#Interesting

Now more than a week has passed since SHOT 2018, and we at TFB are finally recuperating from what is most likely the busiest single week that the entire team will have all year. With SHOT Show over, we can finally go back to the boring business of gun writing and video making. But while the show is still fresh on our minds, I think it is important to take a second and look at some of the trends and big product pushes that occurred during the show.

The Kel-Tec RDB (Rifle, Downward ejecting, Bullpup) is one of the most promising bullpup designs of recent years, thanks to its slim layout and ambidextrous features. However, there is a lot that can go wrong with even the most clever of designs, and unfortunately Kel-Tec has had a history of producing weapons that, while innovative, have experienced issues with usability, reliability, and quality control. So, the question on many people’s minds was “sure, the design looks good, but can we trust a rifle from Kel-Tec?” InRange TV was one of the recipients of the pre-production RDB, and this week they released their very thorough review of the Kel-Tec RDB, giving us an idea of what to expect:

For this fifth installment of our series on unusual, strange, or remarkable magazines, we’ll be talking about a Czech weapon designed in Britain in the 1940s for the war effort against Nazi Germany. Joseph Vesely was a Czech migrant to the UK in the late 1930s, with most sources having him fleeing the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in early 1939. During and after the so-called “Phony War”, the British were looking to re-arm with new weapons, including submachine guns, having purchased over a hundred thousand .45 caliber Thompson submachine guns from the American concern Auto-Ordnance, and having copied the German MP.28 submachine gun as the Lanchester. Vesely approached the British Ordnance Board with blueprints of a new weapon which utilized a tandem column magazine of 64 cartridges (initially) of 9mm Parabellum. At the end of this post I will provide resources for our readers to learn more about the Vesely submachine gun designs, but the primary interest of this post is the magazine system itself, and how it worked.