution, but too far ahead of its time. (Fun fact, in German, G11 is pronounced "gay elf.")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckler_&_Koch_G11
Honestly, if someone were to make a subsonic caseless round with less sound than a standard suppressor (which are still decently loud), the lack of leaving casings behind would be great for a covert operations/stealth weapon. Who knows, maybe technology will bring us there someday.
Click to expand...


The thing that ultimately killed the G11 was the reunification of Germany. The end of the Cold War killed a lot of weapons programs. The G11 itself was a decent weapon and extremely reliable towards the end of the program. Some West German special operations groups had started field testing it before the program ended and the only real complaint is the same complaint that most small caliber weapons get: poor to mediocre terminal ballistics. The weapon itself and caseless ammunition still has its merits. If HK were to modernize the G11 to accept the accessories common on a modern fighting rifle (optics, lights, lasers, sound suppressors, etc.) and bump the caliber up to, say, 6.5mm-6.8mm (around .27 caliber) with an appropriately increased propellant charge, you'd have an excellent fighting rifle with good range and terminal ballistics. However, I think the next ammunition advancement for military rifles will be telescoped ammunition where the projectile is actually down inside the cartridge casing to make the ammunition more compact, along with a shift away from brass and steel for the casing towards polymers and lighter weight metals to make the ammunition lighter weight. The US military is already experimenting with this kind of ammunition design with the LSAT squad automatic weapon.

As far as pointless weapons go, my vote would have to go to PDWs like the P90 and MP7 due to the poor terminal ballistics of their ammunition. While they tend to have better range and flatter trajectory than a pistol caliber SMG, their rounds aren't very good "fight stoppers" compared to 9mm, .45 ACP, 10mm Auto, or .40 S&W due to their small caliber design and light bullet weights. A local SWAT team in my area was considering going to the P90 from MP5s and deciding against it after researching their effectiveness to stop a fight. It took many more rounds of the smaller projectiles to put a man down, sometimes as much as half a magazine (25 rounds), than a 9mm or .45 sub gun. They instead chose to go with all .45 caliber weapons and bought HK USP 45 pistols and UMP45 SMGs for their entry teams. This was quite a few years ago, 2006 or 2007 I believe, so I'm not sure if they're still using the same weapons.
 
The Dude said:
The thing that ultimately killed the G11 was the reunification of Germany. The end of the Cold War killed a lot of weapons programs. The G11 itself was a decent weapon and extremely reliable towards the end of the program. Some West German special operations groups had started field testing it before the program ended and the only real complaint is the same complaint that most small caliber weapons get: poor to mediocre terminal ballistics. The weapon itself and caseless ammunition still has its merits. If HK were to modernize the G11 to accept the accessories common on a modern fighting rifle (optics, lights, lasers, sound suppressors, etc.) and bump the caliber up to, say, 6.5mm-6.8mm (around .27 caliber) with an appropriately increased propellant charge, you'd have an excellent fighting rifle with good range and terminal ballistics. However, I think the next ammunition advancement for military rifles will be telescoped ammunition where the projectile is actually down inside the cartridge casing to make the ammunition more compact, along with a shift away from brass and steel for the casing towards polymers and lighter weight metals to make the ammunition lighter weight. The US military is already experimenting with this kind of ammunition design with the LSAT squad automatic weapon.

As far as pointless weapons go, my vote would have to go to PDWs like the P90 and MP7 due to the poor terminal ballistics of their ammunition. While they tend to have better range and flatter trajectory than a pistol caliber SMG, their rounds aren't very good "fight stoppers" compared to 9mm, .45 ACP, 10mm Auto, or .40 S&W due to their small caliber design and light bullet weights. A local SWAT team in my area was considering going to the P90 from MP5s and deciding against it after researching their effectiveness to stop a fight. It took many more rounds of the smaller projectiles to put a man down, sometimes as much as half a magazine (25 rounds), than a 9mm or .45 sub gun. They instead chose to go with all .45 caliber weapons and bought HK USP 45 pistols and UMP45 SMGs for their entry teams. This was quite a few years ago, 2006 or 2007 I believe, so I'm not sure if they're still using the same weapons.
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Neat to know someone knows more about the G11 that I didn't know. I had heard it was a good weapon, though. That's some neat stuff there. We need to talk guns at some point.

Well, the PDWs are made more for penetrating body armor, though with the amount of 9mm stuff they have out these days, there's stuff that's even better. The thing is that a PDW would be better against an armored soldier, but not an unarmored one. They're more limited in their usage, but probably better for military vs military stuff.
 
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