Forgotten Weapons

Designed by Bartolomeo Girardoni the in the 1770s, the Girardoni is an air rifle that can fire 20 rounds as quickly as a modern bolt action rifle. It uses .46 caliber round lead balls, delivering 154 grains of lead per shot at about 1000 fps. This was a revolutionary weapon when it was created, and it was adopted by the Austrian army. However, its manufacturing was ve...

In 1954 and 1955, the French company SOFAM (Société de Fabrication d’Armaments) in Paris marketed a system to convert bolt action rifles into submachine guns. The original design is reportedly Spanish, but was marketed through the French company. The design was pretty simple, using the stock and trigger guard of the rifle (in these examples a Mauser 98, but conceivabl...

Aimpoint is known for its red dot optics, but in the early 2000s the company decided to develop a 3.5x fixed magnification traditional scope. It was intended for a French military trial, and Aimpoint used their 3x magnifier as the base for building it. I have three different iterations of the project to show, none of which ended up winning the contract.

The post...

During the 1980s, the US ran the Joint Service Small Arms Program to reduce the number of different small arms in US inventory. The most significant outcome of this program was the M9 pistol, but the program also considered adopting a submachine gun. The requirements were bit tricky, with things like a low rate of fire but also a very high-ROF burst option, and calibe...

In 1872, two Austro-Hungarian military officers named Julius Payer and Carl Weyprecht set out on an expedition to find a northeast passage to reach the Orient by traversing across the Arctic Ocean above Russia. The expedition was well-funded, and among their other specialized articles equipment they had several bronze Gasser M1870 revolvers and Werndl rifles. Why bron...