[Evil Tim]

Originally Posted by MT2008

And anyway, the bigger problem for me is that it seems a little too hard to take PDW seriously as an actual "category" of weapons that is highly distinct from "submachine guns". I know that there is now an article on Wikipedia which treats them as such

It's funny you should mention that, actually: I tried to look up the references they cite, the "Smalls Arms Strategy 2000" document from 1986, "which defines the APDW (Advanced Personal Defense Weapon)." What I found was the only occurrances of this document on the internet are...Sites mirroring Wikipedia's PDW page. Nobody seems to know what it defines the "APDW" as, and it seems the arms industry doesn't really know either. Weird, given you can usually find any publication that isn't massive on scribd (ie anything other than giant helicopter tech manuals that cost $70 a throw) and globalsecurity tends to host things like that if you can hit the stop button before it redirects you. Globalsecurity even has that wonderful US Army urban combat manual where they built the example images in Simcity 3000.

Originally Posted by Mazryonh

Actually, as of this post's writing there are now paragraphs attempting to define "Assault Rifle" and "Battle Rifle" in those two categories.

Yes, but did you know that before you checked? Had you ever read them to see if there's some rules there you needed to know?

Originally Posted by Mazryonh

It's funny you mentioned that. I remember how Colt themselves once called their CAR-15 Model 607 (featuring a 10-inch barrel) a "Submachine Gun" despite in reality being an ultracompact carbine by virtue of the round it used.

Yeah, the thing is "fires a pistol round" is part of a very solid and agreed-on definition which was made when submachine guns were first adopted (originally to differentiate them from machine guns, which fired a rifle round). There are a handful of cases of manufacturers not sticking to the "classic" weapon classes (another would be Rocky Mountain Arms with their 5.56mm "pistol" that happened to look exactly like an AR-15 with a really short barrel), while there are thousands of weapons made precisely in line with these classes. For everything that's not quite an SMG, you can rattle off a list of thirty things that fit the classic definition exactly.

This is in no way the same as a class of weapons the industry has no clear definition for and where you are proposing a meaning where I believe roughly than 80% of weapons called PDWs will not actually be such. As MT2008 commented, it isn't worth all the potential confusion just to keep a category around which will currently only have about half a dozen guns in it anyway.

That's the heart of the problem: there is no single, clear definition of what a PDW is within the arms industry, other than "a marketing gimmick name for various smallarms." Us making one up won't solve that issue, it'll just mean there's yet another definition of it floating around confusing people. I know there are some other contentious sub-classes out there (do battle rifles have to be select-fire, when does a machine pistol become a subgun, etc), but none where you'd actually say most weapons said to be in the class are not.

Originally Posted by Mazryonh

And why the pessimism of there being "so few PDWs" presently? The jury's still out on whether or not the concept will take off

Oh come on, the concept's been lurking around since the eighties and we've had, according to your definition, about six of them. This puts them into roughly the same bracket of success as semi-automatic revolvers and sustained pressure pumps.