You’d think all the fiddly bits are for decoration but actually all of that is very functional.
Functional or not though, I just can’t help but see wasted space when I look at any of the modern automatic handguns.
Pistols should all be bullpup imo. We can land robots on comets and other planets, we can solve the mechanical issues.
That gun is over 8.5 inches long and the barrel is actually only around 5. That’s a substantial waste in my opinion and I think we tolerate it only because of habit and intellectual/experimental laziness.
Once we have AIs and robots to democratize code and prototyping, I’m sure we’ll see a completely new type of handgun and I’m certain it’ll use the full length of the gun as a barrel.
Since the thing looks like a ray gun anyway I’m reminded that the probable approach of future handguns will be something like metal storm, where the ammo is electrically fired and caseless.
There are concepts for a metal storm pistol but they stack the ammo end to end in the barrel. That’s a mistake in my opinion because the only round that gets the full length of the barrel is the last one.
In any case, certainly another area of waste is cased ammo. I want the entire mass of the round devoted to propellant and projectile.
I’m pretty positive you could make a system that triggers the rounds via a piezoelectric effect, or perhaps a solar powered supercapacitor if you need a hair trigger. The capacitor approach would radically improve the durability of the device also since you could remove a slew of moving parts. The down side would be the fact that you’d have a somewhat limited sustained reloading capacity since the capacitor would be trickle charged, unless of course you somehow baked the recharging into the magazine equivalents or even the ammo itself somehow. Perhaps by making it so that a discharged round charges the system for the ignition of the next round, much like how in today’s firearms recoil energy is used to ready and position the next round.
Considering the split hairs gains that get called “revolutionary” in this industry, I’m confident such fundamental changes will occur, and will be hailed by every objective observer as a true technical leap forward.
The initial models will suck, but then prototypes usually do.
