Today's Q&A is from Tim on Patreon:
"The great nation of Elbonia is looking to spin up a sniper program. But they know better than to adopt ZF41 scopes. What rifles do you attempt to sell them?"

After some consideration, I would try to sabotage the Elbonian Sniper Corps by supplying them with...

From Jon on Patreon:
"Elbonia has been occupied by an enemy force. Do you sabotage their resistance by airdropping them Liberator pistols or Cobray Terminators?"

To my mind, the Liberator is a substantially more useful resistance weapons, so I would supply Elbonia with lots of crates of Cobra...

From Jan on Patreon:
"What often baffles me is the transition period of various stages of development of gun technology - in particular around the Civil War. What were the types of guns used during civil war and why weren't more modern mechanisms used, if they were available? Was it similar in w...

From Nikolas on Patreon:
"Have there been any attempts to make miniaturized man-portable chain guns? Do you think there's a future for such a machine gun given modern advances in energy storage?"

Chain guns are a specific type of externally-powered machine gun. They have a single barrel, and ...

Edit: I mixed up the selector and rear pin holes; the rear takedown pin hole is not stepped. Sorry!

From Ryan on Patreon:
"Why do more rifles not have captive takedown pins? It seems that if someone is developing a rifle from the ground up there are almost no drawbacks to having them, especi...

From John on Patreon:
"You've covered your fair share of strange conversion of firearms. Have you ever come across a bullpup conversion that was actually useful, and not a kludge?"

Nope.

That's basically the whole answer.

Okay, to elaborate a bit, it's because making a bullpup use blue ...

From crablegs21 on Utreon:

"In your opinion and in hindsight, which country had the most optimized cartridge for the their primary infantry rifle for WWII? Additionally, which country would have benefited most by switching to that cartridge prior to WWII?"

In my opinion - and I think post-w...

From Jubs on Patreon:
"They say that 'no one's gone bankrupt making guns during a war,' but is that actually true?"

It's usually true, but not always. Even during a war, you can make enough bad choices that you can go bankrupt as a gun manufacturer, and Hopkins & Allen is a perfect example of...

From Arvid on Utreon:
"Why does an AR-15 need a buffer thingy? Why can't it just have a spring like every other normal gun?"

The Ar-15 really doesn't need the buffer and tube, but it is a holdover from the origins of the system: the AR-10. The intent of the AR-10 was to create a 7.62x51mm bat...

Yesterday we looked at the history and the functioning of the Armatix iP1 "smart gun", and today I'm taking it out to a BackUp Gun Match. How will it perform? Will it cycle reliably? Will I time out before I can actually get it authorized to fire? Let's find out!

The Armatix iP1 is a pistol created by former H&K designer Ernst Mauch that was released - or almost released - in the US in late 2013 and early 2014. It is a .22LR caliber semiauto pistol that incorporates an RFID-connected authentication link between a watch and this pistol, so that the pistol ...

During my visit to Slovenia, I had a chance to tour the AREX Defense factory in Šentjernej. I came away really impressed by the quality and the breadth of operations that the factory performs in-house. They have only been making their own handgun designs for about 5 years, but they have been a su...

When I got a tour of Arex Defense in Slovenia, one of the really neat things I saw (which I had not seen elsewhere before) was a machine for making MG links. It's a single really long piece of hardware where a spool of sheet steel goes in one end and hardened links plop out the other end, with ju...

In firearms, as in really all technology, the market iterates and improves concepts over time. A novel new system - like the polymer-framed, striker-fired semiauto pistol - will never be perfect on its first introduction. Over time, as users and manufacturers gain more insight into the details of...

David Wirth is one of the founders of Arcflash Labs, a small company developing "ultra-high energy pulsed power supplies", which have applications in a variety of fields - but today we are talking about electromagnetic weaponry. Arcflash is currently shipping out their first batch of commercial G...

The GR-1 "Anvil" is a portable, shoulder-fired gauss rifle made by Arcflash Labs. Yeah, it's pretty awesome to be living in the future where we actually have real gauss rifles, isn't it?

First, some terminology. This is accurately identified as a gauss rifle, coil gun, or linear accelerator (a...

ArcFlash Labs has come out with a new coil gun design that takes the best elements of their underpowered EMG-01 and their overly bulky GR-1 Anvil and melded them into a much handier EMG-02. This new design maintains the same muzzle velocity as the Anvil (200-250 fps / 60-75 m/s) but uses smaller ...

Angstadt Arms has recently released their MDP-9 carbine, an AR-type lower coupled with a roller-delayed blowback upper assembly. This is the same operating system as the much-lauded MP5, and Angstadt version of the design is remarkably light, handy, and simple. It is made specifically for Glock m...

In the wake of World War Two, much of Europe was awash in small arms - but there were still organizations looking to purchase new arms rather than use the available surplus. The Gemeentepolitie Amsterdam (Amsterdam Municipal Police), for example, formed a Submachine Gun and Carbine Brigade in 194...

The Battle of Alligator Creek (aka Battle of the Tenaru) was a formative moment in the American World War Two psyche. After making an unopposed landing on Guadalcanal and taking its mostly-completed airfield at minimal cost, the US Marines had to defend their permitter on the night of August 21st...

The ALKA model 93 is one of the nicest of the several dozen simple SMGs made in Croatia during the Homeland War of the 1990s. It was produced by the IM Metal company (later renamed HS Produkt) starting in 1991, was formally adopted by the Croatian armed forces in 1993, and produced until 1994 or ...

One of the lessons the British military took from the Great War was that without extensive training and practice, most people were not very effective with a large-bore revolver. So in 1922, they undertook a program (via Webley) to develop a smaller sidearm that could be used with much less traini...

The AKB-15 was a project developed by Arex Defense in Slovenia in 2015. The company received a request from a small country (they decline to reveal exactly who) to modernize a stock of AKM rifles with adjustable stocks, picatinny optics mounting, and new barrels among other features. Arex develop...

The Agram 2000 was originally developed in the 1990s in response to a Croatian Army need for a submachine gun during the Independence War. It is a closed-bolt, hammer-fired, simple blowback submachine gun. The initial prototypes used a top folding shoulder stock, but the production model omitted ...