ArmyRick said:
Interesting. I have never been fond of bullpup style weapons and apparently most of the western nations do not seem to be either. I would be interested to see what some of our gun gurus have to say.
I'm certainly not a SME to the degree of mose of a few others here (KevinB comes to mind), but a few thoughts...
- There is merit in simplicity for simplicity's sake. Fewer complex moving parts, fewer small components... Fewer parts to get gummed up, broken, lost etc. There's obviously a diminishing rate of return on simplicity traded off for precision, but conversely, precision bought at the cost of added complexity introduces other problems. A simpler mechanism has advantages. The AR family is reasonably simple, but as has been shown, can still be manufactured to a very high quality- in most cases the rifle will be better than the shooter.
- Ergonomics continue to evolve. The biggest gripe I see with bullpups is that awkward placement of the parts you might need to manipulate when in the middle of a scrape. Magazine placement on a bullpup, and in some cases the charging handle, frustrate efforts to reduce combat manipulations to gross motor skills. With an AR family rifle or carbine, most of what we need to do - stoppages, for the most part - can be done with gross motor skills, and keep the arms and hands where the body naturally wants to put them in a fight anyway; we've merely added a gun to the body's existing physiological responses, and trained some basic manipulations. There's no tucking under or crossing of hands; all the manipulations can be easily done in a workspace that keeps your visual plane on the threat. Most of our manipulations on an AR family weapon can be done with simple graps and slaps using much or most of the hand.
The AR platform has simply gotten it right in terms of basic layout of a combat rifle as an extension of the human physiology in a fight. The amount of work that has gone into development of these weapons has created them in any variety or configuration desirable. They can be made to a quality higher than most soldiers really need. Parts can be modularly added or substracted as deemed suitable and necessary. Manufacturers keep offering space guns, but when you really look at those who get to choose what they use, the dominant firearms remain ARs or AR derivatives.
