Well, I haven't shot it yet, but I can tell you right now that as a handgun, the HK416 rifle is heavy as hell and very poorly balanced. That heavy barrel makes it extremely muzzle-heavy. I basically have to hold it like a rifle, shoulder stock or no, in order to get a decently stable sight picture with it—and since it doesn't have a stock, that position isn't very comfortable to hold, as there's no way of bracing it.

If I had forearms like Popeye, it wouldn't be a problem, but for a soft and doughy mortal like me, it's all a bit much. On the other hand, I expect that with that much mass involved, even "high-velocity" .22 LR should have next to no perceptible recoil.

Mechanically, I wouldn't expect there to be any problems with it. H&K and Walther are both highly reputable manufacturers, and the thing does have an air of quality about it (in part, admittedly, because it's so heavy). The operating system is simplified from the one found in the original 5.56mm NATO rifle, but it's exactly the same as the one in the .22 sport version of said rifle, because the pistol literally is the rifle with a shorter barrel and no stock. The actual working parts have not been abbreviated in any way, as far as I know. Basically, I would just expect it to be a lot less accurate, because shorter sight radius and really unwieldy form factor, but to work just as well.

TLDR: It is highly unlikely to be a practical shooting tool at all, but it might be entertaining, which is about all I imagine the designers were going for in the first place.

--G.
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This is not meant to be a smear on either handguns or assault rifles, but every sort of firearm has something it is total shit at, and this thing looks like it falls into that zone alone not one but two axes.

On the other hand, it also looks like it might function as a decent SMG if you preform what's no doubt a highly illegal full-auto conversion and slap an extended mag in there.

-Merc
Keep Rat

That being said, it looks like you might be able to make a stabilizer (not a true stock, mind, just something to rest against your shoulder) out of some heavy gauge wire or iron rod? Still probably pushing the boundaries of legality, but it might make it a tiny bit easier to handle.

That is probably not an entirely unfair assessment, although perhaps a bit oversimplified. Because the thing is that even some things that are advantages in one platform become disadvantages in the other; for instance, five pounds would be a terrific weight for a service rifle, but it's godawful in anything that thinks it's a pistol.

>On the other hand, it also looks like it might function as a
>decent SMG if you preform what's no doubt a highly illegal full-auto
>conversion

Having handled an actual SMG, I have to say I think you would probably still want some kind of shoulder stock on there. But yeah, that barrel length would work fairly well in an SMG or one of those newfangled "personal defense weapon" things. ... Of course, it would still be a .22, which would be less than ideal.

(Also, yes, full-auto conversions of semiauto firearms are quite Not OK. I'm not an expert, but I don't think you could even make it Retroactively OK by filing the paperwork and paying the $200 tax, because of the 1968 Gun Control Act's extensions to the part of the NFA about full-auto-ness and the manufacture thereof.)

>and slap an extended mag in there.

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that. Mine came with a 10-round magazine, because that's what's in the catalog, but they also make 20- and 30-round magazines for it. All of them are much larger than they need to be, because they're designed to be the same size as the equivalent-capacity 5.56 mags that go in the grown-up rifle.

--G.
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I know some of those giant fuckoff "hunting" revolvers can weigh that much. I do not know how ludicrous a proposition that is, tho.

... actually, I'm unsure if I should have hunting in sarcasm quotes. Is revolver hunting an actual thing, or is it just how these things are marketed because it is more palatable than saying "if you want something in your holster that would make Dirty Harry feel inadequate as a man, have we got a gun for you!"

-Merc
Keep Rat

Yes, it is an actual thing, although I have no doubt that the manufacturers of hunting revolvers benefit considerably from the Walter Mitty market as well.

--G.
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Not a member of the lodge myself, but I believe that, like full sized pickup trucks, you have correctly identified the reasons of the secret heart of 90% of such weapons - but there's that other ten percent, and some of the buyers that are compensating do take them hunting.

There are significant chunks of the US where walking in the woods has a statistically significant chance of Insanely Belligerent Wild Hog Attempting To Gore You, if nothing else.

-----

The most wonderful thing about BBs
Is BBs are wonderful things
Their sides are made out of iron
Their guns are made out of pain
They're crashy smashy bashy flashy fun-fun-fun-fun-fun
But the most wonderful thing about BBs
Is there is more than one
The~re is more than one!

Tangent: I've eaten wild hog! When I went to Space Camp as a kid, midway through the week they told us they had a special treat for us and instead of eating in the cafeteria there was a pig roast. We were told that one of the instructors had bagged it himself.

I can't for the life of me remember how it tasted. I just remember being desperately relieved for something other than the cafeteria food, which was... not to my liking, because it was very, very southern in kind of a bad way. Grits. Okra. Other unfamiliar vegetables. Lots of dishes that looked and smelled awful to a child with an unsophisticated palette in a strange place. I lived on Jello and cereal for like three of those days.

But roast pork? Yeah, I'd eat that, no problem.

-Merc
Keep Rat

Belated, but...
95% of what most folks think is ok as a sidearm for that sort of thing? Isn't.
I've read more than one article referring to this, since it is actually legal to go hunting boar in various parts of the former USSR...and(apologies, but) Americans seem to think that that'd be cool to do with the .44 mag, because DIRTY HARRY!
Luckily, the local hunting guides have gotten used to that and so when the now even MORE pissed hog come thundering down at you, they unload the AKM they were toting along, so you at least get out of it alive.

Hunting with a revolver is indeed a thing, but you tend to need quite a BIT of revolver. Anything smaller than .454 Casull is right out, as it were.

...!
Gott's Leetle Feesh in Trousers!

The general consensus was a Thompson, with a significant minority recommending an M3 for simplicity's sake. They contended the *real* question was, what type of ammo: armor piercing or hollow point?

The answer of course, was both. Alternating. Feed problems be damned, because when a grizzly was bearing down on you (sorry), There Is No Overkill.

It was a pretty tongue-in-cheek discussion.

I admit, if I were sufficiently insane to want to go Out Of Doors and deliberately confront large hostile animals, my 'minimum choice' would be along the lines of a twelve-gauge, probably with slugs. If there was a girl I was trying to impress, I'd go for an old-fashioned Stopping Gun.

-----

The most wonderful thing about BBs
Is BBs are wonderful things
Their sides are made out of iron
Their guns are made out of pain
They're crashy smashy bashy flashy fun-fun-fun-fun-fun
But the most wonderful thing about BBs
Is there is more than one
The~re is more than one!

She keeps scoffing up until the severely pissed boar comes at her. She doesn't break and run but clearly won't get a killing shot lined up before BANGBANG!

She is notably less scoffing after.

...!
Gott's Leetle Feesh in Trousers!

As said, yes it is an actual thing. There is also a market for hunting revolvers as a backup weapon for use in hunting things like bears and wild boar. Both for dealing with a charging bear/boar and as a 'just in case' when you are going up to the animal you think you killed.

So I read this, and immediately thought. "Huh. I know a lot of people are into bow hunting. For deer and such. But before firearms you didn't hunt bears and boars with bows; you hunted them with spears."

"... no. No, surely nobody is that foolhardy."

Less than five minutes of Googling reveals that, no, there are in fact people who are foolhardy enough to be out there with spears hunting wild boars. Admittedly, they're often using packs of dogs... but the point of packs of dogs is to make the boar run towards you so you can stab it.

There's at least one pack of dudes who are hunting them with knives.

Shouldn't be surprised. But was.

-Merc
Keep Rat

My late grandmother once told me that, in her experience running a hunting lodge, the personalities you could expect from different groups of hunters broke down roughly along the lines of what they hunted and how.

Deer hunters: Usually decent.
Muzzleloading deer hunters: OK, but don't let them get started about "woodscraft".
Deer bowhunters: Weird, but harmless.
Moose hunters (all equipment types): Not really serious. Moose hunting is easy mode. You might as well be out there hunting cows.
Bear hunters: Macho assholes.
Muzzleloading bear hunters: Macho assholes with a Davy Crockett complex.
Bear bowhunters: Insane macho assholes.

Fortunately, I doubt she ever had anyone rock up and announce an intent to hunt bear with a spear. I wouldn't be surprised if that isn't even legal in Maine.

--G.
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So I googled "bear hunting with spears."

The first two results are youtube videos that featured the following "hunts:" guys laying out bait and then setting up on metal platforms directly above said bait, bolted to the side of trees with easy access to a rifle or a shotty.

They wait for a bear to amble over, and then just... drop the spear onto it. Bear runs. Then they wait a bit and amble into the woods to find the corpse.

Is this what passes for hunting now? I don't hunt myself. But my brother does, as did our grandfather and great-grandfather; indeed, my great-grandfather was born in a time and place where his rifle was sometimes required to put food on the table. But he also hunted for sport.

This doesn't seem at all like that. It seemed wrong in a way I'm having trouble describing, because I certainly don't have a problem with my brother setting up in a duck blind with his call and his wooden decoys.

-Merc
Keep Rat

Whether bear-baiting is hunting depends on who you ask. It's sufficiently controversial, even among the subset of people who are into killing animals in the woods, that there's been at least one referendum on banning it in Maine in recent years, and if we even bother having a referendum about banning a method of taking game in this state, you know it must be pretty sketchy.

--G.
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Friend of mine played a Troll in a Shadowrun campaign some years back; the character didn't usually need to shoot things, but he carried a pistol anyway, because not carrying a weapon in that setting is foolhardy bordering on suicidal. Thing is, Trolls are seven to ten feet tall and built like the proverbial brick shithouse. One time while waiting for the pizza to show up we got to talking about how his hands were too big for "normal" pistols and did he have to have the dang thing custom-made? I think we concluded that there was enough of a market for Troll-sized firearms that it didn't need to be a full custom job, but that there was probably a bit of a markup.

We didn't bother working out what his upscaled pistol would be like in any more detail, because none of us were firearms nerds. But I imagine it might not be that different from a giant fuckoff hunting revolver, or the peculiar hybrid Gryph started this off with. Probably more practical than either. There are undoubtedly Walter Mitty wannabes in Shadowrun, and the gun manufacturers are undoubtedly still happy to take their money, but a PC is looking for practical.

20% markup in 3e, 10% in 4 and 5E, same for dwarves.

>We didn't bother working out what his upscaled pistol would be like in
>any more detail, because none of us were firearms nerds. But I
>imagine it might not be that different from a giant fuckoff hunting
>revolver, or the peculiar hybrid Gryph started this off with.
>Probably more practical than either. There are undoubtedly Walter
>Mitty wannabes in Shadowrun, and the gun manufacturers are
>undoubtedly still happy to take their money, but a PC is looking for
>practical.

What you're looking for there is a Ruger Superwarhawk:

http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=10710

--
-Pasha
"Don't change the subject"
"Too slow, already did."

I remember no such official rule, which may just mean that we could not find it in the book. This happened in 2000 plus or minus a couple years, so we were probably playing 3e, but it is possible that we were cheapskates and sticking to 2e books that we already had.

>>There are undoubtedly Walter
>>Mitty wannabes in Shadowrun, and the gun manufacturers are
>>undoubtedly still happy to take their money, but a PC is looking for
>>practical.
>
>What you're looking for there is a Ruger Superwarhawk:

I ... can't tell if that's meant to be practical or not.

It wouldn't have gone over well with our GM, that's for sure. She was very big on scenarios requiring us not to kill every motherfucker in the room.

In Shadowrun?!

--G.
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Sure, the official scenario material for SR is very combat-oriented, but you don't have to play the official scenarios. :) We were more interested in sneaking around and story arcs. In retrospect a less structured game engine might have been a better choice, considering how much of the rulebook we wound up ignoring. But we all liked the setting, so.

I mean, my Ork still had to change his name and appearance before high-tailing it out of Seattle to avoid Yakuza but that wasn't due to a _fight_. Really fun game.

------
Fearless creatures, we all learn to fight the Reaper
Can't defeat Her, so instead I'll have to be Her

As a more practical matter, I have to wonder: G, are you going to try to return it for a refund, or sell it to someone else?

Nah, hell with it. It's not the shop's fault I didn't do enough research, and private sales are a pain in the ass. Anyway, I like it! It's silly and incongruous. I should take a photo of it surrounded by my various little .32s, like an orca trying to hang out with some dolphins.

--G.
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That's not too surprising, given that that's H&K's whole thing. "You can find better if you dig a bit, but you'll never pay more." :)

I forgot to mention in the original post that Heckler & Koch is something of a successor to the original Mauser company. Mauser's factory was broken up by the occupying Allies after WWII, and Edmund Heckler and Theodor Koch (and Alex Seidel, who didn't get his name on the company for some reason) were Mauser engineers who found themselves thus unemployed. Unlike many of the company's other engineers, who decamped to countries where they would be allowed to keep doing firearms work until such time as it was permitted in Germany again, they started a new company in the Oberndorf area making stuff that was allowed at the time (sewing machines and whatnot), then got back into firearms when the time was right.

None of which is directly relevant, and I didn't realise the Walther 416 I was looking at in the catalog was actually an H&K design at the time, but in retrospect it makes my thought that it looked like a modernized Mauser broomie that much more amusing to me, even though the resemblance turns out to be entirely coincidental.

Also, you mentioned building a custom AR, which reminds me of another thing I sort of discovered in the course of researching what this weird gun actually is that might be worth mentioning—namely, that building one's own AR or AK from parts is also a Thing. I say "sort of discovered" because it came up in a separate context at around the same time, as these things sometimes do, in that Ian over at Forgotten Weapons mentioned it in this month's Q&A video. He used the metaphor of the Jeep, which a suitably determined individual could basically scratchbuild from parts available from the JC Whitney catalog without ever actually having a Jeep beforehand.

I find myself intrigued by this concept, just because of the engineering aspect of it. I think I'd rather like to do that sometime. It would provide an interesting look into the engineering challenges involved, and be a useful hook for a closer look at the history of either one (and both the AK-47 and the AR-15 have fascinating histories). Something to think about doing this summer, perhaps.

--G.
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Technically, hasn't anyone who has completely broken down their AK for cleaning and maintenance and then re-assembled it done this?

I mean, the entire point of living in an era interchangeable parts is that the bits are supposed to be completely, well... interchangeable. I'm sure most of the people in this thread are familiar with Eli Whitney's famous demonstration before the US Congress, where he disassembled ten rifles, put all the parts in a big'ol pile, then rebuilt all ten using parts chosen at random that hadn't ever been mated with one another before.

If you just order a box full of AK parts and then hand-assemble them, I suppose it might require engineering, although if that's the case wouldn't it mean you got some sub-standard parts? Like, if you have to hand finish something to make it fit properly on an industrially-produced firearm, doesn't that mean that one of the parts in the equation wasn't built to spec?

I am rather interested in the economics of this, though. Are assault rifles like cars, where the whole is worth less than the sum of the individual parts? Or are they more like computers, where being assembled into a working whole usually increases value?

-Merc
Keep Rat

There's field stripping, and then there's constructing an entire platform. The difference is akin to that between doing a brake job on your car and replacing the entire braking system.

>I'm sure most of the people in this thread are familiar with Eli
>Whitney's famous demonstration before the US Congress, where he
>disassembled ten rifles, put all the parts in a big'ol pile, then
>rebuilt all ten using parts chosen at random that hadn't ever been
>mated with one another before.

Familiar enough to know that it was a con. Seriously, did you not know? Those weren't interchangeable parts. They were the mechanical equivalent of a deck of marked cards. They only worked one way, but Whitney had arranged the demonstration so that wouldn't be obvious to the War Department. He then took the contract money, blew it on legal actions over the cotton gin patents, and didn't come across with the rifles he'd promised until long after they were of no use to the Army. Whitney didn't invent the American arsenal system, he invented the great American defense contractor tradition of ripping off the government.

>If you just order a box full of AK parts and then hand-assemble them,
>I suppose it might require engineering, although if that's the case
>wouldn't it mean you got some sub-standard parts?

It depends on where they came from. If they're all from the same manufacturer, then yes, they should all go together without any particular fiddling or challenge. If not, who knows? If you're sticking a Romanian upper on a Yugoslav lower with a Chinese trigger assembly and an East German gas system, you're learning a hard lesson in the universal fact that international standards aren't really. :)

Anyway, think of it as like building a complicated model kit. Of course the parts should just go together and work, they all came out of the same box, but in practice it's not that simple, because in practice nothing with that many parts is ever that simple.

--G.
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No, actually! I didn't know that.

I mean... I knew that he fucked up the contract, although I confess I wouldn't be able to tell you the details without looking them up beyond "massively overpromised in a way that should have been obvious to a five-year-old." And I knew (or should I say, thought I knew?) that the firearms in question had been hand-assembled by skilled artisans working very, very carefully in order to be sure they'd all work together, which achieved the goal at the expense of... well, of expense.

But I'd no idea the entire demonstration was bogus. None at all.

I think I only know this fact because it came up tangentially in a book I read about the Brunel's, though, as opposed to anything in-depth I've ever read about Whitney himself.

-Merc
Keep Rat

That's the nice thing about standards...

There's so many to choose from.

Which is, to my understanding, part of what the whole custom-built AR craze is about: the ability to have a modular rifle which can be built to do almost anything, while fitting almost anyone.

Long barrel, short barrel, light caliber, heavy caliber (I've seen up to .40 caliber wildcats,) suppressor, fixed stock, varying lengths of collapsible stock, side-fold stock, handgrip reciever, flatttop, flattop with Picatinny rails, scope, red dot sight, reflex sight, various lighting units, smooth handguards, guards with more Picatinny rails...

The AR platform can basically be made to do anything short of hunting dangerous came requiring a high-powered bolt action, and fitted to *anyone*. Thus, the challenge is not simply assembling it, but assembling the right one for your own unique needs.

Amusingly, I've just discovered that Abyssal aircraft carriers like it too. :)

--G.
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Hah, apparently so! I have to admit I kind of want one (an HK rifle, not an Abyssal CV) despite the cost, just because it's so refined for an AR.

And you're absolutely right about there being a big custom/homebuilt AR community these days. I get the impression that it's almost exactly like the community of folks who homebuild their PCs out of parts, and like PC builds, a lot of it just comes down to case aesthetics.

Yes, I just called the AR-15 the personal computer of assault rifles.

That said, once you get into it, you really can customize ARs to a variety of purposes and your own shooting style, and it's apparently fairly easy to do with common tools. I plan on doing it myself eventually.

Well, yes, I get that. I was talking about one I'd found that was being sold, as a pistol, with a 10" barrel and a shoulder stock already on it, which I couldn't figure out the trick of. Upon closer inspection, though, the stock is an aftermarket part, and is in fact secured with, I kid you not, Velcro straps. So I guess that's how they're getting around that.

US firearms import regulations are weird enough without skirting the fringes of the NFA (as we will see in the next GOTW). I really wish people wouldn't do stuff like that; it seems me the sport is under sufficient social pressure without people inside it deliberately taunting the muggles.

--G.
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-Merc
Keep Rat

Nope. The road out to the gravel pit where I do my summer shootin' is not paved, and this time of year it's still pretty much some ruts through a bog. Probably be into June before I can get out there in my little not-a-pickup car.

--G.
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I'm not gonna say this is the most Maine thing I've ever read, but it is certainly up there.

-Merc
Keep Rat

One is pleased to have reinforced your stereotypes. Ayuh.

--G.
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...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-Covered Balls!"

Well, I didn't know, it's not like I've ever handled an M16.

--G.
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...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-Covered Balls!"