Geissele has taken the step from manufacturing accessories, to making the guns themselves: The company released its new VSASS semiautomatic sniper rifle system at the Modern Day Marine 2017 industry demonstration. News of the new rifle was first broken by Soldier Systems Daily, via an article available at this link. The VSASS (which stands for Very-long-range Semi-Automatic Sniper System) is a Stoner-type direct gas impingement system built from the ground up by Geissele, utilizing very few off-the-shelf components. It sports a number of refinements, including an extended length barrel extension, hardened steel cam pin raceway, cobalt alloy cam pin, and other improvements to the operating group. Many internal surfaces are coated in the durable solid lubricant by Nano Composite Coatings, which appears to be owned by Bill Geissele. The VSASS uses SR-25 magazines, as well as Geissele’s SSA-E trigger. It weighs 12.3 pounds unloaded and without optic, according to the Soldier Systems article, with variants chambered for .260 Remington, 6.5 Creedmoor, and 7.62x51mm NATO.

Geissele Automatics’ new VSASS semiautomatic sniper system, seen here in the .260 Remington chambering. Image credit: Eric Graves, Soldier Systems Daily. Used with permission.

In addition to the VSASS rifle, Geissele has also introduced an upper receiver kit for the M110 SASS, with which the VSASS appears to share much of its architecture. Indeed, the lower receivers of the VSASS and M110 look so similar that one could tentatively assume their uppers will interchange, although whether this is possible is not yet known.

With US SOCOM looking for their own compact 6.5mm semiautomatic sniper rifle, the release of the VSASS may be a telling move by Geissele.

More information about the VSASS is available via the Soldier Systems Daily article, linked here.