The 1908 Hino Komura

[Shellback]

I hadn't seen one of these before and thought it was a really unique design. A rare piece of firearms history, the Hino Komura (http://www.guns.com/japanese-hino-komuro-1908-blowforward-pistol.html), blow-forward pistol.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IelUFboWuOA&feature=player_embedded#!

[Jac]

That's some steampunky goodness right there... :)

[Zhurdan]

Queen Amidala called and asked if it comes in silver.:)

Honestly though, I've never even heard of that sort of action. Pretty neat find.

[Shellback]

I see what ya mean.

http://img716.imageshack.us/img716/5605/natalieportmanqueenamid.jpg

[LHS]

That's a neat old pistol. I really enjoy seeing self-loading weapons from the early days of the technology. They were trying pretty much everything they could think of, hoping something would stick. It's amazing to see the weapons that came out of that time period, so many of them had features and ideas far ahead of their time.

[TGS]

That's a neat old pistol. I really enjoy seeing self-loading weapons from the early days of the technology. They were trying pretty much everything they could think of, hoping something would stick. It's amazing to see the weapons that came out of that time period, so many of them had features and ideas far ahead of their time.

My thoughts exactly, down to the same words. The variety and ingenuity of those days is staggering.

[LHS]

For example, did you know the early Thompson SMG prototypes had no buttstock and were belt-fed? Or that the Russians had a select-fire, intermediate-cartridge assault rifle with a vertical foregrip in 1916? That the US experimented with a 'flame bayonet' for the M1903 and M1917 rifles? The whole concept of the Pederson Device amazes me, given the time frame. Because the boundaries of 'what works' had yet to be set, people seemed to go in all sorts of novel directions. Some worked, some didn't, but almost all of them were interesting to the historian.

[Johnkard]

It's because the existing schools of thought on engineering were not advanced enough to encompass each minor implementation.

A lot of the error handling and logistics of design were left to the individual inventor working on the project. Because of this, engineers were trained to a much higher level in a much narrower set of skills than their modern counterparts.

Now, there are unified schools of thought extending across most of the little logistical problems that emerge while implementing an idea. It's hard to branch away from convention when convention is supported by wide series of papers and statistics. Properly vetting a new idea such that it can properly compete with a conventional solution is prohibitively time consuming and expensive for the "little guy." Most people don't know that the majority of Corporate Research and Development budgets don't go into actually developing new technologies, the money is used to test, validate, and improve a very narrow selection of base concepts that undergo relatively little change.


The problem now, is how finished products are valued. As it stands, production is optimized at the cost of product quality. I'd rather have an expensive well engineered individual handgun, than an assembly line designed to efficiently produce mediocre handguns. True, If I owned the company profit margins might affect my point of view, but in general I think most of us hold the latter view.