The XVIII International Defense Industry Exhibition MSPO 2010, in Kielce, Poland, September 6-9, 2010, has confirmed the MSPO as one of the leading European defense trade fairs – and the one with exceptional value for the Polish defense industry and Armed Forces as well.

This year’s fair was attended by over 360 exhibitors from 30 countries, and visited by almost 14,000 visitors from all over the world, having an opportunity to see up-close what’s best and most modern in military equipment. As in the previous years, a companion logistics fair LOGISTYKA 2010 was held together with the MSPO, showing off uniforms, equipment and vehicles for internal security and fire services.

The MSPO opening gala has hosted Poland’s newly elected President, Mr. Bronislaw Komorowski, along with many defense and state officials. A national exhibition by a guest nation at the MSPO has been a tradition since the beginning of the new Millennium. This year’s MSPO guest nation was the United Kingdom and the exhibition, opened by Britain’s Minister for International Security Strategy, Mr. Gerald Howarth, MP, showcased defensive and security manufacturers. The UK’s defense export volume and value have recently catapulted it to No. 2 in the world preceded only by U.S.

After last year’s dramatic fire wrecking one of the exhibition halls on the eve of opening, this year the visitors were amazed to see a beautiful, modern, bright new structure replacing it, fitted with an outdoor stage integrated under the entrance vestibule where the gala opening took place.

The fair has traditionally aimed at somewhat heavier or more complicated equipment than small arms, but nevertheless many interesting firearms, both foreign and domestic, had their Polish premieres there.

Radon – Poland’s Objective Modular Combat Rifle

Without a doubt, the star of the show and the most important domestic-interest event was the first public presentation of the Polish Army’s objective Modular Small Arms System-5.56 (MSBS-5.56), now christened ‘Radon’ (from elementary radioactive Radon gas, Rn, atomic number 86) in accordance with the Polish periodic table prototype codenaming procedure. The Radon, a joint venture between Warsaw’s Military Technology University (WAT) and Fabryka Broni Lucznik-Radon was shown in both configuration combinations, i.e. classic (lock, stock and barrel, MSBS-K or now Radon-K) and bullpup (MSBS-B/Radon-B), of the already two generations of the rifle: the shooting Technology Demonstrators (1st Gen) and mock-up of the future ‘Final Look’ designs (2nd Gen). Target Radon in both configurations would be a system comprising of: Combat Rifle, Automatic Carbine (CQB weapon), Designated Marksman Rifle (DMR), Grenade Launching Rifle (fitted with under-barrel GLM module) and an Infantry Automatic Rifle (high capacity magazine-fed heavy-barreled support weapon). All of these are to offer 80-90% parts interchangeability. The 1st Gen TD is somewhat blocky and sketchy, but it was just a working model of the concept, while the 2nd Gen ‘Final Look’ offers a much more ‘High-Speed Low-Drag’ design.

The main component of a thus configured system is a 100% common upper receiver, which is to be mated with different barrel modules, lower receiver modules, and butt-stock (or butt-plate – according to the configuration) modules. The upper receiver in both 1st Gen and 2nd Gen is to be made of light alloy. Radon is totally ambidextrous, including fire control levers, magazine and bolt release buttons mounted on either side, as well as reversible bolt handle, ejection port cover and a truly reversible bolt, enabling the ejection direction to be changed in seconds without the use of tools and requiring no parts to be exchanged.

The lower receiver module has a magazine interface for the STANAG 4179-compatible (AR-platform) magazine. The choice of lower receiver module governs the configuration of the weapon, as it comes in two different versions: one with the classical folding buttstock interface and the other butt-less with multiple fire control group configurations possible (military selective with fully automatic and/or burst capability, and semiautomatic-only for the DMR and civilian-legal rifle). The Radon offers a choice of interchangeable barrel subassemblies with different length barrels complete with muzzle device, gas chamber, piston and locking chamber. Individual barrel modules differ in length and thermal capacity or contour (e.g. the IAR or DMR barrels). If a classic configuration lower is chosen, a butt-stock is attached with a choice of folding telescoping or fixed telescoping; both offering an adjustable cheek-piece capability. The bullpup lower can only accommodate a butt plate module, as governed by the weapon’s overall canard configuration.

The modular rifle fires the NATO-standard 5.56×45 round, fed from various plastic or metal magazines of different designs – provided they are AR-platform compatible. Additionally, it can be fed from a large-capacity drum and/or double drum magazines, dedicated to the IAR support weapon. For the future, a 7.62×51 NATO standard rifle round system is being considered.

Radons (in its 1st Gen, or TD guise) are currently undergoing a rigorous testing program aimed at achieving total reliability in various operational environments. As these demonstrators are still more of test appliances than weapons ready for issue, efforts are being made at enhancing their ergonomics and aesthetics. Part of that effort are the ‘Final Look’ mock-ups, a sneak-peek into the Radon’s future, offering a mature, elegant form of the Radon’s 1st Gen TD. These were designed by a team of eager young men from WAT and elsewhere, combining a rich knowledge of technology, industrial design, and SF combat experience, promising that the finalized Radon, expected to be accepted and manufactured within several years, could be a superb combat rifle.

Other Polish Rifles in Kielce

Other than Radon, the FB Lucznik-Radom also showed another batch of now seemingly endless line of modernized Beryl rifles. After many years of design stagnation, we can witness a veritable fountain of Beryl modifications rolled-out each year since 2007. This year’s novel features were a hinged receiver cover and a STANAG 4179 magazine adapter, as well as a Beryl-specific Beta C-Mag, a joint-venture between FB and Beta, Co. The beefed-up hinged receiver cover, coupled with a Picatinny rail welded on top of it to offer a semi-solid (5 mm gap at the hinge) same-level 1913 rail all along the top from the gas block to the top cover edge, cured the most cursed-upon by the Polish military ailment of the Beryl: being the necessity of re-zeroing the sights on the overhead rail after each field-stripping requiring the rail to be detached in order to open the receiver for routine maintenance. The AR-magazine adapter for Beryl required a minor re-shaping (opening to full rectangular shape) of the magazine well – which however is still capable of holding an AK magazine as well. The Beryl-specific Beta C-Mag has an AK-style feed-tower enabling it to hook into most 5.56mm AK rifles. There was also a brand-new .22 LR training rifle based on the Beryl rifle, possibly offered to the Army for basic firearms course training.

New Czech Army Rifle and SMG Displayed

Of the foreign premieres, those most interesting were centered at the booth of the Warsaw-based MK Szuster company. Mr. Krzysztof Szuster, the proprietor, has a long history of representing hunting rifles and scope manufacturers in Poland (including Blaser, Krieghoff, SIG-Sauer, CZ, Zeiss and Schmidt-Bender), but also ventures into the military market representing the brands’ military lines, as well as Accuracy International and Colt of Canada. This year his booth showcased the SIG 516/517 (true AR) system, but the really exciting and new items there were the new Czech military long arms with old names:, the CZ 805 Bren and the Scorpion 3A1 9mm SMG.

The CZ 805 won the controversial Czech Army rifle tender in February, 2010, and is as of this writing (December 2010) in series-production, with first units already delivered to the Czech Army’s Rapid Reaction element. It is another Central European iteration of the modular rifle concept available in three different barrel lengths (Combat Rifle, CQB Automatic Carbine and DMR) and intended to be chambered in three principal calibers: 5.56×45 NATO, 6.8mm Rem SPC and 7.62×39 Russian. The CZ 805 Bren A1, displayed in Kielce, was a 5.56mm Combat Rifle. So far, only the 5.56mm system is manufactured but the first prototypes shown in 2008 were of the 7.62mm version. The caliber-changing kit consists of a barrel, bolt head and interchangeable magazine-well of the lower receiver (somewhat akin to the MGI Hydra concept). There are three different magazine-well adapters so far, two for 5.56/6.8 magazines (one takes a CZ proprietary plastic clip interchangeable with HK G36 and the other holds the AR magazine, and a third one is for the plastic 7.62mm magazine that is not interchangeable with the vz.58 rifle.

Just as the 805 has nothing in common with its great World War II-era namesake – the joint Czech-British-designed Bren LMG – so is the Scorpion. There is no overlap whatsoever between the new Scorpion and the former trademark small Czech SMG, be it in original .32 ACP caliber or the recently revived 9mm Luger variant. This is a hi-tech polymer-receiver SMG, like the HK UMP, but more along the lines of the MP5 but rather handier, shorter, better balanced and fitted with a much better stock. Atypically, this is not a CZ in-house design – but probably the first license built weapon there since the vz.24 Mauser 98 variant, even though still almost domestic. The new Scorpion, first known as LAUGO, was designed by Slovak engineer Mr. Jan Lucansky, then brought over to CZ and finalized. This is a very simple closed-bolt, hammer-fired blowback design, with just one movable part – the bolt, but still featuring a fully-ambidextrous 4-way fire control group (safe, single, burst, fully automatic), bolt hold-open device with an external release lever, as well as a pistol grip movable in a horizontal plane to adjust the trigger reach.

Rosomak

Polish-built, Finnish-designed KTO Rosomak (Patria Oy AMV) proves its mettle successfully in Afghanistan, spawning still new models and modifications with various specialist equipment, including amongst others a casevac and self-propelled automatic mortar vehicles. Rosomak, much maligned when first purchased, eventually proved itself one of the most successful licenses ever implemented by the Polish defense industry.

The Rak is a Polish-designed 120mm automatic mortar turret system capable of being fitted to multiple tracked or wheeled chassis. Last year its prototype was displayed on the MPG tracked carrier. This year, the first series-manufactured system was installed in a Rosomak, giving a Rosomak-carried mechanized infantry a bigger punch with a 15 km reach.

Shrivenham is a large village and civil parish in Oxfordshire, England between Swindon and Faringdon near the M4. It is a quaint village with many thatched cottages, stone walls and a Norman parish church. Shrivenham is also the site of UK military colleges. Now known as the Defence College of Management and Technology, which is part of the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, it is a British postgraduate school, research institution and training provider formed in 2003 from five departments of the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, and as such is part of the British Armed Forces.

The Defence Academy is the UK’s Defence higher educational establishment. It is responsible for post-graduate education and the majority of command, staff, leadership, defence management, acquisition, and technology training for members of the UK Armed Forces and MOD Civilian Servants, and for establishing and maintaining itself as the MOD’s primary link with UK universities and international military educational institutions.

The Shrivenham Campus is home to Defence Academy HQ, JSCSC (Joint Services Command and Staff College) and DA-CMT (Defence Academy College of Management and Technology. The JSCSC trains the future commanders and staff officers of all three UK Armed Services and those from many countries around the world. The DA-CMT, with its headquarters and principal operating base at Shrivenham, is the largest of the three main colleges of the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom and develops and delivers high quality education, training and advice in core and functional competences, technology, acquisition, management and leadership, together with relevant aspects of security and resilience to students in Defence and the wider security area in order to enhance the delivery of defence capability.

Within the hallowed halls of this campus is an impressive collection of small arms, the purpose of which is to provide a tangible resource for the students to study and familiarize themselves with a wide variety of historical and modern small arms. It is a hands-on reference library of weapons that are not displayed in fine glass enclosed cabinets as one would find in a museum, but racked for easy access and study. The Defence Academy small arms collection is not available for viewing by the general public. Nevertheless, Small Arms Review has been graciously afforded the opportunity on a number of occasions to be allowed access to the restricted campus to view, handle, study and photograph their small arms collection, for which we are truly indebted for their hospitality.

As has been commented on before in this journal there are two conferences that should be on the list of anybody in the small arms and ammunition community to attend. While the bigger NDIA Small Arms Symposium held in the United States in May of each year is the larger, the Shrivenham Small Arms Symposium held at the Defence Academy is the focal point for European developments.

The smaller size of the Shrivenham Symposium gives it a more personal atmosphere, both Symposia provide a vital opportunity to ‘network’ and the 24th annual Small Arms and Cannon Symposium held in August of 2010 saw increased attendance over previous years. The programme of three days of short presentations on various subjects is now well established.

There were in all twenty-one presentations in the busy programme and the varied subject matter of the presentations included:

* Is there a problem with the lethality of the 5.56mm calibre? by Per Ardvisson.

* The 6.25x25mm CBJ – The sub-calibre approach by Mikael Johanson.

* Reduced Range Ammunition for Combat and Training by Thomas Mauritzson.

* The 20mm NEOPUP Weapon System by Tony Neophytou and Hennie Vermaak.

* Thermal sights for Long Range Small Arms and Soldier Modernization by Andreas Peterhanwahr.

* The NATO Powered Rail. Major B Gilchrist, Canadian Army.

* The U.S. Lightweight Small Arms Technologies Programme, Status & Plans by Paul Shipley.

* The Personal Defence Weapon -The Continuing Evolution by Mark Zimmerman.

* Acquisition Status of Small Arms and Ammunition for the United States Marine Corps by Sal Fanelli, USMC.

Although as said earlier this Symposium is primarily focused on European developments and issues, this year the local presentations were rounded off with contributions from the U.S. and Canada reflecting the joint issues that affect all coalition partners currently undertaking military operations.

SAR would like to encourage the small arms community to lend their support to the 25th Small Arms & Cannon Symposium to be held in the last full week of August 2011.

27 June 2009, Titusville, Florida at Knight’s Armament Company

George E .Kontis was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1945….

Kontis: (Interrupting) Wait a minute, Dan, we can’t start The Interview like this. I was indeed born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but that’s a little misleading. I was conceived in North Florida, in a tiny town called Carrabelle, my father was in the service there. He was a lieutenant in the Army. My mother had come down to stay with him in Carrabelle, and my mother got pregnant while she was in Carrabelle. Just before I was born she got on a train, went to Pittsburgh, and I was born in Pittsburgh. She then turned around and came right back down and raised me in North Florida where I was immediately labeled as a Damn Yankee. And all these years it’s been tough being a non- native born, native Floridian…

OK, now that the record is straight… George Kontis was born in 1945 to a family that started in the Greek community in Smyrna, Turkey, and left for Athens during the 1922 genocide. He’s been married to his wife Marcy for 38 years and has four children, Cherie and West, Alethea, and Soteria. George has been involved in the small arms business for all of his adult life. His designs include GPU-5A 30mm Gun Pod, numerous single barrel machine guns including the GE150, liquid propellant weapons, and improvements to ammunition handling systems.

He worked variously with Colonel George M. Chinn (who thought so highly of George that he included him on the inside cover of The Machine Gun Volume Five as one of the most promising small arms designers of modern times. George worked at General Electric’s Armament Systems Department, At FN Manufacturing, Inc. in charge of engineering for the M240, M249, and M16A4, was operations manager at HK-USA, and is currently Vice President of Business Development at Knight’s Armament Company in Titusville, Florida. George is a mentor to many of the young engineers in our community, and was the 1998 recipient of NDIA’s Col. George M. Chinn Award.

SAR: George, was there a firearms influence in your life when you were very young?

Kontis: My father was quite interested in firearms, even though he was an immigrant. Actually, he was an “illegal.” He didn’t have a country anymore; the Germans had occupied Greece, so he jumped ship in New York. He worked on a barge line for a number of months as a chief engineer even though he couldn’t speak English.

In those years, illegal or not, everyone had to sign up for the draft – those were the rules. When he passed his physical, they immediately snagged him into the Army. Why the Army and not the Navy? Well, because he didn’t understand the directions that they gave him, in English, for where to sign up for the Navy so he ended up in the Army. As a private he learned English, shortened his name from Kontaridis to Kontis, and he got his citizenship. He was not a shooter in Greece, but when he came to the U.S. and joined the Army, he loved to shoot, and he served in the Philippines. He was very proud of his military service and always liked shooting and above all, taught me safe gun handling.

SAR: What was the first gun you fired?

Kontis: I was five years old and it was a .22 rifle that was given to my dad to give to me by one of the barge line captains. Even at age five my dad used to take me out to shoot rats at the dump near the Ohio Valley General Hospital in Pittsburgh. We also went “plinking” there in the daytime. My .22 rifle was made in Chicopee Falls, I think it was like a Stevens, I can’t remember the exact name, but it was a dropping block .22. It was a great little rifle.

My uncles all went shooting and often went with us. One day at the dump, one uncle shot himself in the foot, and that taught me a very important safety lesson about shooting. He put a very clean hole right through his foot. Luckily, he missed all the bones. I learned to be extra careful after that. When I was in the third grade we moved to Tallahassee, and shooting is what I did almost every day. I didn’t go to soccer camps or any of that stuff. The money my parents spent on me was for ammo. My friends and I were in the woods all the time shooting, hunting, bringing home rabbits, birds, whatever. There was a lot of game there. I finally got a shotgun, and started buying up guns, even at an early age.

I also received an M1 Carbine as a hand-me-down from my Dad. It was “service” gun; he had the bring-back paperwork for it. It had a carving of a dog on the stock, done by a GI, quite a nice carving, and some hand-done checkering. I still have it. I restocked it because I wasn’t crazy about that dog being on my hunting rifle. One day I ran into Pete Kokalis, and he was telling me about trench art and explaining how valuable it was. I said, “You mean like if you had this rifle and there was a dog carved on the stock and some really nice checkering?” Kokalis’ eyes got really big so I knew this was something special, and I went home and threw that other stock away and put my original stock back on.

SAR: When was the first time you were around a machine gun or a silencer or anything unusual?

Kontis: Well, that didn’t come until I finished college at Georgia Tech. I went there to study Mechanical Engineering. My father was a marine engineer; it sort of was in the blood. As I kid, I always played around with a lot of mechanical things. My favorite TV show was called The Big Picture. Probably nobody remembers it, but it was put on by the government. They would go from one factory to the next and they would show how a helmet is made, they’d show how a rifle is made, show how ammunition is made. I was just fascinated by that. I liked to fix things, take things apart and fix them and play with them. I got Popular Mechanics and Popular Science. I was a big reader there and spent a lot of time in the library. I used to read books on how to make things yourself. I was particularly fascinated by Henley’s Twentieth Century Book of Formulas, Processes and Trade Secrets; it was a book that taught to make various compounds with different formulas. There are about 20 types of gunpowder formulas in there.

My friends and I did a lot of experimentation, too. We made some gunpowder and other things: bicycle spoke guns, firecracker guns, you name it, we did them all. We were pretty safety conscious for a number of reasons. One of the kids I knew had made a bomb and blew off most of his right hand. None of the girls would hold hands with him at the skating rink, so I decided girls were more important than bombs. And then of course, there was always the lingering memory of my uncle, screaming and hopping around the dump on one foot, with blood everywhere. Guns and shooting were my primary hobbies. I spent all of my spare time with them.

SAR: When was the first time you ran into a machine gun?

Kontis: That would’ve been my first day of work, my first day at a real job. It was as a design engineer at the General Electric Company in Burlington, Vermont, 1967. My first machine gun was a 20mm Vulcan cannon. We were the engineers in charge of testing, but not allowed to push the “fire” button. There was always this nagging thing that you really wanted to shoot that gun, but you weren’t allowed to. Finally, after a few years, I got an opportunity to go to an NDIA function, which at that time it was called the ADPA (American Defense Preparedness Association). There were some machine guns available and I got to shoot an M3 Grease Gun. I was impressed by the simplicity. It was such a clever design, but I was also amazed by how uncontrollable it was – for me anyway.

Georgia Tech had been an amazing experience. It was a very, very tough engineering school. I never worked so hard at anything in my life, and it taught me hard work, perseverance, how to take a problem and look at all the aspects and filter down what’s really important. They taught us how to identify the problem, focus on that alone, and then use the laws of physics and engineering to solve the problem.

I was at GE for 15 years. When I started, it was in the middle of the Vietnam War era, so they were making M134 Miniguns and M61 20mm cannons for all of the fixed wing aircraft, some helicopters, and gunships. The M61 started its life on fixed-wing aircraft. While I was there, they removed three of the barrels and developed the three-barrel M197 to arm helicopters.

I spent a lot of my time in R&D. We had developed the 25mm caseless program. That was going to be an aircraft cannon. We worked on case-telescoped ammunition, and I worked for about a year on liquid propellant guns. I spent about another year working on gun barrel improvements, trying to figure out why gun barrels fail and what we could do to extend the life. A very, very difficult problem, not well understood even today.

SAR: Did you work on the 5.56x45mm Miniguns, the Six Pack?

Kontis: No. That gun was invented by my boss, Bob Chiabrandy. He was probably the most brilliant engineer and designer I’ve ever worked with. That project started just before I got there, in the early 1960s: Bob had developed that weapon, a very, very clever design. There were no moving parts in the bolt, other than the firing pin. Although it was designed to fire at 6,000 shots per minute, they accidentally increased the power causing it to fire at 12,000 rounds a minute. This set the world record for the highest rate of fire of any machine gun. It fired linked ammunition, which was always a problem. Those links weren’t designed for side stripping, which would have been more ideal.

Preceding the 5.56 Minigun, there were two 7.62mm Miniguns that were being developed, A and B. The A gun was designed by Ray Patenaude – it’s the gun we know today with a two-piece bolt. There was a B-model Minigun designed by Chiabrandy with a one-piece bolt with dropping-block action same as his 5.56mm Minigun. That gun fired great – it was fantastic. The Army would come to review progress on the A model, which wasn’t firing, and they’d hear the B model firing. “What was that?” they’d ask. “Oh, that’s another project down at the other bay. We’re not allowed to talk about that one.” That was the B model. The A gun was continually failing, one problem after another, which they finally straightened out, of course.

SAR: What kind of problems did you see?

Kontis: The Minigun bolt from the A model that the military adopted, was difficult to make. As the two-piece bolt compressed to lock, there was this little finger that stuck out from the bolt head that followed a cam path in the rear portion. We used to call that thing the “fickle finger.” Because it was a casting, it was hard to maintain the dimensions, and it was a nightmare to machine. That was part of the problem. The rest of it was mostly in feeding, because to feed the round required something that looked like a gun with the sole job to delink the round: it was a tricky design.

SAR: It was always interesting to me that the geometry worked out where you had to have seven pushrods in there to coordinate against the six barrels. Did you ever get any feedback from the field?

Kontis: That was the beautiful thing in those years, and the thing that we’ve complained about just in recent times. GE used to get daily reports from Vietnam and even non combat areas, on what worked and what didn’t. It was fantastic feedback from the end users. They were reports, similar to faxes, providing important information that gave us a head start on finding solutions.

SAR: Did you ever go out on a military site, looking at the weapons?

Kontis: Yes, but remember, I worked mostly in R&D, so most of my time was spent on the research side of things. GE had a very big single-barrel cannon program. I worked on these for a number of years. The first one was the GE-120, 20mm, dual-feed cannon. The basic design was an inspiration of Dick Colby – he’s famous from the SPIW program. Then we went to the Hispano-Suiza 20mm. I was a project engineer on a 7.62x51mm version, the Armor Machine Gun (AMG.) That was on its way to becoming a successful program. We thought we were going replace the M73/M219 machine gun.

SAR: Good idea.

Kontis: Fantastic idea. That was overtaken by events because of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. They canceled all of the development programs and selected the MAG58. Those single barrel programs were fun, and I learned a lot about taking a weapon from inception, right through prototype design, to pre-production. On the AMG program my technicians and I developed a new instrumentation technique. We found it very useful and we had never seen it done before. Usually in firearm development you instrument the bolt to develop a time versus displacement curve. This lets you “see” how the bolt is moving through the cycle, and you measure its performance against time. We placed two transducers on the bolt: one to measure time and the other for velocity. In the end we developed a velocity versus displacement curve, getting rid of time altogether. This “VD” plot tells the engineer the velocity of the bolt throughout the cycle. Since velocity is related to energy, a sudden dip in the curve and you know you’ve lost energy. Using the VD information, you can find the exact spot where energy is lost and identify cycle problems easily.

SAR: What was the inspiration for doing the Armor Machine Gun; was that trying to shorten up the receiver?

Kontis: Yes, it was to replace the M73. Everybody, including the Army, knew the M73 was a dog and had no future. The M1 tank was coming along, so we needed a gun with a short receiver. In 1968, Springfield Armory closed and during the first part of 1969, GE took over the Springfield operation that included production of the M73 and M85 machine guns.

Bob Chiabrandy was named as engineering manager and I was one of the guys working with him. Bob and I spent all week down at Springfield operations working production problems.

The Armor Machine Gun appeared to have a promising future. It was recoil operated using the Browning short-recoil cycle. It had a very interesting triangular accelerator that worked in a cam on the receiver. The accelerator pivoted in the barrel extension and kicked the bolt to the rear during recoil. It could feed from the right or the left and the feed components were right there in the weapon. It had a neat little built-in solenoid, and it could fire using a solenoid or manually with a little palm trigger. The gun worked really quite well.

It was able to fire the two ammunition types including A127 that the M73could not fire. The case of the A127 was very soft and had a high incidence of ruptured cartridges, but only in the M73. The Army had to come up with special hardened case ammo for the M73. Like the M60 machine gun, the AMG could fire either ammo.

GE had a great prototype shop. When you completed a design, it was reviewed by manufacturing engineers, production engineers; it was textbook John Pederson. Tolerances were studied, the manufacturability was studied, and the drawing was not released until a manufacturing engineer, the big guru, Charlie Tudhope, signed off on it. Only then was it released, even if only a few units were to be made.

The engineer was responsible for designating what the significant characteristics were. Those were the dimensions that were inspected by Quality Assurance. If you had 10 dimensions specified as significant, you could be assured that those 10 dimensions were inspected 100% on every one of those parts.

The Burlington GE plant was formerly a Bendix operation that made turrets during World War II. GE went up there to build the Mark 12 reentry vehicle – a nose cone for a missile. At the same time, GE Schenectady was working on an Army project for Gatling guns and the project was moved up to Burlington. That’s when it all started. Vietnam hit, and it was just, “Katy, bar the door.” We went all out on designs. GE developed the linkless feed system from a design that was conceived by the Roy Sanford Company, in Connecticut. GE took the concept, solved all the problems and made it work in production. Those 20mm linkless feeds were used on all of the major aircraft, starting on the F-105. They were in the F-4, the A-7 and the F-111. They had refined the linkless feed systems to be scalable – even the 30mm GAU-8 round for the A-10 aircraft. That was one beautiful design from start to finish.

SAR: You worked on caseless ammunition there?

Kontis: 25mm caseless. The weapons system was for aircraft and the idea was to go to 25mm. They figured 20mm was going to be limited down the road, so they wanted to go to 25, and they developed a 25mm caseless round. It was a coffee-mill gun, much like a Gatling gun, but had ten chambers for six barrels. Rounds were fed into empty chambers under the gun, which were moved to line up with barrels and fired. The empty chambers rotated out of the gun so more rounds could be fed.

The round used compressed propellant and a percussion primer. The case telescoped 25mm was the same idea, when caseless didn’t work, case telescoped was tried next. Case telescoped is basically taking what you normally think of as a cartridge and replacing that with a cylinder. Everything is packaged into the cylinder, including powder, primer, and projectile. The difference is that the projectile is not seated right there at the origin of rifling. The projectile is back inside the cartridge case, so when the projectile gets launched, it flies out and then contacts the origin of rifling and then begins to spin up.

SAR: So it has to transition from its own case into the rifling? Did you use progressive rifling on that?

Kontis: Yes. In order to get the projectile started up so it didn’t jump right into the full rifling. That wasn’t the design challenge, though. The big issue with these weapons is sealing the high chamber pressure.

SAR: You were there 15 years. Any other projects you worked on at GE?

Kontis: I designed the GE-150, an externally powered .50 caliber machine gun. We were going to replace the M2HB and the M85 with a .50 caliber externally powered gun. This gun would use a two-rotation cam, unlike a Gatling gun that moves a bolt back and forth in one rotation. The GE-150 cam turned two times and translated the bolt all the way to the rear, and all the way into battery with a firing dwell at the front end and a feed dwell at the rear. We made the feeder in such a way that it would handle either link; the rearward end stripping M9 for the Browning style, and the forward end stripping M15A2 for the M85. Ammunition linked either way could be fired using the same feeder: no changes, no adjustments, just load in the rounds and shoot.

We actually built that and tested it at full rate and it worked great, so we were pretty excited about it. There were two drawbacks to this design. One was that the heat from the barrel would head right into the drive cam and that could lead to problems. The other drawback was the fact that the M9 link is a pull-to-the-rear link. There is no other way to get the round out of the link. Pulling the round to the rear, feeding it into the bolt, then chambering all takes time. The time to fire the first round fired was lengthy, all due to the link, and there wasn’t much we could do about it.

For sure, the most exciting job and the most fun I had the design of the GPU-5/A 30mm gun pod. The success of the 30mm in the GAU-8 type round in the A-10 was something that we thought would be good for every one of the aircraft to have, so we made a pod that all the fighter jets could carry.

Lew Wetzel and I worked on that design together. He was the project lead – it’s surprising when you look at the GE Gatling designs and realize how many of them he designed. One of the things I learned from Wetzel was the way you to make a new design successful. The trick is to prove out the high risk areas first by building prototypes and testing them. For complex designs, we’d start with simple prototypes then continued to refine them until finally all of the high risk design issues were proven out. By the time you go into the first full prototype you’ve only got the small problems to clear up.

The GPU-5A was a very unique design. GE never had anything quite like it. Wetzel came up with the ammunition handling system concept. All the rounds were stored and transported in little conveyor buckets. Wetzel and I spent a lot of hours trying to figure out how to make the thing work.

What we did was to spiral the ammunition around the full length of the pod. There were two layers of conveyor buckets that moved up and down the pod taking a helical path. The inner layer went toward the gun feeder and outer layer of conveyor buckets moved in the direction of the muzzle – turning around at the end and becoming inner conveyor buckets.

In the center of the pod was a four-barrel GAU-13/A not the seven-barrel GAU-8. (The five-barrel is in 25mm.) My part of the design was the feeder, the recoil mitigation system and some of the feed storage system components. Since it was a gun pod, everything had to be as small as possible, yet be rugged enough to handle those huge 30mm rounds.

The tricky part of the gun feeder was that the four-barrel gun needed the ammunition to be spaced apart somewhere on the order of five inches. In the conveyor system the rounds were spaced with a “pitch” of about two inches apart. This level of acceleration of the ammunition was needed to match the speed of the bolt, and conversely to decelerate fired cases from the gun in order to place them into empty conveyor buckets. This was common practice in aircraft weapon systems. Round acceleration was always done the same way – with a sprocket. The sprocket would pick up a round at a slow speed and while rotating it would accelerate the round from the root of the sprocket out to the tip of the sprocket to gain speed. If I had used this conventional acceleration technique, I would have had to use about nine sprockets passes to get the rounds properly accelerated. There just wasn’t room in the gun pod.

That’s when I thought about using elliptical gears. I went through the equations for the elliptical gear calculations and theoretically it appeared everything would work perfectly. All I needed was a four-lobed elliptical gear pair, and by God, the round would be accelerated up to speed to match the speed of the rotating bolt, and using only one sprocket, not nine.

My next step was to figure out how to construct the gear and it was then I realized something was bad wrong. I found out the gear couldn’t be cut with a standard gear cutter. Now I was stuck so I decided to contact the guy who developed the elliptical gear equations I was using and ask him, “Hey, what’s with your equations. They don’t work for my application?” I found his number and called him. His name was Fred Cunningham; the guru who wrote all the equations and lots of articles about elliptical gearing. Cunningham told me, “What you’re trying to do won’t work because gear teeth have to be symmetric and in your design, the gear teeth will be asymmetric.” He made a suggested design change but it would require a lot more gears and sprockets and there probably wasn’t room for them.

It was no cause for worry; I knew just what to do. Whenever I was faced with this level of problem, I did have one more option. Go see Bob Chiabrandy – which I did. Bob listened attentively to my problem, looked at my equations, and seemed rather amused that I had actually called Cunningham and challenged his design methods. A couple hours later Bob hands me a table of numbers and says, “Here are the x & y coordinates of your gears.” “You need to figure out how to make them, but I think these will work.” We cut the first ones out of a piece of sheet aluminum, filing them here and there. The technicians mounted them on a nice board with a hand crank and they ran together perfectly. In the pod they picked up the rounds at the 2 inch pitch and fed them right to the bolt….

SAR: …Making a proper presentation….

Kontis: … matching the bolt velocity perfectly for a smooth transition. That was just one of the gear pairs! The second pair picked up the fired case from the bolt and decelerated it, dropping it back into the conveyor bucket so no fired cases were ejected overboard. The conveyor bucket held live rounds and fired cases. When the pod fired the ammo handling system, and it went from totally full of live rounds to totally full of empty cases after it fired out. Nothing was ejected overboard.

SAR: That’s a thing of beauty.

Kontis: It was a fun design project that worked really well. It was used in Desert Storm. The other part that I designed was the recoil system for it. When you’re designing a gun pod, you’re trying to make everything as absolutely small as you can. This big cigar was going to be far too fat unless Wetzel and I figured out how to compact everything. That’s why we put the gun inside, wrapped the ammunition around it, and then put the skin around that. It’s also why the elliptical gears had to be made to work.

There is a tremendous amount of recoil from the 30mm cannon firing in an aircraft. We designed what we called a strong-back; it was like a skeleton to take the loads. Much of the recoil energy from the gun was converted to friction using two recoil adapters and this reaction was taken from the strong back and into the aircraft mounting hooks. Recoil adapters for a system that big use ring springs: concentric rings have high energy-absorbing friction when compressed. To that point, all ring springs used on Gatling guns operated inside a tubular housing. We had no room for a tube, so I figured out how to put a “housing,” if you will, inside the rings.

The spring pack was double acting, so that when it was pulled apart the stack of ring springs was compressed and when the ends were pushed together, the ring stack was again compressed. This was kind of a wild idea I had. We made some prototypes and we played with them with some coil springs, and by golly it really did work. I refined the design from prototype stages, and ended up getting a patent on the design, and they still use this particular design today. It was quite successful.

SAR: Did you have any problem with GE when you got patents? They didn’t claim your work?

Kontis: Oh, they did claim them. When you work for a company, generally your patents are assigned over to the company. Now, I must say GE was very good about giving you an honorarium for your patent that involved a nice gift, an expensive dinner, and a monetary award. It wasn’t all that bad.

SAR: You went to an ADPA meeting, which was the precursor to the National Defense Industrial Association and the Small Arms Symposium.

Kontis: That would’ve been in the ’70s and early ’80s. In those years, it was a who’s who of small arms people. Berge Tomasian, who ran Saco Defense, was chairman until Jay Trumper from GE took over. From the government side, there was Frank Marquardt who designed the Marquardt 20mm Navy Aircraft Cannon used in the Mk11 gun pod. Gene Stoner was there quite often, as were the guys from Saco: John Rocha and George Curtis. I took advantage of these opportunities to get to know people like Uzi Gal, Israel Gallili, and Bill Ruger, who showed up once in a while. They were all a great bunch of people to associate with.

We held yearly meetings just like we do now as NDIA, with papers presented. Usually one year it was east coast, one year it was west coast. They were rarely held at Picatinny. I was a participant, but later on, I was more active in the organization.

The Colonel (Chinn) and I had gotten to be pretty good buddies. You’d see him there all the time and as well, Rod Spies who was the head of marketing from Hughes. The Chain Gun was a Hughes development that wasn’t ready in time for the Armored Fighting Vehicle (Bradley) competition, so TRW with Gene Stoner’s 25mm cannon won the competition between GE and TRW. Out of nowhere came Spies, who figured out how to get his chain gun considered. In the end, it was the 25mm Chain Gun that won out. Spies was an amazing marketing guy – he won the Chinn Award too. As I said, ADPA was a great experience.

SAR: Any other projects or programs at GE?

Kontis: Near the end of my days at GE, I had an idea for a new project, a .50 caliber Gatling gun. It just seemed like that was something that could be a hot seller. It would be something that was needed to replace the aging aircraft cannons. The concept was for a six-barrel gun or a three-barrel gun. I would make the rotor big enough to be a six-barrel gun for fixed wing aircraft armament, but start out by making a three-barrel gun, since that would be more saleable. As the design progressed and proved itself, three more barrels could be added to make a new product. Just the opposite of what was done for the 20mm from the M61 to the M197. A lot of people liked my .50 caliber concept and I got money allocated for it, and I was ready to lead the design team as the project engineer. That was the time frame where I decided that I wanted to get into management; I didn’t want to be a design engineer anymore. I felt like I was getting pigeonholed; and I really liked working with people. I also thought I’d like to work in sales some day. I liked the whole NDIA (ADPA) scene and being inspired by all those great gun designers, and I felt like it was time to move on. I left that project and in 1982 I took the opportunity to go to FN and be the Product Engineering Manager. FN was having trouble getting the M240 off the ground and I was sure I could help.

SAR: Where had FN come from with the M240 program?

Kontis: The M240 was brought on by the failure of the M219 (M73) during the Yom Kippur War. The Israelis complained to the U.S. what a terrible gun they had been sold. There was even a congressional investigation. There were other candidates being trialed but the money for these got canceled. My Armor Machine Gun was a casualty along with others. The GE AMG and other guns coming down the pike weren’t ready yet. Congress demanded a worldwide competition with the objective to pick the best gun to replace the M73.

FN won that competition with the MAG58 Coaxial machine gun. It was the tank version of their Infantry MAG58. They were given a contract for a limited number of guns as well as providing a Technical Data Package (all the drawings) so that the guns could be built in the United States. FN in Belgium began delivering the guns from the Herstal, Belgium factory, so the immediate need for a reliable tank coax was filled.

Then FN won the competition to build the same gun (now called the M240) in the U.S. Since they didn’t have a U.S. factory, they built one in Columbia, South Carolina. They were in quasi-production for one year, but it was a huge mess. From the engineering side, they needed an engineer who could interact with the Army representatives and convey the Army message to the Belgians. The converse of this was also needed. I used to jokingly say my job was as a translator – converting English to English.

The U.S. factory, FN Manufacturing, Inc. (FNMI) suffered from growing pains: a new factory with inexperienced personnel, the language barrier, and inexperience in understanding exactly what the U.S. military wanted. I was only on the job a few days when I realized how bad things really were, but we had a good group of people, and I felt pretty confident we’d get things moving in the right direction. After all, they had a nice factory and had some decent new manufacturing equipment, and a reputation for building good stuff.

It took a long time for the workforce to understand what was needed, as many of them weren’t experienced gun people or machinists. The Belgians had sent quite a contingent over to get production going. The first year they had built some M240s, but not to the Army’s Tech Data Package that they had drawn to U.S. format. The Army demanded the gun be built to their new tech data package, but the Belgians wanted to continue to use theirs.

SAR: Because they knew those worked.

Kontis: Exactly. This was how they built the guns in Belgium. The U.S. didn’t buy the manufacturing package; they only bought the technical data package, and there’s a big difference. I had a great engineering team and we finally got the Army drawings into a condition where both the Army and the Belgians were happy with it. The FNMI manufacturing engineers made new manufacturing drawings that worked best for the new factory.

You know, even though these were tank guns, the Army did something very, very smart when they redrew the drawings. It would’ve been so easy to eliminate all of the infantry features of the original MAG58 that allowed those guns to be used on the ground. It would have been cheaper too.

Here are some examples of what I’m talking about. The back sight bracket had steps that were used for the rear sight. Those steps were hardened so that they wouldn’t wear, and here we were at FNMI, installing back sight brackets with hardened areas where the steps were, and no sights on the gun. We also hardened the area where the dust cover latched underneath, even though there was no dust cover on the coaxial weapon. We did all the little infantry nuances, from the MAG58, even though these guns were going into tanks. Hats off to whoever decided that, or we would have never gotten the M240G and M240B off the ground.

There is an interesting story of a problem we had to solve right off the bat. Product Engineering’s job was to go through the M240 design dimension by dimension, comparing the Army drawings with the Belgian’s manufacturing package so that we could accommodate both. In doing that, we were very successful with one major exception.

One thing that didn’t work very well at all was the feed tray, and this is the very heart of every automatic weapon. The ammunition links were digging trenches in the top of the tray causing malfunctions. The FN Herstal design was made out of nine components that included an investment cast round stop, rivets, and stampings. The first U.S. made feed trays looked just like the ones from Belgium, but ours didn’t work well at all and nobody could figure out why.

The feed tray started out its life as a stamping of very soft steel, “tin can steel” we used to call it. Then it was masked for certain areas that we didn’t want plated, and then it was chrome plated. After it was chrome plated, then it was phosphated black. This was just an inordinate amount of time to manufacture a part, requiring a lot of handwork. They’d sit there painting the masking on these things. It was an awful, awful part.

My idea on that was that we’ve got some really good casting companies in this country, so let’s get a couple good houses to make us a casting. We called in Hitchner and some others and said, “Can you guys investment cast this?” They said, “Sure. What material do you want?” I picked a good material that I knew would come out harder than the links and we ended up with a nice hard feed tray. It was absolutely beautiful. The Belgians were screaming, “What are you doing? The part’s fine like it is.” They weren’t real happy with the American team at the time. We took that thing out and fired it and we couldn’t fail it. It just shot and shot and shot. That was one of the first times that the American engineering team there “grew legs.”

SAR: Did you get to go shooting at FN if you wanted to?

Kontis: All the shooting you wanted [laughter]. That was a nice part about FN. We got to do all the demos but we engineers were authorized to shoot all the time for testing, it was great. We did lots of demos, and our first demos were something we called the GMAK, Ground-Mount Adaption Kit. I always have to be selling and I figured, “You’ve got a great design. Let’s put this thing on the ground.” The number one M240 complaint from the tankers wasn’t anything about the gun or how it worked or functioned, it was that you couldn’t take the gun out and put it on the ground. We decided the thing to do is sell a ground kit for it, use it as an infantry weapon, basically a bipod and butt stock to dismount with. We couldn’t get any buyers. We heard asinine comments like, “If you take the gun out of the tank and put it on the ground, you decrease the fightability of the tank.” Wait a minute. The tank is already dead [laughter]; you’ve got no more fightability. Get the hell out of there! Put the gun on the ground so you can get moving and keep fighting. At NDIA, Ed Gripkey our marketing manager, would be holding the weapon, with me doing all the soft-shoe dancing and verbiage for the demo. We had the wooden stock from the MAG58, but wood could not be decontaminated in an NBC environment. We had developed a pipe stock with a rubber pad on the pack and it worked well. It was comfy to shoot and troops really liked it, but we couldn’t sell any of them. The GMAK went nowhere at the time.

We got pretty busy at FN because we won three major contracts at once. We won the M16A2 rifle, we won the M249, and then the Mk19. These represented all of the major contracts in U.S. small arms – all won within a period of about three months. We figured, this is never going to fly. Number one, the politicos from all the other states were screaming. Maine was screaming, “You can’t have the Mk19. That’s for Saco.” Although Sako had never built one, this message came from the Navy. About the M249, FN diehards were saying, “Oh, that’s our baby; we want to build it.” As for the M16, FN had hired a lot of ex Colt employees including the head of manufacturing and some other top people. Their mantra was, “We need to bring the M16 into FN.” In the end, we let the Mk19 contract go to Saco and the rest is history.

The Mk19 was Colonel Chinn’s baby. I hired an old friend of mine named Charlie Mooney, who worked with Chinn. Charlie was another one of the best engineers I ever worked with. Charlie is now deceased. It was sad to lose Charlie at a young age. Charlie took the Mk19 from a gun that wasn’t working very well, although the concept was there, but the details, where the devil lives, weren’t there. He made it into something that would work. Then Saco took it and made it into something that could be produced as well. Just because you have a drawing that works out and a prototype that works, doesn’t mean you can produce it and have mass quantities work: it takes a lot of time. I was working in product engineering for about half of my career, and by the late ’80s I was getting a little tired of working in engineering and I saw a lot of marketing opportunities that we weren’t taking advantage of. And I always want to get new things into the hands of the troops. When I saw a need, like this GMAK, it was just driving me crazy.

I had to get it out into the field. When we didn’t succeed, I had to go somewhere else and get something else out into the field. FN had a lot of products over in Belgium that weren’t being sold in the U.S. and they came in and gave us an orientation on what they had. When I saw the list I said, “Wow, those are some really cool products. We could sell those in the U.S.” Without anybody asking, I wrote a marketing plan, the first one I’d ever written. I didn’t even know how to write a marketing plan, and there was no Internet to search. I showed it to my boss and he said, “I don’t want to see that anymore. Don’t show that to anybody.” FN was pretty good about hiring consultants and they hired these top-notch consultants to come in and look at business, and while one of them was interviewing me we talked about the new products. He saw I was excited about the new products and he said, “There needs to be a marketing plan.” At first I held my tongue, but then I remembered what Julien Labeye, the president of FNMI, told me. He said, “Tell these guys whatever you want, no holds barred.” So I said, “Well, sir, I wrote a marketing plan, but I was told to hold it close.” He said he wanted to see it, so I handed him it to him. He said, “This is a pretty good marketing plan.” The next thing I knew I was sales manager of North America for FN, and I was off selling FN products in Canada and the U.S.

That was really a great experience for me. It expanded my horizons. I went to Belgium, to France, and up to Canada. We really started things moving and got FN products on a roll. We had the M249 in production, the M16A2, and the M240. Now there was the opportunity to product improve, do R&D, and hopefully sell the GMAK, but now my goal was to sell it on the ground and not just for dismount, which I finally succeeded in doing.

I wanted to sell the Para kit for the M249 and to bring over the quick-change barrel .50. Another pet project was the adaptation of the M3P .50 caliber to the Boeing Avenger. The origin of this system was the FN HMP (heavy machine gun) gun pod. FN was real unhappy with my proposed plan because they wanted me to sell them a complete gun pod, but it just didn’t make sense on a ground vehicle, particularly with the weight constraints (the Avenger had to be air transportable.) What I had in mind was to sell the guts of the pod – gun, charger, mount, feed system, etc., without the rest of the HMP system, the bulk of which was the big “cigar” that enclosed everything. Some of the FN Herstal people were really against breaking up the gun pods to sell components, so I arranged for a meeting with both the FN Herstal and FNMI people, including Julien Labeye.

At first my presentation was a comprehensive, multi-page report to show which parts of the gun pod would be used and which not, with technical discussions etc. Then I remembered somebody told me that most company presidents won’t look at any more than one page of anything. I decided that a 1-pager would be my whole presentation. For each of the dozen or so attendees, I made black and white photocopies of the page in the HMP brochure that had nice isometric sketches of each of the HMP components. There was no such thing as a color copier back then, so I took the black and whites home to my young daughters, aged 7 and 9. I offered to pay them to color in red the parts Boeing won’t need, green for the parts they would use as is, and yellow for the one part that needed a slight modification. The girls, both very artistic, did a beautiful job with colored pencils and everybody at the meeting was impressed not only with the good sales prospects of a new gun system for the Avenger, but for some good ingenuity in using “available resources” to get the point across.

SAR: George, you just rolled through a whole lot of stuff there. Let’s stroll back down the line a bit. You were there when FNMI bid the M16?

Kontis: I went to Rock Island Arsenal and sat down with a gentleman, I believe his name was John Irons. He was the project manager of the M16. And I said, “John, we’re from FN. We’ve got a great factory in Columbia, South Carolina, and when that M16 comes up for competitive bid, we want to be there and we want to bid on it.” This was the M16A2, right out of the JSSAP program. I had worked with Jim Ackley before and I had met (Lt. Col.) Dave Lutz and some other folks, but basically this was more oriented towards “We’re a firearms factory and we’re eligible to bid on this, and by God, we want to bid on it.” M16A2 was now in the production arena and we were to get a TDP. FNMI’s ex-Colt guys were ecstatic because, “Hey, we know these parts. We can bid.” At FNMI, we put together a really good package and we bid it and we won. There were only two bidders, Colt and FNMI, as I recall. There was a $14 per rifle difference in the bids, or something close to that. It was quite a challenge for FN to build those parts; I remember that. I don’t think it was a moneymaker for a number of years for them.

Whether plinking, practicing, competing or training, a .22 LR alternative is financially desirable and very beneficial. While there have been several .22 LR pistols over the last century to choose from, there have been very few factory full-size versions that share fit and function with the original gun. Of the few that do, they are typically expensive. The ATI GSG 1911 .22 LR pistol mimics the size, weight feel and function so closely it can be used with the factory .45 ACP 1911 gear, and at an affordable price.

We received the GSG 1911 for testing and evaluation several months in advance of this scheduled article. While we like to bring our readers the “latest and greatest” as soon as we can, we wanted to put some time in on this one and perform a mini endurance test before going to print.

Since the primary subject matter of Small Arms Review is NFA Firearms, we only thought it made sense to test it as a platform for the numerous small and effective rimfire suppressors available today. We immediately ordered a thread adapter from Gemtech as well as a Gemtech Outback II, a Bowers Paradigm and a SilencerCo Sparrow.

Initial Observations

Although we have had the opportunity to handle several of ATI’s (American Tactical Imports) other offerings in the past, they have all been based on military-style rifles and carbines and we didn’t know what to expect with a 1911 pistol. This is a gun many of us “cut our teeth” on and most shooters have a deep appreciation for this design so we knew expectations would be high and criticism in any flaw whatsoever would come easy out of familiarity.

The day it arrived it didn’t take long before we needed to hit the test range and do some initial function and performance tests. Given an MSRP that we consider quite reasonable, we didn’t have high expectations for the cosmetic features, but were quickly and pleasantly surprised. Right out of the box we were extremely impressed with several characteristics. The most noticeable at first sight were the checkered wooden grips. Our test gun had dark checkered grips with a large diamond pattern over each grip screw. Further examination revealed an extended beavertail safety, an enlarged ambidextrous safety, a combat hammer and an adjustable trigger. The rear of the slide is heavily serrated to the rear, and the finish is dark and uniform on all parts. The sights are a popular 3-dot style, drift adjustable for windage. To adjust for elevation, 3 different front sights are included each with a gradual increase for point of impact/point of aim synchronization.

Though the magazines hold 10 rounds of .22 LR, they have been built to simulate the weight and feel of a standard 1911 .45 ACP magazine. They are very heavy and rugged and even fit standard magazine pouches. A magazine has to be inserted in order to drop the hammer, even on an empty chamber as is very common with many imported pistols.

The only real key that it was chambered in .22 LR and not the usual .45 ACP was the very light tension of the slide spring. If it were gripped like a normal heavy .45 ACP and returned to the rear, it would immediately be obvious that it was not.

On to the Range

The first order was to just test fire the gun as it was shipped before altering anything. This is a “must do” as changes and additions can alter performance at times and we wanted to start from the beginning and just fire for function. There were several shooters on the initial day and we ran several hundred rounds of ammo in rapid fashion.

Not a single malfunction was observed and it was time to adjust the sights. Since all shooters were shooting at 15-25 yards and consistently hitting high, we changed the front blade to the highest sight provided. Every group thereafter was placed in its intended spot. No windage adjustment was necessary.

After several more magazines to “proof” the sight adjustment we immediately installed the Gemtech thread adapter with the included wrench and started running it suppressed. The first candidate was the Bowers Paradigm followed by the Gemtech Outback II and the SilencerCo Sparrow. While all ammo continued to run with great success it was the opinion of this writer that the Federal Gold Medal Match ammo really shined through.

After numerous boxes of ammo, several targets and all combinations of sound suppressors the GSG 1911 continued to draw praise from the test shooters.

Multi-Purpose Package

While .22 LR guns are often associated with inexpensive shooting and generally an all around inexpensive alternative to “real” shooting, the mix of test shooters this first day found an entirely new reason to not only want, but “need” to purchase one of these guns for themselves. There were 3 or 4 shooters who immediately decided to purchase one or two at that first outing. All the test shooters are firearms instructors for Alpha Group, LLC and though they all have specialty classes in different disciplines, we are all also NRA Basic Pistol and Personal Protection Instructors and assist people in basic firearms introduction and training on their road to advanced gun ownership and obtaining their concealed carry permits. Since many students are adults, including many grown men, a full-size pistol with little to no recoil or noise can be extremely beneficial. When working with younger shooters and more timid students, the loss of a loud noise in training greatly assists them in focusing on the basic principals while ratcheting down the intimidation factor several-fold. This helps from developing a flinch that they need to work hard to lose in the future and just makes the overall experience much more pleasurable.

Extended Testing

Since the timeframe was wide from delivery to the publishing of this article, the GSG1911 was used in numerous scenarios not usually available in a more time conscious deadline period. At the time of this writing, the GSG1911 has been part of the authors gear bag in his capacity as a licensed ADC Agent. Several calls a year come in to deal with small and large game animals involved in human interaction that have to be rectified. Some are in urban areas where the use of a larger caliber creates concern and confusion and the suppressed .22 LR GSG 1911 excelled. Even more important than sound reduction is pinpoint accuracy in these situations and with the Federal Gold Medal ammo it was not only extremely quiet, but cycled every time and extremely accurate. At this point it has replaced the previous suppressed .22 LR pistol in the ADC gear bag and has yet to disappoint in any situation.

Also as assumed, the GSG1911 was used for training in several shooting courses from basic pistol classes to entry-level shoot-house runs and even rimfire competitions. It always ranked as the most requested firearm in these entry-level classes and has found a home with several more instructors as of this writing. To our surprise, even some of the female shooters with smaller hands have been more comfortable and had a better shooting experience with the full-size GSG 1911 over many of the smaller and very common .22 LR pistols offered in the same classes.

Conclusions

While the price point is extremely attractive on the GSG 1911 .22 LR, please don’t let that fool you into believing you are buying a substandard firearm. Several shooters who use their firearms in a professional capacity have had the opportunity to test the GSG 1911 .22 LR and all have had a favorable impression. Many have even purchased their own after testing the T&E gun sent to SAR. I can’t think of a higher endorsement than that.

While the first impression of a standard .22 pistol is generally a plinker, the GSG 1911 has proven useful in several other areas. As a training tool it has been an extremely successful addition and has been handled by dozens and dozens of students with favorable impressions. If your interest in this firearm is for plinking or target shooting it will not disappoint. If you are one of several die-hard 1911 fans who just want a break in the noise, recoil or ammo expense without sacrificing valuable training and practice, you may find a great value in this pistol and have the added bonus of using your standard holsters, mag pouches and carry rigs. If you want a gun that feels like a gun as a suppressor host it has even more appeal. As someone who has the opportunity to use firearms in several capacities on an almost daily basis, this writer has added a GSG 1911 to his gear bag in a permanent fashion.

As a long-time shooter, every once in a while something completely unexpected really exceeds any preconceived notions and the GSG 1911 may be as valuable a find for you as it was for this writer. At the MSRP of $359.95 it is a small gamble to take with the potential for a large payoff.

Sources

American Tactical Imports
GSG 1911
Available at dealers Nationwide
www.americantactical.us/

Gemtech
GSG 1911 Thread Adapters
& Outback II Silencer
www.Gem-Tech.com

Bowers Group
Paradigm Silencer
www.subguns.com

Silencerco
Sparrow Silencer
www.silencerco.com/

On 19 June 2009, former U.S. Army General Colin Powell cut the ribbon to officially open the New National Infantry Museum and Soldier Center near the home of the U.S. Army’s Infantry School, Fort Benning, Georgia. The new museum is world class and quite large, with approximately 190,000 square feet dedicated to telling the story and honoring the U.S. Infantryman from 1607 to the present. The museum features six separate era galleries where exhibits are arranged by dates, although many of the early exhibits; “Securing Our Freedom” 1607-1815, and “Defining a Nation” 1815-1898, Manifest Destiny and the Civil War, exhibits are not yet open to the public. Among the many exhibits there are many personal items and stories of individual soldiers, some famous, others just ordinary soldiers who did an extraordinary job.

The International Stage

The gallery exhibits currently open to visitors begin with the “The International Stage” 1898-1920. Upon entering the display area there are many artifacts from the Spanish American War, including a porthole from the USS Maine. The Maine was a U.S. ship that mysteriously exploded and sank in a Cuban harbor, and eventually led to the war with Spain. Moving ahead, the visitor steps into World War I “no man’s land” by entering a sandbag covered trench. Along the walls of the “trench” are artifacts and photos that project the miserable conditions troops endured during the “Great War” (less rats and decaying bodies). Moving further one hears the rattle and sees the muzzle flash of a machine gun reflecting off of the wall. There is also an audio-visual exhibit that tells the story of Medal of Honor recipient, Sergeant Alvin York, one of the most famous Infantrymen of the war.

World at War

One of largest exhibits in the museum is “World at War” representing World War II, to include both European and Pacific Theaters of operations. Summarizing the events that unfolded during the conflict are projected on a rotating globe-like screen on the floor. Vintage films are continually running on screens throughout the exhibit areas. Small arms used by all of the belligerents involved are on display, as well as personal weapons and gear of famous soldiers and generals that include Audie Murphy’s service cap and German Field Marshall Herman Goering’s gem covered baton. Other artifacts are a U.S. Army Jeep and a Japanese gas mask designed for a horse. On display are uniforms of both Allied and Axis soldiers. Several dioramas in the exhibit area depict significant battles.

Cold War

The next chronological exhibit is the Cold War 1947-1989 that includes many artifacts and weapons fielded during the period, from a Browning Automatic Rifle designed during World War I, to the Davy Crockett, a small nuclear weapon developed during the 1960s for Army Infantry use against large Soviet troop concentrations, should the Cold War ever suddenly go hot. Many items from the Korean Conflict are also on display. Visitors can listen to Korean War veterans tell their recorded stories inside a recreated bunker. The Vietnam Gallery allows visitors to experience a search and destroy mission in a hot and humid jungle environment. Many personal effects of prisoners of war are displayed to offer a glimpse of the brutal conditions captured U.S. servicemen endured during their confinement in places like the infamous Hanoi Hilton. The Berlin wall was erected in 1961 by the Communist East German Government to keep East German citizens from defecting into West Berlin. The tearing down of the infamous wall in Berlin, Germany in 1989 marked the end of the Cold War era. On display in the museum are three complete sections of the Berlin Wall covered with graffiti, painted by citizens of Berlin.

Sole Superpower

The Sole Superpower exhibit, from 1989 to the present, was so named to describe the United States’ status after the Cold War ended. The Gallery covers the smaller scale conflicts like Grenada, the War on Terrorism and the two Iraq Desert Wars. On display are many high-tech weapons used by U.S. Forces as well as captured enemy weapons and equipment.

The Hall of Valor

Prominently featured in the Grand Hall is the Hall of Valor, a glass-enclosed space dedicated to recognizing deeds of exceptional bravery. On the outside, quotes are etched in the glass, and inside, plaques honoring each of the nearly 1,500 Infantry recipients of the Medal of Honor line the walls. A computer allows visitors to look up details for each Medal of Honor recipient.

The Last 100 Yards

The Last 100 Yards is one of the museum’s featured exhibits. It consists of a 100 yard long inclined ramp lined with lifelike Infantrymen from all periods. The name “Last 100 Yards” signifies the Infantry’s “boots on the ground” role in closing and seizing the last yards of ground from the enemy. A World War II glider, Huey helicopter and Bradley Fighting Vehicle complete the display.

The Officer Candidate School Hall of Honor

The Officer Candidate School Hall of Honor was established to recognize distinguished OCS graduates and as a method to motivate and provide incentive for both candidates and graduates to excel. This gallery honors the over 2,000 Soldiers who have been inducted into the OCS Hall of Fame since 1952. A computer is provided to search for individual inductees. A timeline follows the early beginnings of the U.S. Army’s Officer Candidate School and chronicles its development and history.

The Ranger Hall of Honor

This exhibit was formed to preserve the spirit and contributions of the Army’s elite Rangers. Honored are nearly 200 soldiers who have been inducted into the Ranger Hall of Fame since 1992. A computer allows visitors to search for individual inductees by name. Also featured are U.S. Army Ranger history, its origins, and their role in military history. Several exhibits display uniforms, weapons and other items used by Army Rangers during World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and Grenada.

World War II Company Street

Located directly behind the museum building is a complex of seven restored World War II buildings to allow museum visitors a trip back in time. The simple wooden “Series 700? buildings were mass produced in the 1940s to meet the demands of the rapidly growing Army preparing to enter the war. After 1945, the post-war Army was rapidly downsized and the buildings, no longer needed, were being torn down. However, a building of each type; a barracks, mess hall, orderly room, supply room, chapel, and General George Patton’s headquarters building and sleeping quarters were spared and restored. Each of the structures are fully furnished with realistic touches that include 1940 era music, photos and furniture. A Physical Training field, like those used for daily PT by recruits, adds to the realism. A final touch are the period street lights.

Rifle Range

In addition to the era galleries there is an interactive rifle simulator, where for a small fee visitors can experience the feel of firing an M16 rifle. The rifles don’t fire live ammunition, but are fitted with lasers and a recoil simulator. The shooter gets 30 shots to hit 20 targets to “qualify”. It is the same type of device the Army uses to introduce new recruits to the M16.

IMAX Theater

The museum’s unique theater features a large high resolution screen that is five stories high and 70 feet wide. Images are projected in three-dimension that give the viewer the illusion that they are in the film. The 300 seat capacity theater features Hollywood movies as well as military documentaries.

Dining

For lunch or dinner the museum offers fine dining in a causal atmosphere at the Fife and Drum American Bistro located inside the museum.

Gift shop

For souvenir hunters, the Soldier Store offers a large selection of mugs, T-shirts and jewelry – many emblazoned with museum and Army logos. There is also a wide variety of military history DVDs and books, not offered elsewhere.

The Family Support Gallery

This gallery pays homage to the parents, children, spouses and other loved ones who make sacrifices just as important as the soldier’s. It also includes a play space for children where they can try on costumes and role play.

Brief History of Fort Benning, Georgia

Fort Benning is situated near Columbus, Georgia and covers over 182,000 acres. Ninety-three percent of the facility is in Georgia and seven percent is in Alabama. Fort Benning was established by Congress as Camp Benning during 1918, and assigned permanent status the same year. At the request of the Columbus Rotary Club, the Camp was named after Confederate Army General Henry L. Benning, a resident of Columbus. During the Civil War General Benning commanded a Georgia Brigade in the Army of Northern Virginia. After the war ended, Henry Benning returned to Columbus where he practiced law until his death in 1875.

The first mission of Fort Benning was to provide basic training for U.S. Army troops during World War I. After the war ended, Fort Benning struggled for appropriations. However, by the mid-1930s the post was booming with construction because of the federally funded building projects initiated during the Great Depression. Just prior to the United States’ entry into World War II, the 2nd Armor Division was established at Fort Benning. The facility also became the home of the “Big Red One,” the First Infantry Division. An officer candidate school and airborne training center were also established at the Fort. During 1943, the 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion, known as the Triple Nickel, was formed and trained at the Fort. Airborne training is still conducted at Fort Benning.

The new museum replaces the old one that was located on Baltzell Ave, which opened in 1958. Although the original museum was located on Fort Benning, the new facility is just outside the gates on South Lumpkin Road, making access easier for visitors. There is no admission fee, but donations are appreciated. Cameras are permitted, but no flash photography is allowed. Adult and school group tours are available.

As part of their Knob Creek, Kentucky experience many enthusiasts have included a trip over to the General Patton museum on nearby Fort Knox. If you have visited the Patton Museum recently, you will have discovered that most of the museum’s exhibits and vehicles are no longer there. As part of the base realignment and closure program (BRAC), the Armor Center has begun to move its headquarters from Fort Knox, Kentucky to Fort Benning, Georgia, where a new National Armor and Cavalry Museum is planned in the near future. The remaining exhibits at Patton Museum at Fort Knox basically are personal and historical items from the famous general.

National Infantry Museum and Soldier Center
1775 Legacy Way
Columbus, Georgia 31903
(706) 685-5800
www.nationalinfantrymuseum.com

The museum is open 9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and 11:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. Sunday. The museum is closed Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day and New Year’s Day.

As of January 2011, The National Infantry Museum and Soldier Center will be closed on Mondays for general maintenance. The facility will be open during federal holidays that fall on Mondays to include Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Memorial Day and Independence Day.

Directions to the National Infantry Museum are to take I-185 south from Columbus, Georgia to exit 1B. Drive west on US 27/280/431 for about a mile, then turn left at the light onto Fort Benning Blvd. The museum will be a little more than a mile south, on the right.

As discussed in previous articles on the subject, Soviet Army Spetsnaz troops and specialized KGB personnel (which acted both in and out of country) possessed a significant arsenal of silenced and noiseless handguns. The nature of the Spetsnaz operations, however, was much broader and often required the engagement of targets at longer ranges without attracting undue attention. The simplest and earliest approach was tried during World War II, when NKVD and Army recon units were issued with the so called “Bramit device” – a clip-on silencer for a Mosin-Nagant M1891/30 rifle, developed shortly before the war by the Mitin brothers. This was a more or less conventional expansion type silencer with two rubber baffles. It was to be used only with a special reduced charge 7.62x54R ammunition, loaded with standard “L” type ball bullet and about 1/3 of the standard powder charge. Rifles equipped with Bramit silencers were used throughout the war to good effect behind German lines, taking out sentries, guard dogs and other obstacles.

After the war the Soviet Army changed its main rifle from the long and powerful but slow-firing bolt-action rifle to the much more compact and somewhat less powerful (in terms of bullet energy, not firepower) assault rifles. During the late 1950s Soviet designers developed the first quick-detachable silencer for the Kalashnikov AK assault rifle. Known as the PBS (Pribor dlya Beshumnoj Strelby – device for noiseless firing), this device had a cylindrical body made of two halves, like a clam-shell, with the hinge at the front of the cylinder. Inside it had 12 baffles, machined integral to the semi-cylindrical walls of each half of the device. The halves were held together at the rear by the screw-on end-cap, which also had an interface (threads) for the rifle barrel. The device was also fitted with an additional rubber baffle, which was used to increase barrel pressure during the discharge and thus ensure reliable gas operation with reduced subsonic loads.

During the early 1960s this design was improved – the silencer body was made as a hollow steel cylinder, closed at the front, and the baffles were made as separate units, inserted from the rear and held inside by the screw-on end cap. The rubber baffle (which has a service life of about 200 rounds) was retained. These silencers were to be used only with “US” type reduced charge ammunition, which fired a specially designed bullet of increased weight at subsonic velocities. The typical 7.62×39 “US” round was loaded with a bullet weighing 12.5 grams (193 grains), propelled to a muzzle velocity of about 270-290 m/s (885-950 fps). As time passed, the nature of typical targets and the potential operation profiles for Spetsnaz troops changed.

For one, the NATO forces began to issue body armor on increased scales, and the basic combination of the AKM + PBS + US ammo was no longer effective enough. As a result, during the late 1970s an R&D program for new Spetsnaz long arm was ordered. The task was handed over to the Central Institute of the Precision Machine building (TsNII TochMash), which was responsible for most of the developments in the field of special purpose small arms and ammunition in the USSR. By 1983 the two prime customers for the proposed weapons, the GRU (Army Intelligence Department) and KGB finally agreed on a set of technical requirements for a new silenced sniper rifle. The new R&D program was named “Vintorez” (“thread cutter,” as usual, the name has no practical meaning).

According to the specification, the new weapon was to be effective against enemy personnel at ranges of up to 400 meters. It also had to reliably penetrate a typical steel helmet at the same range. Live fire trials proved that the readily available 7.62×39 US ammo was not up to the task, and new ammunition had to be developed. Several approaches were tried, including combinations of the 7.62×25 TT case and 7.62 7N1 bullet (a sniper-grade bullet for the 7.62x54R cartridge). This ‘Frankenstein’ round was accurate enough, but lacked the necessary penetration and was soon abandoned. A shortened (to 28mm) and necked up 5.45×39 case combined with specially designed 7.62mm AP bullet was tried next. This round showed much potential, but a change in requirements, which happened in 1985, effectively killed it. The reason for this was that the GRU and KGB now also requested a silenced assault rifle, firing the same type of subsonic ammunition, but capable of penetrating military-grade body armor (with steel or titanium armor plates). After examination of the updated requirements the developers decided to create a completely new family of rounds, capable of the necessary accuracy, range and penetration while maintaining subsonic muzzle velocities.

The new ammunition was based on the readily available 7.62×39 M43 steel case, necked up to 9mm and loaded with long and heavy bullets. For sniper work, the developers created the standard steel/lead core jacketed ball bullet. For assault work they also created a special AP round with a hardened steel core that projected forward from the jacket. Upon impacting armor plate, the bullet jacket is stripped off and the penetrator is then free to punch a neat hole through the plate, the underlying Kevlar and the poor guy who happened to cross the path of the Spetsnaz operator. The sniper ball round was designated 9×39 SP-5, and the assault/AP round the 9×39 SP-6. With ammunition now available, the designers quickly finalized the design of the sniper rifle, which was officially adopted by the Army and KGB in 1987 as the 9mm Vintovka Snayperskay Specialnaya VSS – 9mm Special Sniper Rifle.

This rifle was quite unusual by typical western standards for a sniper rifle. It was not only semiautomatic, but actually a select-fire weapon, issued with 10- and 20-round magazines. Noise reduction was achieved by using a fairly conventional silencer, made of steel and integrated into the gun design. The rifle was normally equipped with a 4X PSO-1-1 telescopic sight (the same as used on the Dragunov SVD rifle but with a different reticle, adapted for the 9mm round) or the NSPU-3 night sight. Both sights were installed using a standard side rail on the left side of the receiver. Iron sights were provided in the standard configuration as a back-up measure. The rifle was quite compact, reliable, and accurate enough for its intended purpose, and quickly became very popular among its users. Once the design of the sniper rifle proved itself satisfactory, it was quickly modified into a silenced assault rifle, with a minimum of modifications. The basic gas operated action remained the same, but the wooden skeletonized stock was replaced with a metal side-folding stock, and some minor changes were made to the barrel to better withstand automatic firing (the VSS was to be used in full automatic mode only under emergency conditions).

The new rifle was designated 9mm Avtomat Specialnyj AS (AS Special Automatic rifle), and put into production alongside the VSS at the Tula arms factory. The AS is also often referred in literature as ‘Val’ (“Shaft”), as it was the codename for the project used during its development. Like the VSS, AS became quite popular among its users, and is still widely used by special elements of the Russian army and law enforcement units. The VSS and AS were used during the closing years of the Soviet campaign in Afghanistan, but earned their real fame during several bloody campaigns against separatists, Muslim terrorists and various bandits in Chechnya, a mountainous semi-independent republic within the Russian Federation.

The AS and VSS were prized by both sides for their stealthiness and excellent stopping power, especially when compared with the “tiny” 5.45 bullets fired from standard issue AK-74 assault rifles. The AS became very popular for MOUT operations, especially for house clearing, as it was not so loud as to deafen the operators and their teammates when firing indoors, and was lethal even when firing through barriers and body armor. The opposite side also respected these weapons and paid premium prices for 9×39 guns and ammo on the black market. (Some sources said that one could buy a used car in good shape for the money offered by terrorists for an AS or VSS plus a useable amount of ammunition back in the mid-1990s). These weapons also became quite useful for other police operations, mostly against organized crime such as drug trafficking. The problem was that both the AS and VSS were relatively expensive to produce, and during the turbulent 1990s funds were scarce for many (if not most) law enforcement organizations throughout Russia.

There was the market niche, and there were other organizations willing to fill it and earn some much needed cash to survive the hard times. One such organization was the Central Design Bureau for Sporting and Hunting Arms (TsKIB SOO), located in the city of Tula. During the early 1990s, the design team, lead by V. Telesh, designed two 9×39 weapons, intended for law enforcement use. To ensure a low cost of development and manufacture, both were based on the proven and tried Kalashnikov action, or, to be more precise, on the AKS-74U compact assault rifles, which were manufactured at the Tula Arms factory (TOZ) located nearby. The first of two weapons, known as the OTs-12 “Tiss,” was no more than the standard AKS-74U, rebarreled for the 9×39 ammunition, fitted with a new bolt with an enlarged breech face, and with newly developed 20-round magazines made of steel. The design of the OTs-12 was finalized by 1993, and a pilot batch was manufactured by TsKIB SOO, which had its own small-scale production facility. This pilot batch was distributed to some LE organizations across Russia, but mass production never commenced, and the “Tiss” quickly faded out of sight.

The other weapon from same design bureau earned much more fame, despite the fact that its production life was hardly any more successful. The OTs-14 “Groza” (Thunder) was created as a modular weapon for urban combat and special operations, and was widely publicized in the Russian gun-related press during mid- and late 1990s. The same AKS-74U action adapted for 9×39 ammo (as used in OTs-12), was put into the bullpup configuration to reduce the overall length in the ‘combat’ position. Modularity was achieved by supplying the gun with a detachable 40mm underbarrel grenade launcher firing standard Russian VOG-25 ‘caseless’ FRAG grenades, a quick-detachable silencer, an assault forward grip and a telescopic sight. That allowed the operator to configure his basic weapon according to the upcoming mission profile. Typical configurations were an ‘assault carbine’ with the forward grip, a ‘grenadier’s rifle’ with the underbarrel grenade launcher, a ‘silenced carbine’ with the silencer installed and, finally, a ‘para-sniper’ with a 4X telescopic sight fitted and a silencer where necessary. This sounded very promising but the basic design had some serious issues, some inherent to its parent Kalashnikov-type action, and some not.

The first issue was that the rifle ejected to the right and it was impossible to fire it from the left shoulder (a feature that can be quite useful during MOUT/CQB operations). Second, all the basic controls (bolt handle and safety/fire selector) remained in their original places on the receiver, way out of reach for the bullpup layout. Third, for some unknown reason, Telesh decided to use a single trigger for both rifle and grenade launcher. In the GL configuration, the user had to switch the single trigger between the rifle and the GL by rotating a lever, located on the left side of the trigger unit, through a 180 degree arc – hardly an intuitive operation, which can take precious seconds during the stress of combat. Nevertheless, TsKIB SOO managed to manufacture several hundred of the OTs-14 rifle kits, and sell these to some LE units and organizations across Russia. Production of the OTs-14 lasted between 1995 and 1998, with several hundreds made, and some OTs-14 rifles still can be found in various law enforcement armories across Russia. It must be noted that today OTs-14 rifles are seldom used in real operations, due to the lack of spares and the overall wear and tear of the guns, without even considering the ergonomic flaws listed above. The AS and VSS rifles, on the other hand, are still in production and in active service with the Russian Army and various law enforcement agencies.

Specifications and technical descriptions

All 9×39 ammunition is loaded into Berdan-primed steel cases with lacquer coating. No headstamps are provided on SP-5 and SP-6 ammunition. SP-5 bullets are fully jacketed, with a tombac-plated steel jacket. The core is of the combination type – the front part of the core is made from steel, the rear part from lead. SP-6 bullets are semi-jacketed with the same tombac-plated steel jacket, but the pointed steel core/penetrator projects from the front of the bullet and the space between the penetrator and the jacket is filled with a thin layer of lead. The penetrator is made from hardened tool-grade steel and usually separates from the jacket when hitting armor plate or other hard barriers: the penetrator goes inside the target while the jacket remains outside of the barrier/armor plate. When hitting soft armor or body tissue, the SP-6 bullet normally stays intact, thus ensuring conformity with international conventions on warfare. Penetration for the SP-6 cartridge is usually listed as 7-8 mm (about 1/3 of an inch) of mild steel at 100 meters, or “guaranteed penetration of Class Three body armor at 400 meters.” The “class 3” body armor, according to Russian standards, ensures protection against all conventional pistol rounds as well as against standard 7.62×39 ball bullets, fired from an AK assault rifle.

The description below is for the AS “Val” assault rifle. Differences with the VSS are noted where appropriate.

The AS is a gas operated, integrally silenced weapon. The receiver is machined from a steel forging for improved strength and durability. The long stroke gas piston is located above the barrel, and rigidly attached to the bolt carrier. The rotating bolt has six radial lugs and locks into the receiver. The front part of the barrel, ahead of the gas port, has several sets of holes drilled at the bottom of the rifling grooves. These holes are used to bleed some of the gun gas into the integral silencer.

The trigger unit is somewhat similar to that of the Czech-made Sa. Vz.58 assault rifle, and is striker-fired. The striker spring is located below the bolt return spring, and both springs are assembled into the captive unit with spring guides and a polymer bolt buffer attached to the rear plate of the unit. The safety lever is similar to the one found on all Kalashnikov-type rifles, but the fire mode selector is a separate lever located within the trigger guard just behind the trigger. The lever positions are marked with white dots on the pistol grip – three dots on the left side mark the full-automatic setting, and a single dot on the right marks the single-shot mode.

The tangent-type rear sight has a typical U-notch and is graduated up to 400 meters in 25 meter increments, but the actual effective range is about 200-300 meters due to the rainbow-shaped trajectory of the subsonic bullets. It is interesting to note that both rear and front sights are installed on the silencer body rather than on the barrel or on the receiver. The front sight is a protected post that can be adjusted for zeroing. The side rail for day/night scope mounting is machined on the left side of the receiver. The VSS has a slightly different rear sight, which is graduated for SP-5 sniper ball ammunition, with settings between 100 and 420 meters, in tens of meters. Between 100 and 200 meters the sight is graduated in 50-meter increments (“10”, “15” and “20”), but beyond 200 meters the graduations are in 20- and 30-meter increments, that is “22”, “25”, “27”, “30”, “32” and so on until “42”.

The integral silencer is of a conventional expansion type. Its rear part, which is located around the barrel, serves as an expansion chamber and the front part has four baffles made from stamped steel and welded into the single removable unit. The silencer is attached to the gun via the short thread at the front of the barrel and its co-axial alignment with the bore is ensured by the supporting ring installed on the barrel at the front of the handguard. The lock is located at the bottom of the handguard. The silencer is removed from the gun only for maintenance, transportation or storage; firing the gun with the silencer removed is prohibited due to safety and reliability concerns. The service life of the silencer is normally equal to that of the entire gun system.

The furniture of the AS consists of a short polymer fore end, a polymer pistol grip and a side-folding skeletonized shoulder stock, made of steel tubes, with a plastic buttplate. It folds to the left side of the gun and does not interfere with the controls so the AS can be fired with the stock folded. The VSS has a similar fore end, but the Dragunov-type shoulder stock is made from laminated wood and is integral with the pistol grip. It can be detached for transportation and storage, thanks to the dovetailed mount located on the bottom of receiver just behind the trigger guard. Both weapons have standard sling swivels.

The AS is optimized for high performance armor piercing 9x39mm ammunition, designated SP-6, but can also fire “ball” type SP-5 ammunition intended for VSS sniper rifles. The VSS, which is optimized for SP-5 ball ammo, can also fire SP-6 AP ammunition, but it is not normally recommended due to increased wear of the accurized barrel. The AS is usually issued with 20-round double stack, double feed magazines, made from plastic. VSS rifles are usually issued with 10-round plastic magazines of similar design, which are compatible with 20-round magazines.

The AS is most often used with basic iron sights, although some users try and customize their weapons to better suit their preferences and the combat environment. The VSS is usually issued with the 4X PSO-1-1 telescopic sight or with the NSPU-3 IR/night sight, using special quick-detachable mounts, installed on the side rail.

The OTs-12 “Tiss” is similar in design to the Kalashnikov AKS-74U compact assault rifle in all but a few details. The major differences are the bolt face, adapted to the larger cartridge head diameter (as compared with the standard AKS-74U bolt), the new barrel with the muzzle brake/compensator instead of the flash hider, and the new magazine made of stamped steel. The sights are similar in design to the parent weapon but re-calibrated for 9×39 ammunition. The rear flip-up sight has settings for ranges of 100 and 200 meters, due to the limited range of the subsonic ammunition. Despite the fact that the basic ammunition for the OTs-12 is optimized for use with a silencer, no such attachment was ever offered for the OTs-12.

The basic action of the OTs-14 rifle hardly deserves any attention, as it is a direct copy of the standard Kalashnikov AKS-74U action. The receiver, however, is slightly modified and a detachable receiver extension, made of polymer, is added below the barrel in front of the receiver. This extension serves as the base for the installation of the removable pistol grip and trigger unit. The opening at the base of the receiver, which is normally used for the trigger, is protected by a stamped steel cover, pinned in place, and the new, removable forward trigger group is linked to the sear via a push-rod which passes through the forward receiver extension and the bottom of the receiver around the magazine housing. The pistol-grip/trigger unit is locked to its base by a protruding lip at the front and the manually released lock at the rear. The lock is operated by a push-button located on the left side of the pistol grip unit in its rear part. The rifle is normally supplied with two pistol grip/trigger units, one standard and another combined with the grenade launcher. In the latter case, the unit has a large switch on its left side, which selects which barrel to fire – the front position of the switch is for firing the rifle, and the rear for firing the grenade launcher. The manual safety/fire mode selector for the rifle is retained from the parent Kalashnikov design, as well as the reciprocating bolt handle.

The stock of the weapon consists of a hinged buttplate, attached to the rear of the receiver. It must be unlocked and opened to the left before the gun can be disassembled. In the ‘assault carbine’ configuration the gun is equipped with a forward vertical grip with a tubular barrel extension, which has the purpose of holding the grip and protecting the holding hand from the muzzle blast. The front of the barrel is threaded and, depending on the configuration, accepts the forward assault grip, the detachable silencer or the protective muzzle nut.

The sights are installed on the short carrying handle, which is made integral to the gun. The rear sight has two alternative openings – a U-notch and an aperture, selectable to the user’s preferences through the 180-degree rotation of the circular rear sight blade. The range adjustment mechanism has four settings – for 50, 100, 150 and 200 meters, with a dial located on the left side of the carrying handle. Zeroing is achieved by adjusting the position of the front sight post. The sight line is quite short, and accuracy with open sights is somewhat limited. The carrying handle is provided with a proprietary quick-detachable mount for a telescopic sight, which is usually a fixed power 4X telescope. In the GL configuration, the barrel extension is fitted with the folding ladder-type grenade sight with range settings between 100 and 400 meters in 50-meter increments.

Feed is from detachable box magazines made from stamped steel with a 20-round capacity. Magazines are compatible with those originally made for OTs-12 “Tiss,” but are not compatible with plastic magazines made for the AS and VSS.

The detachable silencer is similar in design to the ones used for the AS and VSS, although the mounting arrangements are different and the barrel of the OTs-14 has no gas escape ports. The silencer body is made of steel with a screw-on end cap at the rear end. The rear part of the silencer, which is of larger diameter, serves as a large expansion chamber. The front part of the silencer contains five baffles, which are made from steel and spot-welded to two side struts to form a single removable unit. Late production silencers had their outer surface covered with a thin layer of rubber to provide some heat insulation and gripping surface.

The OTs-14 weapon was usually shipped in a special fitted case, containing the rifle, two trigger units (one standard and one integral with the grenade launcher), silencer, two magazines, sling, and a detachable forward “assault” grip.

As basic review, recall that the most recent variants of 40mm grenade systems are typically deemed “third generation” systems, following the design of the M79 40mm grenade launcher, the original first generation 40mm grenade launcher. Later second generation launchers are represented by the Colt M203, and the Heckler and Koch M69 launchers as systems that require mounting to the host weapon. The newest 40mm grenade launchers represent an entirely new system of weapons, representing the third generation of the 40mm grenade launcher. In general terms, third generation 40mm grenade launcher systems are defined as a multifunctional 40mm grenade launcher. That is, they are capable of functioning as a standalone unit or as part of an integrated rifle system. Third generation systems frequently feature the increased use of aluminum, composites, and polymers within the manufacturing process, and generally rely upon a side opening breech, rather than the M203’s slide forward breech mechanism. By opening to the side, the third generation systems are better capable of accepting 40mm rounds that are longer in length than the original M583 parachute flare round. This is a significant and important feature as increasing numbers of less lethal and medium velocity 40mm rounds enter the market. Finally, third generation systems all feature universal mounting solutions reliant upon Mil-Std 1913 Picatinny rails as a means of mounting the launcher to the host weapon. By presenting a universal mounting solution, third generation 40mm systems offer a unilateral cross-platform 40mm solution – that is, a single 40mm weapon system may be mounted on a host of primary weapons, without special tools in a quick and efficient manner. Mounting a third generation system to the host weapon typically requires the minimal use of common hand tools rather than relying upon specialized mounting hardware typically required to mount second generation 40mm systems to the host weapon. It should be no surprise that the Fabrique Nationale FN40GL system fits the definition of a third generation 40mm system nearly exactly.

The System

The FN40GL Enhanced Grenade Launcher is intended for integration with the Fabrique Nationale SCAR 16 and SCAR 17 rifles. Capable of firing all types of NATO standard 40x46mm low-velocity grenades, the FN40GL may be mounted under either rifle or may be configured as a stand-alone launcher.

When assembled on a Mk16/Mk17 host rifle, mounting is easily accomplished with a trigger adapter and dual locking clamp levers. The FN40GL easily mounts to the Picatinny rails at the 6 o’clock position on the host rifle. No special tools to mount or dismount the launcher from the host rifle are required as one merely flips the two mounting levers upward. The mounting system is as easily manipulated as any common Picatinny rail attachment. When mounted to the host rifle, the FN40GL is firmly mounted without any flex or movement, yet is easily removed quickly and without the use of tools.

Completely ambidextrous, the FN40GL utilizes a polymer receiver mated to an aluminum barrel for durability and light weight. Unlike other third generation 40mm systems, the 9.6-inch barrel swivels to the right or left for ease of loading and unloading from any firing position. This feature differentiates the FN40GL from other 40mm systems. While other systems allow the barrel to pivot to either the left or right, other 40mm systems force the user to choose one direction or the other. The FN40GL is currently the only 40mm system that allows the barrel to pivot in either direction at any time. While this may not seem significant, the ability to load the weapon from either the left or right allows left handed shooters to utilize a standard system without modification. More importantly, the design allows the shooter to load the weapon in any position – left or right – an important feature when loading from one side may prove difficult or impossible in the heat of battle.

The FN40GL may also be mounted to an alloy stand-alone stock assembly to allow individual use of the system. While the launcher is outfitted with Mil-Std 1913 Picatinny rails at the 12 o’clock position, the stand-alone stock assembly provides rails at the 3 o’clock, 6 o’clock, and 9 o’clock positions to allow the mounting of lights, lasers and other targeting devices. While this may not seem significant, recall than 40mm systems are being used in increasing numbers in a less lethal role. The ability to mount a forward grip, red dot sight, and laser aiming modules on the system may prove valuable on the battlefield, while the ability to mount ultra-bright LED lights and eye safe laser dazzlers may be more appropriate for use in situations involving civil disobedience.

Fabrique Nationale offers the FN40GL with a traditional folding leaf sight as standard sights. The application of optional after-market grenade launching sights or laser aiming modules is easily mounted to the system via the built in Mil-Std 1913 Picatinny rails.

At the Range

The FN40GL is a manually operated, single shot grenade launcher. Loading is easily accomplished by loading a 40mm grenade within the chamber of the weapon and closing the breech. The breech is a multiple lug rotating design. Unloading is easily accomplished by opening the breech via a lever on the left side of the weapon and removing the live round. The lever to open the breach is intuitive for right handed shooters, and is located in approximately the same location as the legacy M203 system. As the system opens to the left and right, an ambidextrous opening lever would be innovative, yet mechanically difficult to achieve with the current design.

The trigger of the system is unusually large and placed low on the weapon system. While the system was fired using the stand alone stock, it appears that the placement of the FN40GL trigger may allow the operator to keep the index (trigger) finger on the trigger of the host weapon, while using the shooter’s middle finger to fire the FN40GL. Regardless of finger placement, the FN40GL features a double action only trigger system that proved long and heavy. While firing the system was under ideal conditions, one must recall that most users will be firing the system under duress, whether a civil disturbance using less-lethal rounds, or on the battle field, firing high explosive rounds. The stress likely faced when firing the system necessarily requires a double action trigger as a means of preventing fratricide and unintended discharges of the weapon. When firing high explosive, one can never be too careful.

Accuracy of the system using the FN designed leaf sight was reasonable and targets at 250 meters were easily engaged within the kill radius of an M433 HE round. Presumably, accuracy would be better when used in conjunction with electronic or laser sighting systems. Muzzle velocity was approximately 250 feet per second.

Conclusion

The FN40GL is a highly capable third generation 40mm system. While the double action only trigger pull is not ideal, the long and heavy trigger pull is likely to prevent accidental discharges in high stress situations. It can be differentiated from others in the market in that the FN40GL is currently the only 40mm system that allows the barrel to pivot in either direction during the loading sequence. The system appears to be currently adaptable only to the FN SCAR 16 and SCAR 17, giving limited use on rifles outside of the FN family. Although tested with a standard leaf sight, accuracy of the system would presumably benefit with the addition of an aftermarket laser range finder, laser designator, or sighting system. Wide use of Mil-Std 1913 Picatinny rails allow the mounting of nearly any aftermarket sighting system. Additional information may be found online at www.fnhusa.com.

Header photo, Left to right: UNS-SR is a night vision unit that utilizes 1 AA battery with a life exceeding 24 hours, mounts in front of almost any day optic that the rails will line up, and has recognition of a man-sized target out to 250+ meters in starlight. UNS is a night vision unit that utilizes 2 AA batteries with life expectancy exceeding 48 hours, mounts in front of almost any day optic that the rails will line up, and has recognition of a man-sized target out to 500+ meters in starlight. UNS-LRLP is a night vision unit that utilizes 2 AA batteries with life expectancy exceeding 48 hours, mounts in front of almost any day optic that the rails will line up, and has recognition of a man-sized target out to 800+ meters in starlight. UNS TLR is a Thermal vision unit that utilizes two DL123 batteries with life expectancy exceeding 5.5 hours, mounts in front of almost any day optic that the rails will line up, and has recognition of a man-sized target out to 800 meters, and UNS T is a Thermal vision unit that utilizes two DL123 batteries with life expectancy exceeding 5.5 hours, mounts in front of almost any day optic that the rails will line up, and has recognition of a man-sized target out to 1,000 meters. In front is FIST. This is the “Blended Technology” model that allows the operator to add in-line night vision and thermal capability with one unit that mounts in front of the day scope. FIST uses two DL123 batteries with a full “On” life expectancy of six hours. The thermals can detect a man-sized target at 1,000 meters, and the night vision capability extends beyond 800 meters for a man-sized target in starlight.

C. Reed Knight, Jr. is a name that is very familiar to readers of SAR. Reed has been at the forefront of special weapons technologies for decades, working with the likes of Gene Stoner and many other modern designers on programs from the Knight suppressors to the rail forends used by much of the U.S. Military today, as well as the MK11 Mod O and M110 SASS rifles.

Never one to sit back on his laurels, Reed put his engineering team onto a problem that he saw over his 25-plus years dealing with government needs. Knight’s Armament has been involved in the development of night vision opto-electronics since 1991, when they were the test facility for SOTF. They evolved their participation into JSOC, and other groups within the U.S. government. It didn’t take too long before Reed and his engineering team decided that they had the necessary skills, facility, and equipment to solve the problems they were seeing.

The first problem was the night vision equipment was divided into two main categories: standalone vision aids, and dedicated opto-electronic weapon scopes. The two were not interchangeable, and Knight’s was the first group to create the in-line night vision system. This allowed the operator to install his night vision device in front of the standard day optic for night use, and with Knight’s design, it kept the point of aim within .5 MOA. There is a shift that occurs when putting a night vision opto-electronic device in front of a straight optical one, and Knight’s successfully adapted to this. A second problem was that most manufacturers of opto-electronic gear were specialists in their field, and had little experience with firearms and the shock/ mount problems and recoil effect. Knight’s was uniquely qualified to address these issues due to the decades of firearms experience and engineering in the facility.

The latest optics solution that has entered the combat theatre is the new Thermal Weapon Sights (TWS) and their presence has added a third component to the soldier’s kit. Now the soldier would have a day sight, a night sight, and a thermal sight. With Knight’s first engineering solutions, the operator can use his day sight, and when needed simply attach his night vision device in front of it on the rail and there will be virtually no point of impact shift.

Knight’s second solution was to work towards “blended technologies,” meaning some of the opto-electronics offered from Knight’s are a night vision device combined with a thermal weapon sight, and the operator can select his choice of operation on the one blended unit while it is mounted in front of his day optic. The operator can choose day sight only, night vision, and night vision enhanced with thermal using “white as hot,” or using “black as hot.”

Knight’s has also pioneered the removal of film that was being sandwiched into the lenses, and these innovations are allowing the removal of the “Halo” effect that blurs up the detail. For more information, please contact the manufacturer:

Knights Armament Company
701 Columbia Blvd,
Titusville, FL 32780 USA
Tel: (321) 407-9900
www.knightarmco.com

A tracer round leaving the barrel of a firearm and impacting a target invokes a visual that conjures up all kinds of emotions. Some people recall their time in the Armed Services in places far, far away where they first experienced tracer fire. Some people are reminded of the first movie they saw with bright streaming lights simulating laser beams reaching from the shooter to the intended target. Others recall television footage, new and old, of conflicts covered by the national news. Chances are, if you are reading these pages, although you may be one of the people mentioned above, you are also thinking of the last night shoot you visited or participated in and how much fun tracer ammo is when it can be obtained for a reasonable price and fired safely.

Shooting has always been more of an individual conquest than a spectator sport. To the marksman controlling the trigger it is an opportunity many believe second to none. Building knowledge, experience and technique to improve your performance is a gratifying experience on several levels. To a spouse with other interests, possibly sitting patiently in a vehicle reading a magazine while you are at the range, it can be quite dull to watch or even equivalent to watching paint dry, or so I have been told. Once you add some highly visual or reactive targets to the mix the interest peaks greatly for shooters and non-shooters alike. While some reactive targets like Tannerite Exploding Targets can be great fun, when you add tracer fire, especially in low light to the mix, even people with little to no interest in shooting start to take notice.

While Tracer ammo is not anything new, its introduction into mass produced rimfire ammo is a monumental move. Over the past two decades this writer has been testing firearms and ammo, only a few times has .22 LR ammo been encountered. It was usually very expensive and, for one reason or another, the supply never seemed to last long. When we were approached at SAR Show East and asked if we were interested in testing the Piney Mountain line it was an easy consideration.

As of this writing, we have been testing this ammo for over a year. We have fired it from several platforms and in almost every imaginable weather scenario; all with great success. Though it is manufactured for use primarily in rimfire rifles we have had good luck with many pistols as well. Since the average muzzle velocity is approximately 1,020 feet per second there is little reason to act any different than regular .22 LR ammo, which proved to be correct. There are several videos online where people have been running these in their fully automatic machine guns with great success. There is little that can compare to an American-180 firing in the area of 2,000 rounds per minute of solid tracer. When they are mixed between green and red it only makes it more interesting.

During our testing we fired several rounds through a 40mm/22 LR subcaliber round manufactured by Armament Services International. Billed as The Hornets Nest, this unit is machined from aircraft aluminum and finished in a red anodizing. It fires ten rounds of .22 LR each in their own rifled, steel barrel with a single pull of the trigger in an M203 or M79 40mm Grenade Launcher. Loading it with a mix of the Piney Mountain Tracers soon made it clear why it is marketed as The Hornets Nest. It has a MSRP of $595 and includes the unloading tool. Make sure you have a registered 40mm Destructive Device and not a “flare gun” if you intend to use the Hornets Nest.

While testing the Piney Mountain ammo we had a huge burn rate no matter what the platform was. The rifles traced almost 100% though we noticed a slightly lower burn rate when fired from a pistol. On completely the other side of the spectrum we noticed a 100% burn rate when fired from the 40mm Hornets Nest. The ammo cycled quite well in every firearm we used with some pistols (dirty and cold) getting an occasional short stroke on the ejection. It was easily rectified each time with a simple clearing to the side and re-chambering the following round. While some .22 LR ammo has a greasy or waxy feeling, the Piney Mountain projectile has a solid and dry feel, which will only aid in feeding in some of the more finicky guns.

Not a single round to date has yet to fire as intended so their quality control must be held to a high standard. The vast majority of our testing has been between 50 and 75 yards and all rounds burned the entire way to the backstop. They are rated for 100 yards, plus, and some have reported traces out past 200 yards and even to 300 yards. At our test distances we never had any occasion to witness a “burnout” in our testing.

After the “wow, this is fun” period was in full swing we started thinking of situations where these rounds could have a practical application. They came fast and furious. Since these rounds are visible in all lighting situations they give a clear indication of your point of impact. No guessing when the use of a paper-target and spotting scope are not an option. This writer found them extremely useful in teaching his younger students as well. His 7-year-old son immediately responded well to the use of an occasional tracer or two while shooting to check his point of impact. It can be frustrating for a new, young shooter in hit or miss situations and firing a few tracers can get them back on target in no time. The additional visual is also exciting for new shooters because, well, tracers are just plain fun. From this time on a few boxes will be mandatory in his shooting kit.

Tracer Precautions

Make sure you check your state and local laws about the use and possession of tracer ammunition. At the time of this writing Piney Mountain would not ship tracer ammunition to CA, MA, and NYC and Chicago, IL. All other IL purchasers need an FOID # to buy them.

Other things to consider are the environmental precautions at your range. Very dry areas can produce fires and some areas even have periods during dry weather that may prohibit their use. Our testing took place in Spring, Summer, Winter and Fall and we encountered no problems using a proper sand backstop.

Conclusions

We are very pleased to have met the people at Piney Mountain Ammunition. It may be more expensive than traditional .22 LR ammo but well under the price of center-fire ammo. You can obtain retail and dealer pricing from www.redrimfire.com. It is as fun as it is useful and all who participated in the long-term testing agreed it was money well spent. These rounds are non-corrosive and the tracing element left no damaging residual material in any of the test guns and that is always a subject of concern when tracer ammo is discussed. Their value in training and visual stimulation is worth the price of admission and the fun factor puts them over the top. If you have never been to a night shoot at one of the huge national machine gun shoots and have wondered what the attraction really is, add some Piney Mountain tracer ammunition to your ammo stash and get ready to smile.

Tracer (and other specialty) Ammunition 101

Contrary to popular misconception, a tracer round is much more entailed than a dab of paint on the tip of an ordinary bullet. The paint, coded by different colors is only used to identify the type ammunition. Not all ammunition is color-coded and not all unmarked ammunition is standard ball ammunition. So while we may make assumptions based on this, it is not written in stone. There are many different types of projectiles for modern ammunition including;

• Ball Ammo – Very common solid or jacketed bullet. Ball ammo often has no identifying marks on the projectile.
• Armor Piercing – (AP) – Very similar to ball ammo with the construction of the projectile containing a very hard core inside the jacket. This projectile can be made of hardened steel, tungsten, carbide and in some cases depleted uranium in larger rounds.
  
• Tracer – (T) While it looks similar to ball ammo from the outside, tracer ammo has a small cup inside the rear of the projectile where a small amount of a flammable chemical is stored and ignited by the initial powder charge. This chemical burns brightly illuminating the trajectory of the fired round.
  
• Incendiary (I) – Almost opposite in construction of the tracer round, an incendiary round has a small cavity in the front of the projectile containing an incendiary material, which ignites upon impact with the target, flashing and burning very hot.
  
• High Explosive (HE) – The projectile contains a chamber holding an explosive material and an igniter. HE ammo can be designed to explode on impact or after a delay while still in flight.
  
• Spotter (or Observation) – The projectile contains a cavity containing a chemical mixture and a front loaded priming device used to estimate distance by producing a flash and smoke when impacting a target.
  
• Combination Rounds – Many of those listed above can be found in conjunction in a single projectile. Some of the more popular combination rounds include Armor Piercing/Tracer (APT), Armor Piercing/Incendiary (API), Armor Piercing/Incendiary/Tracer (APIT), Incendiary/Tracer (IT) and Spotter/Tracer.

While we realize there are many more types of modern ammunition than listed above, such as blanks, grenade launching blanks, etc., the focus of this article is tracer ammo so we are focusing on those and similar rounds.

Sources

Piney Mountain Ammunition .22lr Tracer Ammo Website: www.redrimfire.com Email: sales@redrimfire.com

Armament Sales International 10-Shot / 40mm Hornets Nest www.autoweapons.com