Issue with "PDW" as a weapon category

[Evil Tim]

Originally Posted by Yournamehere

Additionally the qualifications for submachineguns as they were dictated during their inception were, more or less, the gun being a handheld portable automatic weapon, the pistol caliber being partially necessary criteria for definition and partially a necessity due to the build of the early open bolt subguns like the Thompson.

Well, it was much simpler: it was World War 1, and there was a hard divide between handgun and rifle bullets which wouldn't really go away until 1938 when the 7.93x33mm Kurz was designed. The sub-machine gun (which is how the term was originally formed) was an even-lighter-than-light machine gun firing a handgun bullet rather than a rifle bullet.

Originally Posted by Yournamehere

Battle rifle: Any rifle firing a full powered cartridge (7.62x51mm for example).

In my experience, "battle rifle" is a subset of "rifle" which refers specifically to assault-like rifles that fire full-sized rifle bullets (ie FAL, G3, M14) and have at least a select-fire variant, otherwise it's hard to draw a line between a battle rifle and a DMR. If I remember rightly, the term is actually fairly new, and was coined in the Vietnam era to provide a distinction between the M14 "battle rifle" and the new M16 "assault rifle."

Originally Posted by Yournamehere

As for what Matt said with the role of the round not distinguishing its class, I don't believe that either, because that's about what the difference is between a Battle Rifle, Assault Rifle and SMG are, and so I'd say:

I believe what he means is that what the ammo is for doesn't change the class of the gun. So, for example, loading your M1911 with FMJs instead of hollowpoints doesn't change it from a "light attack pistol" into a "heavy duty pistol" (unless you live inside a videogame, in which case it probably does). Same here, putting AP rounds into what's basically a subgun doesn't really change that it's a subgun, it just addresses why subgun sales started to fall off in favour of compact carbines (the increasing likelihood of encountering bad guys in body armour and the relative crapness of the traditional 9x19mm subgun round against such) so companies could try to lure back their old SMG clients.

[Spartan198]

Originally Posted by Yournamehere

1: Get rid of it altogether and just call the P90 and MP7 SMGs, because they still fall under that criteria as well if you consider 5.7 and 4.6 "pistol" rounds, as they technically are chambered in pistols and aren't powerful enough to be intermediate rounds.

5.7x28mm was designed specifically with the P90 in mind, the Five-seveN pistol came along after. Likewise, the 4.6x30mm was designed specifically with the MP7 in mind, but in this case HK's companion pistol, the UCP, never materialized outside of limited trials with the Bundeswehr.