The sad part is that if they had invested the time and effort, they could have developed a reasonable picture about what an M1A can be expected to do when exposed to a lot of mud.
I'll be blunt, I like science, and I like the idea of having some clue what my rifle is capable of doing when made all icky with filth. However, I am not taking my $1k rifle and low crawling with it through the mud, unless someone is shooting at me and my life depends on it. In the same sense, I won't be testing the airbags on my truck anytime soon. So, tests like this interest me, because someone will be trying to find out what I want to know, without me having to do it.
Don't misunderstand...I think a mudbath test can be perfectly valid. They just needed more rifles, or, at the very least, more repetitions of the same test, in order to see what the rifle will do most of the time. One mud bath, and one failure, is not valuable information. It's a single data point, nothing more.
Mike
I'll be blunt, I like science, and I like the idea of having some clue what my rifle is capable of doing when made all icky with filth. However, I am not taking my $1k rifle and low crawling with it through the mud, unless someone is shooting at me and my life depends on it. In the same sense, I won't be testing the airbags on my truck anytime soon. So, tests like this interest me, because someone will be trying to find out what I want to know, without me having to do it.
Don't misunderstand...I think a mudbath test can be perfectly valid. They just needed more rifles, or, at the very least, more repetitions of the same test, in order to see what the rifle will do most of the time. One mud bath, and one failure, is not valuable information. It's a single data point, nothing more.
Mike