UKarmourer
Member
Yeah that would have beena cp team from the royal military police.
i'm trying like mad to get assigned as an armourer for them!
i'm trying like mad to get assigned as an armourer for them!
It is a bullpup based upon the AR-18 operating system, so I cannot help but like it (I'd love to get my hands on one). It is very similar (in function, not form) to my favorite rifle...the M17, which has proven to be the antithesis of the performance claims of the SA-80 (other than accuracy...it still does well in that respect).
Apparently the problem with the L85 was largely one of garbage-in/garbage-out, in this specific case the original version of the weapon completely meets the specifications required for it . . . which were written by some committee who apparently thought that infantry in a WW3 scenario in Germany would mostly sit around doing any number of things that were not shooting their rifles. I don't recall the specifics on the performance requirements, but they were bizarrely low, and allowed a lot of room for corners to be cut and still meet the operational requirements.
When the Brits contracted with HK to do the A2 upgrades, they had a much more extensive and rigorous requirements list. The basic features of the L85 design were easily upgraded to the more stringent requirements -- problem back in the day was just that MOD initially, in essence, ordered a cheap rifle, and got what they requested.
(Or so I'm told by a former British Army officer I worked with a bit along the way.)
I dissent, the unusually compact and robust operating mechanism make it ideal for use in such designs, particularly bullpup configurations.Let me also say that, having owned an original Stirling AR-180, I don't think it's the bestest ever basis for development. I find it particularly odd that a lot of the new modular uberrifles are based on the AR-18, because the original AR-18 design is very not-modular.
Z-Michigan said:And it's heavily derived from the AR-180 that worked so effectively against the British in northern Ireland. How ironic.
From playing with 1-4x scopes, they are really handy, but they are also surprisingly heavy, I found. That said, I do think they are the wave of the future as far as combat optics go.
Today 02:09 PM
'Company' is a generous term for Prexis - it's a one man shop run by Mike Jestis. The PL85 has yet to ship, but there are 18 of us who ponied up the money for the kits - and are waiting as patiently as possible for Mike to get them out. He's using UKGI furniture and isn't trying to be more than externally faithful to the SA80 in design.Texas Rifleman said:Story was that a company called Prexis was going to make a US semi auto variant.
PL-85 is the supposed name. It's not on their website anymore so it might have flopped.