Gun Porn!

The L86, a bullpup British machine-gun, found more use as a DMR than a machine-gun. There is also the AUG HBAR and QBB-95, but I haven't heard much about them.

QBB-95 is pretty crap, just about everything from the old QBZ-95 series of guns is just horrid.

The Chinese have since ditched the bullpup layout and their new rifle, the QBZ-03 is a traditional one. There's also rumors they may drop their new 5.8mm round in favor of the 5.56 NATO as the performance of their so called super bullet is apparently just horrific.

Not sure about the HBAR, don't think it was ever actually used enough to get any proper figures on it.

edited 23rd Sep '16 3:40:21 PM by LeGarcon

That bullpup Pecheng weapon just looks awkward especially given the ammo cans cant and how little room there is for the hands. That and I imagine putting a little bit of a twist in horizontally feeding belt is just asking for a jam or binding belt.

edited 23rd Sep '16 4:53:57 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Hey now, just because you had to put up with the dim-witted meathead of a jock brother to the L-85 Abomination the L-86 doesn't invalidate bullpups or bullpup machine guns.

Quit projecting onto the rest of the world! We know the SA 80 family sucks ass!

@Garcon:

Citation Needed. From what I understand, the new 95-1 series of bullpups solved most of the problems with the QBZ-03 being developed for the equivalent of National Guard troops and second-line idiots who are too stupid to operate anything else.

Now yeah the concept of firing a drum fed weapon from the shoulder is a bit awkward because of chicken winging but that doesn't automatically make it suck.

I've heard the performance issues were resolved but it's still an ergonomic mess and the troops hate the thing. A lot like the L85.

The weapon performance I mean, that bullet of theirs is a trainwreck apparently.

edited 23rd Sep '16 4:48:00 PM by LeGarcon

The Chinese military love their bullpups so much they brought out a new conventional layout rifle pretty damned quick.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QBZ-03

They still spent money on upgrading the bullpup, that's true, but that's more confusing than anything else. It's more than likely some idiot of a PLA general's prestige project rather than something they really want to do. Something to do to stop the idiot losing face.

I find solace in how the Chinese will certainly get their asses handed to them in any war lasting more than a week because they will be trying to figure the logistics of their clusterfuck military.

Warms me heart it does

Assuming such a war lasts a week or more and is not turned defensive on them. Or the alternative.

The original 5.8x42mm family was. Inconsistent ballistics, inconsistent wounding profile from weapon to weapon, inconsistent accuracy from I heard and perhaps the biggest problem of all we the multiple types of ammo when you really could have cut down the selection. It's been worked on since though.

But then again also, if the ballistic calculators are to be believed, the round is not as bad as it used to be, nor as much of a failure or crap as anyone who would oppose the Chinese would like though if these calculators have so much as even a grain of accuracy about the round's performance, it's nowhere near as good as Chinese propaganda would have you believe. In effect it's about as good as early mark 7N6 5.45mm ammo or M855/SS109 5.56mm.

edited 23rd Sep '16 7:55:02 PM by MajorTom

That's still some decades behind the West and the Russians though. Given the Chinese's inability to do well, anything, I'm not surprised their heavies actually use 5.56 while their nobodies use the domestic rounds.

Not really. It was only recently that the Russians well and truly got 7N10 improved ammo. Likewise it's only been in the last few years that the US has gotten Mk 318 and M855A1 EPR's.

The rest of the 5.45/5.56mm using world meaning places like Ukraine and Germany and the UK and Aussieland and whatnot are still relying on bullets designed in the 1970s and 1980s.

So unless the PLA picks a fight with the US Army Rangers next Tuesday, they have parity in the intermediate caliber world with most of the world. The DBP-10 round was picked up in quantity a lot earlier than 7N10 or M855A1.

The design of the round may be reasonable which is why it would look ok in ballistics calculators. The big problem is likely quality control of ammo batches. There are numerous examples throughout history of even common military weapons whose ammo quality frankly sucks ass so badly that the weapon performs poorly. Kind of like how the nicer Russian ammo vs the cheap shit is a notable difference in not only accuracy and consistency but also wear and tear on the weapons.

Yeah, even if their new and improved round is up to 70s NATO spec and even if it somehow gets produced and distributed on a large scale I've got doubts as to the consistency and quality of Chinese manufacturing.

Chinese manufacturing is not the only place where things are inconsistent. There's a lot of US ammo makers that cannot for the life of them produce consistent bullets.

The vast majority of US made military ammo is not among those.

The typical crap ammo for the US comes from budge rounds and well you get what you pay for.

And you think the PLA is going to buy cheapy cheap shit when they have the money to pay for more consistent quality stuff?

If they have the money to build a stealth fighter program, they have at least enough money that every (new) 5.8mm bullet they got is consistent.

But they don't have the money or even the means to produce either of these things.

Like they still can't replicate Mi G engines properly

Tom: Yes. Especially given their extensive track record in that department.

And don't forget that an overwhelmingly large amount of corruption in the Chinese state comes from the PLA. If there's a way to skim massive amounts of renminbi off the top, there's coteries of generals doing exactly that - and as long as they funnel enough money to the Central Committee members to keep them happy, there's less likelihood that they end up getting the old bullet in the back of the skull headache cure.

It's still worth pointing that after presumably millions in spending and years of R&D the Chinese have produced as the apex of their small arms knowledge a bullet that barely matches what the West and Russia were capable of 40 years ago. This is with ample supplies and plans of those bullets that they could have used to learn from.

It seems to be part of the Chinese ruling culture that they know better than any ignorant Gweilo or Yáng guǐzi. And for centuries, I have to admit, that was true. Just go google or bing all the great advances they made in medicine, maths, physics, chemistry, ballistics, cultivation, distillation (bastards invented whisky - that's something as a Scot I find hard to forgive. ) and so on.

But they got their teeth kicked in in the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries by people they'd spent millennia calling barbarians or worse and those that are in power now have still not got over that cultural cringe.

The reason for that 5.8mm ammunition isn't because it's brilliant ballistically, it's because if the weapons get captured, the barbarians can't use their inferior barbarian ammunition with them - no 5.56mm NATO or 5.45x39.5mm rounds will sully their perfect bores. Never mind it stops their troops doing the same with captured Russian or Western ammunition.

The idea isn't that bad per see.

But the Chinese Party members are notoriously corrupt, even among the commercial Chinese enterprises, issues with founds embezzlement and poor quality control being enforced as a cost cutting measure hamper a lot of the efficacy of the Chinese manufacturing.

Even then, their lack of know-how is showing whenever they try to do something more advanced and are forced to use European or Russian parts to complete their kits. Like their Diesel Engine submarines using Electro-Diesel engines meant to be used in freight trains or Russian jet engines on their home made aviation.

I wouldn't be surprised if a good chunk of their rifles suffer jams and stoppages because of shoddy manufacturing, because whoever was assigned to build them just assumed they'd never go to a shooting war and so didn't feel like keeping the quality standards so he could have more money to embezzle.

Even Russians can't do Mig engines properly. It seems for every good pair of Mig-29 engines they make, they make like 5 pairs of crappy stuff.

Which they sell to their export customers.