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  #21  
Old 07-16-2011, 06:59 AM
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Originally Posted by Yournamehere View Post
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.

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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."

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Originally Posted by Yournamehere View Post
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.
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  #22  
Old 07-16-2011, 11:52 AM
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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.
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Last edited by Spartan198; 07-16-2011 at 11:57 AM.
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  #23  
Old 07-16-2011, 03:44 PM
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Originally Posted by Mazryonh View Post
I was under the impression that the P90 and MP7 were also made to duplicate the armour-piercing abilities of (ultra)compact carbines using assault rifle or battle rifle ammunition, but with much less problematic muzzle flash and blast when used unsuppressed, while in some ways being more compact to allow stowage in vehicles or the like. After all, an FN SCAR-H CQC (a 10-inch barrelled firearm using 7.62mm NATO ammunition) would certainly strain hearing protection more than a FN P90 if both were used unsuppressed at different times.
You're not telling me anything that I don't know (or didn't already demonstrate that I knew in my previous posts). I am well aware that the P90 and MP7 are intended to fit assault rifles' penetration capabilities into a compact package; you didn't need to write an editorial-length post explaining the differences between PDWs and conventional submachine guns. What you still keep failing to ask yourself is why this ability makes them distinctive enough to deserve an entire category. Contrary to manufacturers' hype (which you seem to be buying into), the fact that PDWs fire such ammunition does not make them revolutionary enough to warrant an entire class of firearms unto themselves.

Also, since the G11 example obviously failed to make my case, let me try this one instead: Think about the evolution of the revolver. First, revolvers evolved from black powder designs into cartridge designs, and then from single-action to double-action. Compared to the submachine gun/PDW distinction, those are some major changes, right? Yet IMFDB still classifies them all as simply "revolvers" - we don't even have sub-categories for "black powder revolver" and "cartridge revolver", or "single-action revolver" and "double-action revolver". Or maybe you think we should do that, too?

But anyway, separating PDWs (which represent a comparatively minor trend in firearm history) from SMGs would be almost as ridiculous as insisting that we come up with three new categories for revolvers. If you wish to argue for that, too, then be my guest.

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No, I just thought people would see the rules and follow them, knowing that they might have their membership privileges revoked if they make repeated frivolous or incorrect edits.
Um, making incorrect edits is hardly grounds for banning by itself.

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Originally Posted by Mazryonh View Post
My experiences on other internet wikis has led me to be fairly positive on how things like categories and their entries are self-correcting, when the rules are clearly posted in a form most users cannot change. If this optimism has proven to be unwarranted on this wiki, I'd like to know how.
Right, but you are trying to add more rules and make things more complicated than they need to be (for the purposes of our site).

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In any case, it's still the mods' wiki and they can do what they believe is justified.
Which is what we're going to do, though I don't think it's an illegitimate debate to consider the value of a PDW category.

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Originally Posted by Mazryonh View Post
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, and if it does, we can expect to see more of them using the criteria I developed.
As Tim pointed out, PDWs have been around for a while now; the P90's name comes from the year of its introduction - 1990 - which means that it's been around longer than most IMFDB users have been alive. Since that time, it has been compact 5.56mm carbines - not PDWs - that replaced 9mm SMGs in most tactical teams' inventories. Based on this hindsight, I think we can say with certainty in 2011 that the PDW represents a minor trend in firearms that is unworthy of its own special and distinct category.

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Originally Posted by Evil Tim View Post
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.
That's hilarious. I think it also goes to show why you can't always take the industry's own classification seriously. Indeed, I think Mazryonh himself demonstrated this when he pointed out that Colt described their Model 607 as a "submachine gun" (which is also how Daewoo describes the K1/K1A). In the case of PDWs, manufacturers have every reason to try and promote their weapons as some special and revolutionary new class of firearms, even though they're hardly worthy of such hype.

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Originally Posted by Evil Tim View Post
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.
I think this by itself is a good rule of thumb when we're deciding whether or not to create a new firearms category: If there are THAT few, it probably doesn't constitute a whole new class of small arms requiring their own category.
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Last edited by MT2008; 07-16-2011 at 05:27 PM.
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  #24  
Old 07-16-2011, 04:27 PM
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In all fairness to Mazryonh, PDW doesn't seem as absurd a category to include as some of the others we seem to have. I had no idea, for instance, that someone made a category for "Multiple Barrel Firearm" and another for "Machine Revolver". Those should go, IMO. A lot of these unnecessary categories can be blamed on Cutaway (someone else who seems to have an obsession with making IMFDB into a firearms Wiki rather than a movie guns Wiki).
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  #25  
Old 07-16-2011, 04:32 PM
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I'm going to yank "machine revolver" right now, I've encountered it elsewhere and it doesn't make any sense as a category: you'd never describe a Mateba or Webley-Fosberry as a "machine" anything, because they're semi-autos.

Could you nuke the category, MT? Also, can you nuke "Welrod Pistol?" Ben41 accidentally moved "Welrod pistol" to "Welrod Istol" and created a redirect on "Welrod Pistol" that prevents the article being moved there.
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  #26  
Old 07-16-2011, 04:34 PM
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Originally Posted by Evil Tim View Post
I'm going to yank "machine revolver" right now, I've encountered it elsewhere and it doesn't make any sense as a category: you'd never describe a Mateba or Webley-Fosberry as a "machine" anything, because they're semi-autos.

Could you nuke the category, MT? Also, can you nuke "Welrod Pistol?" Ben41 accidentally moved "Welrod pistol" to "Welrod Istol" and created a redirect on "Welrod Pistol" that prevents the article being moved there.
Sure thing. First I gotta also remove it from the pages it's on, though.
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  #27  
Old 07-16-2011, 04:40 PM
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I don't so much mind having a cat for multiple barrel firearms of a certain type (rotary guns) since it makes it quicker to check through them all and it's a logical group, but I'd agree that the previous name was too broad; nobody really needs to look at all types of multi-barrel weapon to see if this minigun-looking thing they saw might actually be a double-barrel shotgun.
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  #28  
Old 07-16-2011, 04:48 PM
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Took a look at the rest of the firearms categories. Most of them seem fine to me. There are a couple I'm curious about though, and since we're on it, let's discuss them:

*UBGL (Under Barrel Grenade Launcher): Not sure if we really need this when we already have "Grenade Launcher".
*Underwater Firearm: Right now, it's just the H&K P11.

Should I ditch these, too?
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  #29  
Old 07-16-2011, 05:00 PM
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Underwater firearm seems pretty useless since there's only a handful in total, mostly either obscure prototypes or equally obscure Russian special-issue weapons; Wikipedia lists eight including the cancelled Lancejet and AAI's underwater revolver than never got past prototype. They don't tend to appear in anything since Hollywood has a strong preference for spearguns, and I really can't see the use of a category with only one gun in it.

UGBL is potentially useful. The way I use categories for guns, if I see a weapon I don't recognise I'll click around the entries in the cat looking at the page images before searching offsite. Obviously, if I'm looking at an underbarrel launcher I'm not likely to want to search through a list full of standalones.

Also, this still needs killing:

http://www.imfdb.org/wiki/Welrod_Pistol
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  #30  
Old 07-16-2011, 05:19 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Evil Tim View Post
UGBL is potentially useful. The way I use categories for guns, if I see a weapon I don't recognise I'll click around the entries in the cat looking at the page images before searching offsite. Obviously, if I'm looking at an underbarrel launcher I'm not likely to want to search through a list full of standalones.
True, but I just feel that the list of grenade launchers is short enough that this isn't a problem. This seems almost as unnecessary to me as the PDW category, even if there are way more UBGLs than PDWs.

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Originally Posted by Evil Tim View Post
Also, this still needs killing:

http://www.imfdb.org/wiki/Welrod_Pistol
Done. Thought I did it before, but I got logged out accidentally and prevented from making the change, but somehow didn't notice (blame it on multitasking and 'Net-induced ADD).

Also, for now, I'm leaving the PDW category up, but I am still leaning towards removing it.
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Last edited by MT2008; 07-16-2011 at 05:25 PM.
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