We agreed that the F1 was useful on the occasions it worked properly at very short ranges in tight jungle, but was too unreliable.
He had experience with the Owen gun and liked its reliability and usefulness in tight jungle at short range contacts, which typically was what forward scouts would encounter in tight jungle and to what the F1 was supposedly ideally suited.
The advantage he saw in the M16 was that, in Vietnam anyway, it was rare that anyone spent all their time in tight jungle and the Owen and even a perfectly functioning F1 were useless when moving into more open country, rubber plantations etc with longer ranges, so the M16 was far better as an all round weapon.
No. They were fresh in his hands in the mid-1960s, a few years after we started producing them in the early 1960s.
The F1s I fired had to be less than 10 years old.
In the mid to late 1960s as a civilian I fired heavily used WWII (or for all I know WWI) surplus .303 Lee Enfields that were still fairly tight and a bloody sight better than the much more recently manufactured F1s.
Probably reflects more about the steadily declining standards of government assessment, specifications, procurement and inspection than anything necessarily inherent in the weapons. Refer pictures of koalas above. :oops: :evil: :evil: :evil:
Having a 100 yr old No. 1 Mk.III I can vouch for it’s ability to do a great job of grouping shots, and quickly too. Although I have not held or fired an F-1, or any of its immediate kin, I do find them to be at best limited in usefulness except perhaps in lining some Koala’s pockets for recommending its adoption. For close combat, room to room sorts of work, this might do well if it can be made to run right, and function while suppressed. the FN P-90, and the Kriss Vector are other weapons most suited to that sort of work and may well cost less to procure. But for general infantry use, the F-1 is a losing proposition. Might as well give the Troops M-2 Carbines. Having seen some of our own Governmental officials in action , I must opine that your Koala’s appear to be overachievers… :mrgreen: (I hope this post still makes sense after I’ve had some Coffee)
Yeah, that agrees with our koalas’ exaggerated opinions of themselves.
Don’t be too hard on your government officials. If you saw the crap they’ve managed to sell to our koalas, you’d be impressed with your blokes’ ability to sell ice to eskimos.
Well, the same could be said about cheaply mass-produced Stens I guess. I had the chance to buy a .303 really cheap after I got out of the Army. I really wish I had…
The rate of fire achieved by well trained and disciplined British troops in the early parts of WWI was the reason the Germans believed that the Brits had far more automatic weapons than they did…
IIRC there was a WWII American gun - ?pistol? ?smg? - produced from stamped metal in a former toy factory converted to war production. Or something like that.
Can’t recall if it was a weapon that was produced in large numbers or just a small production that didn’t see much service.
Or in a dissolute period of my youth when working in the bush when a mate and I started Saturdays with a few beers before getting up and going into town for some serious drinking. Then the same on Sundays to recover from Saturday, but usually no more drinking after breakfast about 10 a.m. as the pubs were generally shut on Sundays, but not always in some areas due to (a) our then strange laws about pubs being able to serve travellers (which meant that everyone who wanted a drink on Sundays just went to a pub 20 miles or whatever it was from home and said they were travelling and signed the travellers’ book) and (b) cops who turned a blind eye, and in a couple of cases were getting pretty close to blind with us in some outback pubs.
Ah yes, the FP-45 Liberator. It was a .45ACP one shot pistol (could be reloaded, but is was very difficult and certainly not in combat conditions). It was dropped by the OSS to insurgents and main purpose was to allow someone to shoot one of their Axis overlord occupiers and take his weapon. No range or accuracy whatsoever, so you really hoped you killed or incapacitated the enemy. Not sure how many actually were used as intended, but the .45 was probably pretty effective in close quarters…
Interesting laws, probably didn’t really help with drinking and driving, which I think an Aussie poster on another board said was epidemic in 1970’s Australia. We had our share of “blue laws” and only recently in NY State can liquor stores open on Sunday and even more recently, people can purchase alcoholic beverages before noon on Sunday starting at 10am due to the popularity of brunches and “mimosas”. I prefer spicy bloody marys…
One of the pubs I drink at, a hipster place with a bit of a pretentious attitude on cocktails and liquor, only serves house made specialty sausages instead of the standard bar fare of wings and burgers causing many hungry customers to leave when seeing the menus. It’s actually a throwback to old laws that stated a bar had to be a restaurant and serve food to serve alcohol and serving sausage was a quick and easy walk-around. They’re actually quite good though…
RS* might be referring to the M-3 series of Sub Machine Guns. they were cheap, and expendable, if damaged they were discarded for a replacement. A bit better than the liberator Pistol, but only in that it has a few more machined parts, and still it cost about $10 to make at the time. Guide Lamp made both weapons, at the time it was a Division of General Motors Guide produced about a million of the pistols in 90 days, sadly most were never delivered to those folks they were intended for. As you said Nick, they were intended to be supplied to resistance groups in order to kill the enemy discreetly, and take their weapons. The person would then pass the pistol along to someone else. There was room in the grip for 5 cartridges, and loading was much less than efficient. There is a present day maker of an updated version of the FP-45, it shoots little better, hope it’s cheap.
It sounds like a professionally made zip gun with a reloading system that makes a muzzle loading musket look ahead of its time.
I’m not surprised that the Allies didn’t issue it to their own troops but only to (much more expendable) poor bastards in occupied territories.
I reckon anyone who had any experience of decent firearms who was issued with one of those would have had serious misgivings about the likelihood of it firing its single round. At the useful range of 1 to 4 metres, I’d be thinking about using something like a knife, rock in a sock or a baseball bat as the initial weapon and the zip gun as a hopeful backup. Or vice versa.
Obviously there would be a dramatic drop off in muzzle velocity and stopping power with the short unrifled barrel (and probably pretty poor gas containment in the chamber and whatever the breech arrangement was) compared with any other .45 pistol, notably the standard M1911. That is inherent in the stated useful range of 1 to 4 metres. Compare that with an arms manufacturer trying to persuade the military to accept an infantry longarm described having a useful range of 250 to 1000 metres.
I wouldn’t be too confident about the accuracy of the zip gun even at 4 metres. I think I’d want the zip gun muzzle pressed against the target’s skin to be confident of a disabling or fatal shot.
The armourer to some ninth rate kindergarten mob of gangbangers or drug dealers?
Surely there is no difficulty in getting much better weapons legally or illegally?
Even down here with our, relative to US, very strict gun laws, even a lot of the street drug dealers and wannabe gangsters and sundry thugs, not to mention the serious gangsters and outlaw bikies etc, are carrying plenty of illegal handguns and longarms that come out of well known arms manufacturers in various parts of the world.
What possible use is there for a modern version of the FP-45?
Like most things, it was only a tiny proportion that caused serious problems. Countless people from the city went to rural fringe pubs and countless people in the bush went to a pub outside the traveller limit to have a beer on Sundays, without driving home drunk or causing any problem on the roads.
Mate, it wasn’t epidemic. It was just part of the national male character, which has been steadily eroded by wowsers (puritanical, dictatorial, self-obsessed, self-appointed arbiters of social conduct which involves condemnation of everything which is vaguely enjoyable, apart from being a wowser) who in recent decades have been elevating their hostility to fun by prescribing as dangerous and potentially fatal or socially catastrophic conduct many perfectly normal things such as men having more than two standard drinks a day, which means I’d be dead before dinner most days.
The first problem was the introduction of breathalysers. Before that you could get away with a lot of sobriety tests such as walking a straight line and touching your index finger to your nose and drawing a line around a coin even if you were well on the way to shit-faced (which I did several times to my, and probably the constabulary’s, surprise).
Also, we had a much lamented road law where you could drive at any speed on country roads as long as it wasn’t unsafe. This meant that once you were out of the major cities you could go as fast as your car could go unless the cops could prove it was unsafe, which was bloody near impossible on a dry clear day as long as you could stay on the road. Oh, happy days! That’s another bit of fun the wowsers have denied us, along with reducing speeds in a lot of city areas to 40 kmh / 25 mph and currently arguing for 30 kmh /18 mph so that hipster cyclists who ignore red lights and pedestrians focused on their mobile / cell phones who plunge blindly into traffic aren’t wiped out as a necessary part of evolutionary improvement of the human species. We’re even developing special warning lights to save these lemmings from themselves. http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/flashing-ground-lights-target-melbournes-phonehappy-pedestrians/news-story/671dd1180ce3e0bd567f000a82d039f9
Okay, the foregoing is terminally irresponsible by today’s wowser standards, but if like me and almost everyone else of my generation you lived through it, it was fun that was pretty much standard and which nowadays brands you as a major criminal and threat to society for doing anything remotely like it.
Which is fine with me, but only if the cops devoted a fraction of their resources, effort and success over the past 30 years to blitzing drivers doing 63kmh rather than the 60 kmh limit to dealing with the exploding number of home invasions, carjackings, violent robberies and other crimes which are making this country a second rate shithole where crime is dominated by elements brought in from various war torn countries who repay the sanctuary we gave them and their families by turning on the society which saved them from the misery they would otherwise have endured in refugee camps etc. And I’m not slagging all people from those backgrounds as most of them are good people who deserve and are grateful for the chance we’ve given them for a better life. As for the sizeable and hugely disproportionately violent and criminal rest, f**k off back where you came from.
All our standard pubs are open from 10 am to 10 pm seven days a week, if they wish, and for much longer hours if they choose. Many suburban pubs are open close to 24 hours a day, essentially to keep sucking in the dopes who play the poker machines. The good news is that their meals have improved out of sight compared with 30 years ago as they want to keep the gamblers happy.
Your post reminds me that maybe it was a requirement in some states here, or maybe just within a certain range of the capital cities, that the traveller had to eat, or at least buy, a meal to meet legal requirements. I seem to remember going to a few towns outside Melbourne for Sunday lunches in the early 1970s where we could have a beer as well.
Generally we don’t have bar fare here. You want to eat at a bar, buy a packet of potato chips (crisps), peanuts, Twisties or Cheezels or whatever from the bar or a machine.
Now, and I’m reluctant to raise this with you as a moderator of previously unblemished character, but you did say you were drinking at a hipster place with a pretentious attitude.
I trust that you were present in some capacity other than as a hipster or person with pretentious attitude, which would avoid the need for the disgraceful alternative to be raised in the mod room.
LOL The owner is a pretentious sod but the staff are actually quite cool and good at their jobs. The bar right behind it couldn’t be more different as a “dive bar” and is adverted as the oldest (continuously operating since 1886) bar in Buffalo and I tend to avoid it because it’s the opposite, nice owner but uneven staffing. When I do go there, I often wonder how many people were stabbed during the rough and tumble period when Buffalo was the third largest port in the world and was the center of grain transportation in the US…
RS* Said : “I trust that you were present in some capacity other than as a hipster or person with pretentious attitude, which would avoid the need for the disgraceful alternative to bt e raised in the mod room.”
Though I couldn’t Blame Nick for drinking Pabst blue ribbon beer, (which I am told is a Favorite of the true Hipster) I’m guessing he doesn’t have a man bun .
It’s just a nostalgia toy for those who want such a piece for collectibility, or just to plink with. They are made by Vintage Ordinance, as well as replacement parts of incomplete originals. The present day price is 515.00 USD (a far cry for the one, or two dollar cost in the 40’s) And yes, there are hoards of other firearms far less costly, and far more useful to be had , no self respecting Crim would be caught with an FP-45. Plus the fact that Crims do not obey Laws of any kind just because they are Crims. There are no end to things that are Illegal, but Crims always seem to have quite alot of all of them. Laws in themselves really do nothing.
