The side expansion chambers will be to accommodate the blast of the cannon's muzzle brake.

I know what you are thinking: "WTF!".It was build to reduce noise to communities nearby. The vehicle pictured is the M109G 155mm self-propelled howitzer.

Many thanks to Sven for emailing it to me.

UPDATE: Thanks to Mark for these images of another German tank suppressor.

UPDATE: Daniel found a US patent that German defense firm Rheinmetall GmbH has on the design of cannon silencers.

Bonus style points for iPhone

You know someone is serious about shooting when the total cost of their spotting scopes are more than your car.

Yep it's a 6 inch objective and 50x (crazy wide field of view)

the other is a WW2 rangefinder that goes out to 20,000 yards!

More photos here.

By the way, who can tell me how "Cheytac" is pronounced? I have always said "shay tac" ("shay" as in "Che Guevara").

Hat Tip: SayUncle

Surefire snuck out two new 5.56mm suppressors at Modern Day Marine Expo. The Mini and the Micro are stubby little suckers that add barely 3.6 and 2.6 inches to a weapon’s muzzle but cut down weapon signature and improve unit communication.

There is nothing magical about suppressors and they are bound to the same laws of physics as everything else. While suppressor manufactures are continuously tweaking their cans in order to maximize the sound reduction vs. weight / size ratio, ultimately if you shrink a suppressor you will reduce its effectiveness.

I doubt these will be sold to civilians. I cannot think of a single good reason why a civilian would want to purchase one of these particular suppressors, when a suppressor a few inches longer will give much better performance.

UPDATE: I may have come across as anti-suppressor. I am not. I own two and hope to buy a third within a year. They are incredibly useful and there is no reason why civilian sales should be restricted. But these particular suppressors are tiny - smaller than my .22 Rimfire suppressor - the sound reduction would be minimal. I would call it a "sound reducer" rather than a "sound suppressor". What I meant to say is that I cannot think why a civilian would pay for these particular suppressors.

Many thanks to Jesse for the link.

I once saw a suppressed semi-auto 12 gauge shotgun on display at a gun store. I remember being very impressed by the size of the can.

Unlike most videos on YouTube the sound on this video is very clear and you can distinctively hear that a lot of the noise is caused by the bolt itself, rather than the escaping gas.

One of the reasons I love my suppressed .22 bolt gun is that there is no noise from the action other than the firing pin smashing the case rim.

Thanks to Max for the link.

The specs are:
Weight: 8.6 OZ (244gm)
Length: 7.9” (201mm)
Diameter: 1.38” (35mm)
Finish: GunKote, T3 HARD COAT& SCARMOR
Sound Reduction: 35-38dB

The business end of the Ti-RANT

Of course the high-end construction and technology comes at a price. AAC will be selling it for $1195 shipped. That is about $300 more than the Evo 9.

More info at AAC

Actually its a pink sleeve covering a Advanced Armament Corporation suppressor on a .22 converted AR-15.

Hat Tip: Andy @ The Official AAC blog.

This photo is from Visier Special 6, 1997 (special edition of one of the three big German gun journals):

Click to expand.

Revolvers cannot be effectively suppressed because gas escapes from between the cylinder and the barrel creating noise (there are some exceptions). The big shell that encloses the cylinder of the PSDR 3 prevents the gas from escaping. This combined with a big suppressor and a subsonic .45 ACP round causes a noise reduction from 136 dB to 90 dB which is comparable to a CO2 air gun. Decibels are a logarithmic unit of measurement, so a 46 dB reduction is significant. In theory this gun should make a lot less noise than a suppressed semi-automatic pistol because there no slide slamming open and closed.

I had no idea such a gun existed until Sven emailed me. I really like the idea – German engineering at its best!
Many thanks to Sven, who blog at Defense and Freedom, for the scanned page and translation.

The Whisper X is a break barrel and is comes in a .22 or .177 caliber

Specs:

Weight: 6.61 lbs
Muzzle Velocity: .177 ft/s 1000
Muzzle Velocity: .22 ft/s 722 .

I am not sure about availability or pricing yet. Gamo USA do not update their website very often.

More info here.

Looks similar in size to a massive custom 12 gauge suppressor I saw on a Remington 870 recently.

According to police investigations the gunshots hit the victim from a diagonal angle and the weapons used were especially made for the KGB. Known as ’small special guns’ and used in assassinations, both the SP3 and SM4 models only let off minimal noise when shot. Police are stating that the previous Chechen commander that was murdered, Gazhi Edilsultanov was also killed by a 7.62 gun and the same weapon might have been used in both murders.

As usual, the media got the facts incorrect. The SP-3 is a cartridge. The S4M is a pistol.

SP-3 Cartridge (Photo from guns.ru)

S4M pistol (Photo from guns.ru)

The round is one of many Russia piston silenced rounds. The gas from the primer propels a piston (I doubt they contain any powder) which in turn propels a 123 grain bullet at 490 fps generating 66 lbs of muzzle energy. This is significantly less energy than a High Velocity .22 Long Rifle (130+ lbs). The piston then locks in the gas preventing muzzle noise.

The bullet itself is similar to the 7.62×39mm (AK) bullet. In theory this is supposed to fool investigators into thinking the victim was shot by a conventional rifle. This may have worked when the cartridge was classified but any modern forensic expert would not be fooled by a rifle bullet that clearly left the muzzle slowly and had very poor penetration.

A combination of very low power and a relatively large caliber bullet means the round is not capable of much apart from gangland style executions as demonstrated in the recent assassination.

JamesTown.org reports that in September another Chechen was assassinated in Turkey:

On September 6 Gazhi Edilsultanov, a former Chechen colonel, was gunned down in Istanbul reportedly during a dispute over financial aid being collected in Turkey for Chechen separatists. Edilsultanov was the head of the Chechen refugee camp in Istanbul

It is suspected that the killing was not a robbery but an assassination:

Perhaps, however, the story of killing Edilsultanov for the €50,000 was not true, and the suspects invented the money story to cover up the fact that the murder was committed by Russian intelligence.

How cool is that!

UPDATE: After writing a three paragraphs about integrally suppressed firearms it turns out this is not integrally suppressed! The suppressor fits inside the handguard. I got this via. email from the 57 Center:

This particular AR57 PDW Upper in Full-Auto with 6″ Barrel, with 6.5″ Gemtech Suppressor, is currently being produced for a couple LE Agencies.

We currently have our 11″ Pistol/SBR Upper available as well as our standard 16.125″

So they are now directly competing with the full-auto FN P90. Personally, if I had a choice between this and the P90 I would go with the AR platform.

I think the pistol configuration could be a lot of fun.

UPDATE: I asked if the 6″ barrel gave adequate performance. From 57 Center:

We have excellent results with both 6″ and 11″ Pistol/SBR Barrels, this would be peoples choice, LE prefers 6″ with the 6.5″ Suppressor, this unit also works in Sub Sonic,

It is very impressive that the action can cycle subsonic rounds (a light 30-50 grain 5.7mm bullet traveling below the speed of round is comparable to a 40 grain .22 LR Standard subsonic round).

Click to expand.

View the rest of the brochure here.

I found this photo on the Advanced Armament website. Click to expand

The Cyclops Suppressor

AAC Rimfire Suppressor.

I hope more and more businesses in the firearm industry start blogging and actively join in the gun blogging community.

The muzzle break and the threaded barrel

Threaded barrel with adapter


Adapter screwed in, ready for the suppressor.

UPDATE:

The creator of the adapter, Roger, just sent me an email. Check out his website. It contains lots of interesting information on suppressors and air gun hunting.

With suppressor, nice!

Wikipedia has this to say about the rifle:

The Kel-Tec RFB High Efficiency Rifle (Rifle, Forward-ejection, Bullpup) is a gas-operated semi-automatic rifle with a tilting breechblock locking mechanism, manufactured by Kel-Tec Industries of Florida. It loads the 7.62×51mm NATO (.308 Winchester) cartridge and uses metric FAL magazines. The rifle uses a patented forward-ejection system via a tube placed over the barrel that ejects the spent case forwards, over the handguard of the rifle.

The rifle is a forward ejecting semi-automatic firearm chambered in 7.62 mm NATO (.308 Winchester), utilizing a short-stroke gas piston. To avoid the sloppy trigger pull typical of bullpup style firearms, the RFB utilizes a floating linkage bar between the sear and the hammer, allowing the sear to remain above the trigger. The weapon is fully ambidextrous, much in the style of the French FAMAS bullpup assault rifle. The RFB accepts FN FAL style magazines, and is delivered without iron sights. A mil-spec Picatinny rail is standard.

Here is a video of the rifle, clearly showing the forward ejection.

Kel-Tec plans to offer three different four versions each with a different barrel length:

• Carbine (18″),
• Sporter (24″),
• Target (32″ heavy barrel, or 26″ stainless steel barrel)

The rifle is expected this quarter (1st quarter 2008) in the forth quarter, see the comments by dogon1013.

More images after the jump.

Click to enlarge the images.

CCI have renamed Quik-Shot as SHP (Segmented Hollow Point) and are now offering it as a subsonic round!

It will drive a 40 gr bullet at 1050 ft/s with 98 ft/lbs of energy! This is great news for me. I have been using Quik-Shot but since I use a suppressor subsonic is preferable.

CCI’s unique Segmented Hollow-Point (SHP) bullet is now available in 22 Win Mag and a 22 Long Rifle subsonic load. This offering is ideal for bigger targets that require a larger wound area and makes perfect sense in the 22 WMR. The flat-shooting SHP is designed to break up into three sections on impact for even more stopping power. These three segments diverge from the main path for unique terminal performance on game. The subsonic 22 LR offering is great when hunting around a populated area and a quiet, effective round is needed.

More here.

Click to expand image.

Hat Tip: MilitaryPhotos.net

a class three dealer examined it and said in his opinion it could not be removed and attached to a firearm with success.

Gamo has taken pains to make the outer case tapered front-to-rear, plus they have molded two huge flutes into the side of the case. They’ve also made holes in the flutes that expose the sides of the baffles, which are a soft synthetic material, to the air.

It was his opinion that the silencer would be too difficult to remove from the rifle without destroying it, and, even if it could be removed, that the baffles would blow out the sides if exposed to even the low pressure from a .22 rimfire cartridge. In other words, it wouldn’t silence a firearm for even one shot.

More here.

Noise is what the new Gamo Whisper is all about, and I’ll address that issue for you right now. I don’t find the Whisper to be that much quieter than any other spring piston air rifle of comparable power. In fact, my tuned .22-caliber Beeman R1, which has no silencer, is quieter because its powerplant makes less noise. The powerplant is where the bulk of the noise of a spring gun comes from, not the discharge at the muzzle.

More here.