Forgotten Weapons

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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.

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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.

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FireTower

setsneedtofeed

For Unaimed Hip Firing - Viper Mk 1 (1940s-1050s) (lemmy.world)

submitted 5 months ago by FireTower to c/forgottenweapons

7 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The Viper Mk I was an experimental submachine gun developed in the UK for use by military policemen in post-WW@ occupation West Germany. It was a simplified Sten gun (full-auto only, without the semiauto option normally included in the Sten trigger mechanism) put into a wooden housing.

It was intended to be carried slung over one shouldered fired under the arm with just one hand. To this end, it had neither sights nor trigger guard. The whole concept seems pretty questionable, and while multiple different Viper submachine guns were designed to fill this role, none were ever adopted.

Ian's video [9:54]

https://youtu.be/3thJ9Tm2ecU

top 7 comments

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago (1 children)

That picture reminds me of Nerf blasters more than actual guns.

Clamshell cover for the looks, tiny bit of actual mechanism..

[–] setsneedtofeed 2 points 5 months ago

Both the P90 and F2000 are surprisingly empty clamshells as well if you want to look up videos or diagrams.

[–] Diplomjodler3 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Perfect for crowd control.

[–] setsneedtofeed 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I can’t watch videos at the moment, but I presume with military police the idea would be base guards dealing with intruders. The idea of a small, full auto gun does have a logic in that kind of way.

I don’t see any practical advantage this had over a Sten or Sterling though. In a pre-optics world, the technique of point fire was valid but to design a service gun that has no iron sights and only allows point shooting is beyond questionable. Similarly making it one handed might have had an idea to make it more pointable, which is arguably valid, but then it full auto only with that one hand.

Overall just a mismash of ideas, which is why I suppose it never succeeded.

[–] Diplomjodler3 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The only real use i see for this is to indiscriminately fire at a crowd. Hence my comment.

[–] setsneedtofeed 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

The weapon is poorly designed but I doubt that wildly firing into crowds was the intent. I was trying to raise the discussion a little bit by thinking through what the the thought process could have been at the time rather than stating that it’s dumb and moving on.

[–] blahsay 3 points 5 months ago

Jeeze. You don't build something like this if you care about bystanders.