As for L1A1 being better than EM2…yes, it was, simply by virtue of the issues inherent to all bullpup designs, namely delicate trigger mechanism, awkwardness in reloading, and being completely unsuited to non-strong-side firing.

As for the 7.62 vs. 5.56 debate-I’d recommend a new phase to that, where we all criticize the craptastic concept of FMJ rounds in general. On my last deployment I saw an Iraqi civilian attempting to run a roadblock take a 7.62mm NATO round through the neck from about 75 yards away. The bullet went into soft tissue and cleanly exited on approximately the same angle (just missing his jugular and windpipe/trachea); after some application of combat gauze and medical tape he was fine and he able to drive his car away under his own power.

ANY round with a full metal jacket is subpar, frankly. It’s pathetically primitive bullet technology that’s obsolete in the face of technology like the Mk318/316 and Mk77.

Charles222 : the FMJ rounds were developed to shoot russians wearing body armor near Fulda, Germany from 300 meters. Not to shoot some afghan guy wearing a robe as protection. Thats where the problem is.

The issue of the L1A1 being “better” than the EM-2 is BS, simply because, had the US not jammed the .308 down NATOs throat, the FN FAL and variants and the CETME rifle (and therefor the G3 line) would have been chambered in .280 brit or 7.92mm Kurz as intended. So they could have had L1A1 SLR in .280″ had the EM-2 not been good enough.

The problem is with the US Army who wanted THEIR round to be selected, because as the European armys were moving forward to the assault rifle concept developed by the Germans with the STG-44 with intermediate power ammo, the US Army stayed with the battle rifle concept using a full-power rifle cartridge.

The adoption of the .308″ round suited only the US, and forced European manufacturers to re-work every rifle and MG design.

As I recall, the EM-2 came dead last in competitive testing. Whether this was a failure of the bullpup configuration or something specific to the EM-2 I do not know, but it did fail. The FAL was not the first choice of either the British or the Americans (for obvious reasons) yet stood out in the testing and the British were probably wise to select it over the EM-2.

That history is NOT a defense of the 7.62 caliber selected. Yes that caliber was rammed down the British throat by America, and yes the smaller British cartridge was a better choice for a selective fire type assault rifle. But that is a separate issue from the virtue of the EM-2.

correction!correction!correction!

I am getting senile in my old age.
The author of the FN volumes is of course R.Blake Stevens,
not Blake Edwards, the director of the Pink Panther movies.
For the full and sad story of the EM2, I recommend “EM2 Concept and design
a rifle ahead of its time”by Thomas Dugelby, available at Collector Grade Publications

I think the main problem people have with bullpup designs is the fact that they are mostly closed systems. The FAMAS, the L85, the AUG… They were designed to use only proprietary attachments, and getting them to accept non-proprietary accessories is time consuming and often bulky.

To take the example of the FAMAS, it’s a good enough rifle (as one of my friends said, a “peace-time rifle”, designed to withstand staying loaded for long periods of time and being carried around), but there were no scope or light attachments built for it. Everything needs extensive work on the body of the rifle to be fitted.

I handled the EM-2 recently at a UK defence exhibition and it felt absolutely correct in the ergonomic sense, provided you were right handed. I’m ambidextrous so it was easy to try from the left shoulder and I think with a cartridge deflector that might have worked successfully. The rifle is longer than the SA-80 so the ejection port is not quite so close to the face. Where SA-80 is squat and bulky, the EM-2 is narrow and I think lighter and much better balanced. It would certainly have been suitable for women soldiers and smaller ethnic groups like the Gurhkas.

EM-2 was extremely well made, perhaps too much a craftsman’s weapon for modern production standards, but clearly built with the WW2 experience in mind. Contrary to comments above I rather liked the sighting system, although it was non-magnifying. NATO could do a lot worse than look at a modernized version of the 7 mm round before its stars its next rifle competition. Some enterprising US arms company ought to consider buying the rights to EM-2 from BAE – I am sure an ‘EM-3′ would sell well to the civilian and police market and might even pick up military orders.

Aurelian – your criticisms of existing bullpup guns are valid, but on the specific issue of proprietory attachments less so than they were, as the latest versions of the Steyr AUG (the A3) and the L85A2 now have Picatinny rails all over them.

However, I am mainly concerned with the design potential, since I don’t think that any bullpups yet address the problems in full. The IWI Tavor comes closest as the controls copy those of the AR-15 family; the only drawbacks are that converting between right and left-hand use takes a couple of minutes, and the stock length isn’t adjustable (although no-one but the US Army seems to think that this matters). However, my article linked to above suggests several ways of tackling these issues – including a variable length of pull.

Ray – I agree with you about the British 4.85mm cartridge. It was not a clean-sheet design; the starting point was an assumption that the US 5.56×45 would probably win the NATO contest for a new round, so the British proposal was based on the 5.56mm case so that the new SA80 could easily be converted to that calibre. The reason for the reduction in calibre (actually to 5mm) was to get a long aerodynamic bullet for the best possible long-range performance for machine-gun use, and in that it apparently succeeded, with a significantly better trajectory and hit probability than 5.56mm. However, while I have no data on the terminal effectiveness, I have serious doubts!

Madeleine – the EM-2 was in competition with the EM-1, also a bullpup but with a different mechanism and made using stampings and pressings. The EM-2 was chosen largely because its more traditional method of construction was better suited to the capabilities of British industry at that time.

Madelaine, I would love an EM-3…I have seen some folks photo shop EM-2′s to show new metals and plastic parts.
Greg

That was my thinking. Thanks Tony. To bad we cannot turn back the hands of time.

awesome !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Greg, the 6.8×43 would be a great improvement over the 5.56mm, extending the effective range from c.300m to c.500m, but it can’t match the 7.62mm which reaches to over 800m. So you’d still need two calibres to cover the small-arms combat ranges currently experienced in Afghanistan (up to 900m). A cartridge like the 6.5mm Grendel or the 7×43 can deliver just as much energy out to 1000m as the 7.62mm M80 ball, so could stand alone.

Chris, gun design is not something I know much about, beyond the general principles and rough ideas stage, but I think we could do better than the EM-2 now, in particular in meeting the usual criticisms of bullpups, as I spell out here: http://www.quarry.nildram.co.uk/bullpups.htm

Tony, I would not suggest that EM-2 should be put back into production as a military rifle, but I do think there could be a market for a small specialist manufacturer to produce an EM-2+, as a facsimile weapon for collectors. This might perhaps incorporate minor improvements such as an enhanced sight, but would be aimed primarily at gun buffs who would like an iconic weapon for their collection. It could be limited to semi-auto fire to get round legal restrictions. I guess this would sell at least a few hundred around the world as a limited production model (just as pen and watch makers produce limited editions) and would in time become a very collectable and potentially valuable weapon. Of course those police forces that still use the M-1 carbine or Ruger Mini 14s etc as deliberately ‘non-military style’ rifles might also be interested.

OK…So that was a problem with the 6.8×43 being developed as an upgunning so to speak for M16 family and other 5.56 weapons…got it.

Sorry Chris, the only illustrations and information I have on this gun come from Max Popenker’s excellent site here: http://world.guns.ru/assault/as94-e.htm

Don, I don’t think anyone is talking about large-calibre support weapons here, nor pistol/PDW ammo – they’re in separate categories – but just the ammo for the standard assault rifle and LMG/GPMG which would routinely be carried by dismounted infantry.

Most countries had just one of those for the two world wars; the .30’06 in the USA, the .303″ in the UK, the 7.92mm in Germany, although at the end of the war Germany was transitioning to two calibres with the introduction of the 7.92×33.

The introduction of the 7.92×33 was a game-changer in that it demonstrated the tactical advantages of automatic fire from a standard rifle. The Soviets caught on straight away with the 7.62×39 AK, but it took NATO until 1980 to catch up with the 5.56×45. Until then, they managed with just the 7.62×51 which was heavy and recoiled too hard for auto rifle fire.

However, these assault rifles were based on the assumption that small-arms combat would be almost all within 300 metres, as had traditionally been the case. The combat in Afghanistan demonstrated the folly of that assumption, since more than half of Taliban small-arms attacks take place in the 300-900m range. So 7.62mm guns are being rushed back into the hands of the front-line troops as fast as they can be.

The result is we now have two calibres, 5.56mm which can only reach to about 300m and has dubious effectiveness and penetration even within that, and the 7.62mm which is very heavy for man-packed MG belts and kicks too hard in rifles to be suitable for CQB weapons.

It is entirely possible to come up with ammo which can reach out as far as 7.62mm M80 while being lighter and recoiling a lot less, and which is also more effective than 5.56mm at any range. And adopting such a long-range intermediate in the 6.5-7mm class would mean only one calibre, so only one family of weapons rather than two, and no risk of a patrol being caught out with the wrong kind of weapon if the tactical circumstances change rapidly.

You mention the Italian and Japanese switch from 6.5mm in the 1930s, but there are some interesting stories behind that. The Italian 6.5×52 was an old round, loaded with a heavy, round-nosed bullet fired at a low velocity. This bullet did not yaw on impact and only punched neat little holes from which most victims recovered quickly unless the bullet hit a vital organ. The Italians started to developed a modern loading with a lighter, pointed bullet but then realised that they had a problem because they had huge quantities of 6.5mm guns many of which had worn-out barrels. They didn’t have the money to replace the barrels so they decide to bore them out to a larger calibre instead, and what they came up with was the 7.35×52, which actually wouldn’t have been a bad assault rifle/LMG cartridge.

The Japanese 6.5x50SR Type 38 was a different matter, as confirmed by US medical reports in WW2. The pointed bullet yawed rapidly on impact and often fragmented, causing severe wounds. US medics commented on the way in which victims often died from what appeared to be wounds in non-critical places. The reason why they introduced the 7.7mm calibre was simply to achieve greater effectiveness in the very long-range MG fire (i.e. 2,000+ metres) which was common practice at the time. This is proven by the fact that the Japanese Army was using the 7.7mm rounds in MGs for almost a decade before introducing it in rifles, which they probably did for reasons of ammunition commonality in wartime.

Obviously, other things being equal, big bullets are more likely to inflict severe wounds than small ones, so a 6.5mm is going to be a lot more effective than a comparable 5.56mm of only half the bullet weight. In fact, if I had to choose one round of ammo to form the basis of a family of assault rifles and LMGs, I would choose the 6.5x50SR Type 38 over any other which actually saw significant combat. We can do even better now, in terms of a more modern design, but even as it was, I think the Type 38 was better than what we have now.

standard issue optics back then was a revolutionary concept, it would seem. im not aware of any other western army at that time that would consider a scope for normal infantry use.