In the early 1970s, Poland wanted to replace their 7.62x39mm Kalashnikov rifles. The Soviet Union was developing the 5.45mm AK-74, but the Poles wanted to make a more ambitious advance in small arms systems. They launched Project Lantan (Polish small arms programs were code named after minerals a...

In the late 1990s Colt was looking for pistols it could license for sale in the United States, in the wake of the failures of both eh Double Eagle and All-American 2000. They approached CZ, and also Vektor in South Africa. Vektor was just at the end of its production of the SP1 and SP2 pistols, w...

In an effort to appeal to American and British military testing commissions,
Georg Roth produced a handful of prototype Roth-Krnka pistols in .45 caliber. They used a proprietary cartridge; the 11.5mm Roth (approximately 200 grains at 660 fps, although more powerful versions of the cartridge wo...

When Hungary separated from the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War One, it began to slowly rebuild its military equipment. The eventually led to carbine conversions of old M95 rifles using the new 8x56mm rimmed cartridge, which were designated the 31M. However, the Hungarians were not satisf...

Grant Hammond is best known (to the extent he is known at all) for a .45 caliber pistol submitted to US military trials in 1917 and 1918. This pistol is a proof of concept prototype embodying some of the concepts that would go into the later .45 caliber pistol, and also showing some concepts that...

Nicholas Pieper designed a blowback pocket pistol which was manufactured under license by Steyr in 1908. It was a reasonably successful pistol, and can be found today in .25ACP and .32ACP calibers. This particular one is an experimental version scaled up to .45ACP, with the intention of making mi...

Josef Nickl was one of the chief R&D designers at Mauser after the Federle brothers, and one of his pet projects was a rotating barrel military pistol developed from the Steyr-Hahn M1912 pistol. He built a number of prototypes of it while at Mauser, but the company never put it into production be...

During the late 1920s, it looked like the German Army was going to replace the P08 Luger with a less expensive sidearm, and several major German companies developed prototype guns to meet this anticipated need. The replacement ended up being postponed for nearly a decade (the P38 would be the eve...

BSA (Birmingham Small Arms) was the largest private arms maker in the UK during World War One, and when the war ended it of course saw its huge military contracts evaporate. One of BSA's efforts to develop new markets and product lines was to devise a series of self-loading pistols. These also in...

Paul Mauser was very persistent - if ultimately unsuccessful - in his long-tim goal to create a practical semiautomatic rifle using a full-power cartridge. In total he tried some 17 different designs, including one in 1901 which suffered a burst casing during test firing and cost him an eye.

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During World War One, Birmingham Small Arms (aka BSA) grew into a massive arms manufacturing facility to supply the previously inconceivable military appetite for rifles. When the war ended, they were left with a bit of a dilemma. As a private entity, what were they to do with such a huge product...

Switzerland was an early adopter of the Luger pistol as a standard military sidearm, but by WWII that design was becoming obsolete and the Swiss began looking for a newer sidearm. Several lines of development were pursued, and we have examples of two of them here: the W+F Bern P43 and the SIG P44...

In 1936 or 1937, the BSW company (Berlin-Suhler Waffenwerk) produced a small number of prototype pistols for German Army trials. These trials were eventually won by the Walther P38, and for good reason in this case. The pistol BSW submitted was a gas-accelerated blowback design, with an aluminum ...

This experimental repeating conversion of a Trapdoor Springfield was most likely made by Augustine Sheridan Jones, of the Dakota Territory in the 1880s. We know he submitted a different type of magazine-fed Trapdoor to the US military’s 1882 repeating rifle trials, and this rifle also came out of...