Forgotten Weapons
This is a community dedicated to discussion around historical arms, mechanically unique arms, and Ian McCollum's Forgotten Weapons content. Posts requesting an identification of a particular gun (or other arm) are welcome.
https://www.youtube.com/@ForgottenWeapons
https://www.forgottenweapons.com/
Rules:
1) Treat Others in a Civil Manner. This is not the place to deride others for their race, sexuality, or etc. Personal insults of other members are not welcome here. Neither are calls for violence.
2) No Contemporary Politics Historical politics that influenced designs or adoption of designs are excluded from this rule. Acknowledgement of existing laws to explain designs is also permissable, so long as comments aren't in made to advocate or oppose a policy. Let's not make this a place where we battle over which color ties our politicians should have, or the issues of today.
3) No Advertising This rule doesn't apply to posting historical advertisements or showing more contemporary ads as a means of displaying information on an appropriate topic. The aim of this rule is to combat spam/irrelevant advertising campaigns.
4) Keep Post on Topic This rule will be enforced with leeway. Just keep it related to arms or Forgotten Weapons or closely adjacent content. If you feel you have something that's worth posting here that isn't about either of those (and doesn't violate other rules) feel free to reach out to a mod.
5) No NSFW Content Please refrain from posting uncensored extreme gore or sexualized content. If censored these posts may be fine.
Post Guide Lines
These are suggestions not rules.
-Provide a duration for videos. eg. [12:34]
-Provide a year to either indicate when a specific design was produced, patented, or released. If you have an older design being used in a recent conflict provide the year the picture was taken. Dates should be included to help contextualize, not necessarily give exact periods.
-Post a full URL, on mobile devices it can be hard to tell what you're clicking on if you only see "(Link)".
-Posts do not have to be just firearms. Blades, bows, etc. are also welcome.
Adjacent Communities
If you run a community that you feel might fit in dm a mod and we might add your's.
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I wanted to provide some additional reasons not found in the article. Despite deflection issues not being listed, pointing out that the U.S. encountered them creates a reasonable point of speculation that so did the Soviets.
Fair enough! At those round weights, it's also unsurprising.
Regardless, it seems a if there would be several potential applications where deflection might be less important. I'm just surprised nobody seems to be researching or offer anything.
Would not handguns also see the same benefits? Thinking through it, deflection might be even more damaging for some uses, like home defense. If the rounds are effectively light AP (more that standard ammo), they're not only going through walls, but then off at some arbitrary angle, and that wouldn't be good.
This is military rather than private defense driven, and in the military arena flechettes seem to periodically reappear. There always seems to be someone interested in them, but for small arms they seem unable to get past some of the issues that were identified early. Tank sabot penetrator rounds are more or less the same thing, but scaled up and with that increased size and specific use they are quite popular.
For personal self defense handguns, while flechettes don't have the downside of deflection, many of their upsides become irrelevant. This leads to trying to sell a more expensive ammunition to go in what would be a small selection of guns and not doing the actual task any better than conventional rounds.
Except AP, right? And if so, legislation would be harsh; c.f. SS190 5.7x28. I understand the actual AP capability is questioned, but it's hard to evaluate because it's hard to get. I also understand that this is because LE gets twitchy about AP ammo and the NFA tends to cave on any legislation LE Unions get behind.
The legislation already exists.
18 U.S.C., § 921(a)(17)(B):
It would be difficult to produce flechettes not caught by that existing definition.
Putting aside legality and assuming that is overcome, it would still be an uphill fight in the market. I would posit that the majority of people buying handguns do not highly weight armor penetration as a factor. Any company going into flechettes as an armor piercing solution would have to eat all the R&D costs to get flechettes that sufficiently penetrate armor from a pistol length barrel, produce or partner with an ammunition company to produce this new and expensive ammunition that only works for one brand on the market, produce and sell handguns for this. All hoping to recoup costs by catering to the subset of the market that is willing to pay significantly higher prices just for armor penetration.
The only viable customer for a company to pitch flechettes to is the military, and once more- all of the rifle attempts have had insurmountable problems. Investing in flechette handguns simply wouldn't be worth the time, as handguns are considered of low importance to small arms and current calibers work well enough. Even armor piercing 5.7mm never caught on widely for military adoption.