D.E. Watters

If we look into Daniel Watter's dreams, we can see these images from time to time (along with him having tea with John Browning and Julian Hatcher):
 
 

 

 

 

 

My mind is numb from years of deployment. A single year seems to last seven. They say the world is full of beautiful colors. It all looks black and white to me. A question swirls around my brain - somebody stateside asked me, years ago. "Who's a good boy?" I've learned that there are none. We don't all go to heaven

One thing that gets to me is the constant claims of Army Ordnance NIH syndrome.  However, the Army treated John M Browning, John Pedersen, and even foreign firms like FN with respect.  The Army seems to work just fine with inventors and contractors who play within the system.  The trouble begins when you have inventors and companies that immediately start throwing elbows, dragging their drama out in public to Congress and the press when their genius invention isn't immediately recognized.
 
Consider the case of Loren C. Cook.

https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1798&dat=19530303&id=mAEdAAAAIBAJ&sjid=NYoEAAAAIBAJ&pg=3268,207079&hl=en
  http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.35112104230976?urlappend=%3Bseq=1109 Cook made a lot of bizarre claims for his designs, which really make you question his competence as a designer. However, that didn't him from acting like a fool in front of the media and attracting Congressional attention. His design weighed almost twice as much as he claimed, and he had to be delusional if he thought a ~10" barrel SMG was going to achieve 1,800 fps with .45 ACP. (But...but...the barrel is nearly twice as long as the M1911 pistol!)

I'll go as far as to suggest that the biggest issue with NIH designs was not that they came from outside Army Ordnance, but rather that the proposals were often unsolicited.  Testing an unsolicited proposal basically steals funding and time away from official programs of record.  I seem to remember Julian Hatcher complaining that some inventors/manufacturers just wanted to use the Army as a free R&D test service.  "Why spend our own personal savings/corporate funds on ammunition and engineering tests to debug our design when the American taxpayer can foot the bill instead?"
 

Found some numbers on the M4 and M6 survival weapons.  There were 34,910 M4 acquired between 1950 and 1951.  In contrast, 66,600 M6 were acquired during roughly the same period.  The M6 was officially considered standard, with the M4 as a limited standard.  Between the two, 10,934 survival weapons had been lost in combat, crashes, or fires by early 1954.

I'd say that Pikula was harder on ArmaLite's management, and justifiably so.  Was the Ordnance Corps playing dirty at times?  Undoubtedly, but that doesn't explain why the early AR-10 prototypes would go on to fail in other tests, spectacularly so in Nicaragua.  George Sullivan comes off as a snake-oil salesman with gimmicks like Sullalloy (standard 7075).  He routinely tried to steal credit from his designers like Gene Stoner and Art Miller, and he didn't even have the decency to quit his day job at Lockheed.  In later years, he even used Lockheed's corporate resources to try to market the AR-18.  You get the impression that A-I and Colt felt that they had been misled into buying underdeveloped designs.  

Using Mel Johnson as their representative probably closed more doors to ArmaLite than it opened.  Johnson had a notorious reputation for going off on test personnel when test weapons performed poorly.  Stoner confirmed that such an incident occurred when the AR-10's sleeved barrel burst at Springfield.  Frankly, I suspect that some cases of ill behavior by various test centers were acts of retaliation for Johnson's own antics.  ArmaLite's public PR campaign, complete with shameless influence peddling between Richard Boutelle and Curtis LeMay, probably had some in Army Ordnance wondering if they were not going to see a repeat of the Garand v. Johnson dustup of the pre-WW2 era.

I'd say that Pikula was harder on ArmaLite's management, and justifiably so.  Was the Ordnance Corps playing dirty at times?  Undoubtedly, but that doesn't explain why the early AR-10 prototypes would go on to fail in other tests, spectacularly so in Nicaragua.  George Sullivan comes off as a snake-oil salesman with gimmicks like Sullalloy (standard 7075).  He routinely tried to steal credit from his designers like Gene Stoner and Art Miller, and he didn't even have the decency to quit his day job at Lockheed.  In later years, he even used Lockheed's corporate resources to try to market the AR-18.  You get the impression that A-I and Colt felt that they had been misled into buying underdeveloped designs.  

Using Mel Johnson as their representative probably closed more doors to ArmaLite than it opened.  Johnson had a notorious reputation for going off on test personnel when test weapons performed poorly.  Stoner confirmed that such an incident occurred when the AR-10's sleeved barrel burst at Springfield.  Frankly, I suspect that some cases of ill behavior by various test centers were acts of retaliation for Johnson's own antics.  ArmaLite's public PR campaign, complete with shameless influence peddling between Richard Boutelle and Curtis LeMay, probably had some in Army Ordnance wondering if they were not going to see a repeat of the Garand v. Johnson dustup of the pre-WW2 era.

I'd say that Pikula was harder on ArmaLite's management, and justifiably so.  Was the Ordnance Corps playing dirty at times?  Undoubtedly, but that doesn't explain why the early AR-10 prototypes would go on to fail in other tests, spectacularly so in Nicaragua.  George Sullivan comes off as a snake-oil salesman with gimmicks like Sullalloy (standard 7075).  He routinely tried to steal credit from his designers like Gene Stoner and Art Miller, and he didn't even have the decency to quit his day job at Lockheed.  In later years, he even used Lockheed's corporate resources to try to market the AR-18.  You get the impression that A-I and Colt felt that they had been misled into buying underdeveloped designs.  

Using Mel Johnson as their representative probably closed more doors to ArmaLite than it opened.  Johnson had a notorious reputation for going off on test personnel when test weapons performed poorly.  Stoner confirmed that such an incident occurred when the AR-10's sleeved barrel burst at Springfield.  Frankly, I suspect that some cases of ill behavior by various test centers were acts of retaliation for Johnson's own antics.  ArmaLite's public PR campaign, complete with shameless influence peddling between Richard Boutelle and Curtis LeMay, probably had some in Army Ordnance wondering if they were not going to see a repeat of the Garand v. Johnson dustup of the pre-WW2 era.

I'd say that Pikula was harder on ArmaLite's management, and justifiably so.  Was the Ordnance Corps playing dirty at times?  Undoubtedly, but that doesn't explain why the early AR-10 prototypes would go on to fail in other tests, spectacularly so in Nicaragua.  George Sullivan comes off as a snake-oil salesman with gimmicks like Sullalloy (standard 7075).  He routinely tried to steal credit from his designers like Gene Stoner and Art Miller, and he didn't even have the decency to quit his day job at Lockheed.  In later years, he even used Lockheed's corporate resources to try to market the AR-18.  You get the impression that A-I and Colt felt that they had been misled into buying underdeveloped designs.  

Using Mel Johnson as their representative probably closed more doors to ArmaLite than it opened.  Johnson had a notorious reputation for going off on test personnel when test weapons performed poorly.  Stoner confirmed that such an incident occurred when the AR-10's sleeved barrel burst at Springfield.  Frankly, I suspect that some cases of ill behavior by various test centers were acts of retaliation for Johnson's own antics.  ArmaLite's public PR campaign, complete with shameless influence peddling between Richard Boutelle and Curtis LeMay, probably had some in Army Ordnance wondering if they were not going to see a repeat of the Garand v. Johnson dustup of the pre-WW2 era.

I'd say that Pikula was harder on ArmaLite's management, and justifiably so.  Was the Ordnance Corps playing dirty at times?  Undoubtedly, but that doesn't explain why the early AR-10 prototypes would go on to fail in other tests, spectacularly so in Nicaragua.  George Sullivan comes off as a snake-oil salesman with gimmicks like Sullalloy (standard 7075).  He routinely tried to steal credit from his designers like Gene Stoner and Art Miller, and he didn't even have the decency to quit his day job at Lockheed.  In later years, he even used Lockheed's corporate resources to try to market the AR-18.  You get the impression that A-I and Colt felt that they had been misled into buying underdeveloped designs.  

Using Mel Johnson as their representative probably closed more doors to ArmaLite than it opened.  Johnson had a notorious reputation for going off on test personnel when test weapons performed poorly.  Stoner confirmed that such an incident occurred when the AR-10's sleeved barrel burst at Springfield.  Frankly, I suspect that some cases of ill behavior by various test centers were acts of retaliation for Johnson's own antics.  ArmaLite's public PR campaign, complete with shameless influence peddling between Richard Boutelle and Curtis LeMay, probably had some in Army Ordnance wondering if they were not going to see a repeat of the Garand v. Johnson dustup of the pre-WW2 era.

AKS-74U (Krinkov) competitors in trials (early 1970s).

Most notable ones are MA by Dragunov which used polymer (!) receiver, TKB-0116 by Stechkin which used short recoiling barrel operation with rotating barrel lockup and "Smerch" which is a very efficient bullpup ... it managed to fit a full length AK-74 barrel into Krinkov overall length.
 
(Stolen from some random dude's facebook. Miles Vining shared it)

It's a 5v5 deathmatch game angling for a piece of the CounterStrike pie, not really worthy of being called a Rainbow Six title IMO.

"Daddy would have gotten us Uzis"


 
(thanks, Daniel!)

I need a new bookshelf:

MADtv once ran a sketch proposing the most annoying movie ever, which would pair Chris Tucker with Rosie Perez.

Corrected.

A quote, attributed to Ian Hogg, a British Military Officer and author of books on military weapons and ammunition: "It is a notable thing that whenever, and wherever, a commission sits to determine the ideal caliber for an infantry rifle, they always arrive at 7mm - it is an equally notable thing that nobody ever gets a 7mm cartridge as a result of it."
 
A quote, attributed to Nathaniel F, a small-time blogger and cat owner: "It is a notable thing that whenever, and wherever, a discussion occurs on the Internet about the ideal infantry rifle caliber, someone always mentions that one Ian Hogg quote about the 7mm... It is an equally notable thing that nobody seems to have noticed it's completely untrue."

How my girlfriend feels after today's range session:

Rick from SMGGuns just told me my FG42 will be ready in 45 days or less.
 
 
 

Dream rifle acquired. I can die now:
 
 

FWIW:  The Magal was roughly a Micro Galil rechambered for .30 Carbine, not a converted M1 Carbine.

I've found one SAWS report that gave the AR-18's weight as 7.81 lbs, complete with sling and loaded 20rd magazine.

I've found one SAWS report that gave the AR-18's weight as 7.81 lbs, complete with sling and loaded 20rd magazine.

I knew it would be Daniel Watters with the save!

The 1965 Gun Digest noted the weight of the earliest AR-18 prototypes as 6.3 lbs.  The article in question was written after the January 1964 public demonstration for the gun press and military.  SAR has mid/late 1960s ArmaLite flyers listing the weight at 3.04 kg or ~6.7 lbs.  When the US Army tested the AR-18 in late 1969, their sample weighed 7.37 lbs without the magazine or sling.  The report noted a long list of changes in the new AR-18 samples from the samples previously submitted during the 1965 SAWS trials.  For example, the barrel extension was larger, the furniture had been changed from polycarbonate to glass-filled nylon, and the walls of the furniture were also thicker.