A came across an article from The Firearm Blog from a couple years ago entitled "Looking Forward To The Next Top Break Revolver." As you probably know, top break revolvers were quite popular options for defensive revolvers in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and the UK's service revolver from the pre-WWI colonial conflicts through WWII and beyond was a top break.
The advantage of the top break revolver is that the action of opening the revolver also ejected the spent shell casings, which made it a bit quicker to reload in those days before speed loaders and speed strips. The disadvantage is that the steel and manufacturing of the day was not up to the higher pressures often found in cartridges using smokeless powder except in rounds like the .32 and .38 S&W, which are considered weak by modern standards.
The author of the article above believes that with more modern materials and manufacturing, top break revolvers would be viable for higher pressure rounds such as .357Magnum or even .44 Magnum. He notes that Detonics had designed a top break revolver in the 1980s that was intended to shoot magnum rounds, but that it--unfortunately--never came to market. The downside is that the lock on such revolvers would likely interfere with using a speed loader. He suggests that a design would need to either be modified to allow the use of a speed loader and/or designed to allow the use of moon clips.
An interesting article of what could be, but probably won't.
On a somewhat related note of envisioning what a future pistol design might hold, T Rex Labs released a video (see below) of the producer's ideas on what a future generation of duty pistols would look like and the features that they would incorporate. Basically, he envisions combining a rotating barrel action (in order to mount a red dot forward and slightly lower than possible with the Browning tilt barrel action) and the "bull pup" feeding and mechanism of the Bond Arms Bullpup 9.
VIDEO: "What the Next Generation of Duty Pistols Will Be Like"--TREX LABS (35 min.)
Interesting intellectual exercise. First, it would be interesting to see a series of functioning prototypes, perhaps each with a slightly different approach. One of the reasons the sooper-dooper neato stuff hasn't been done so far is the possibility the new stuff doesn't offer a sufficient advancement from what's already well proven, either in cost or performance. Build a few and prove that idea wrong if you can (PTypes usually aren't "costed" outside the R&D budget because it's known they're mucho expensive, the challenge is designing to engage economies of scale).
ReplyDeleteSecond, YouTube is just as thoroughly and completely evil as its owner, Google, and people need to stop using it.
I hadn't realized it when I posted this, but the Bond Arms pistol also uses a rotating barrel design. So, in reality, the pistol proposed by T Rex Labs is just a larger version of the Bullpup 9 with a red dot mount slightly forward and with the rail needed to attach a flashlight and/or laser.
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