Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are taking a look
at a pistol that has got a lot of hype,
and it's something that I've been very excited
to get my hands on and film for you guys.
This is a Laugo Alien.
And ... well, it's really not that common that we
find a modern pistol that is really fundamentally
different from what's sort of been accepted
as the standard way of producing pistols.
... In a mathematical perspective you might say we have found the local minimum
of efficient handgun design.
And it's basically typically a Browning tilting-barrel style pistol,
often these days with a polymer frame, striker fired.
Well, Laugo took a couple of steps back,
got a look at the handgun environment from a wider perspective,
and found a better solution, at least a better solution
for the specific type of handgun that they were looking to make.
... I think this has a lot of potential applications,
but it's most targeted right now towards the competition shooting community.
Because that's where you find the most skilled shooters,
who are interested in the most efficient, most effective handguns.
By effective I mean being able to put many rounds, very rapidly, onto a very tight target.
So how do they do this, or what are they trying to do?
Well, you want to minimise muzzle flip, you want to have a very good trigger,
you want to have the best possible aiming system, sighting systems.
And there are a number of problems with
the kind of typical modern day pistol when it comes to those things.
Striker-fired pistols by their very nature have poorer triggers.
Or it takes a lot more work to get a really good crisp trigger with a striker,
because of the mechanics of how ... striker systems work.
Especially pistols where the striker is only half cocked by the cycling of the slide,
and, generally for safety reasons,
the remainder of the cocking stroke is done by the initial pull of the trigger.
That, just by its very nature, makes the trigger heavier and mushier.
When it comes to modern sights, we're of course getting to the point
where it's becoming pretty typical to put red dot optics on pistols.
Well if you stick that on a Browning-style pistol slide,
it's going to reciprocate back and forth with every shot.
That puts a lot of strain on the optics,
and it also means that you're having a hard time
actually keeping that dot in your sight picture as the slide is cycling.
I ... can't do it, there are probably some people out there who can.
But having that optic sliding back and forth as you shoot is a problem for shooting.
And that's something that can be improved upon.
And we have the matter of bore axis. ... The higher the bore is in the pistol,
the more it's going to tend to push the ... muzzle of the gun up under recoil.
And it's not necessarily so much the recoil of firing that does it,
it's the abrupt stop when the slide hits the end of travel,
it tends to kick the muzzle of the pistol up.
So if you can improve on any, or ideally all three of those things, you will have a better pistol.
And Laugo has done all three of those things.
So, just a brief history of the company.
A couple of things that make me optimistic that this isn't a flash in the pan,
that this is something that will be around, and will continue to be iterated upon,
are, first off, the fact that this is not Laugo's first entrance into the firearms design game.
Laugo has been around since 2001, so 20 years now.
They ... were responsible for the design of what became
CZ's Scorpion EVO 3 submachine gun / pistol calibre carbine.
They worked with CZ until about 2013 doing that,
in fact early CZ Scorpions actually say "Made by Laugo" on the trigger group.
Apparently what happened is the guys at Laugo,
Jan Lucansky, the lead designer of both the Scorpion and also the Alien here,
wasn't happy with the relationship and decided to strike off on his own,
and started working on the Alien circa 2013.
It was first announced I believe in 2018 at Shot Show,
and the first deliveries were made in 2019.
Of course that was just in time for COVID to like destroy things,
and their deliveries have been rather slow, their production has been rather slow.
But we have one here, so without further ado,
let's take a closer look at how this thing is actually different.
Let's start by dumping the magazine.
There are a couple of different versions of this available.
This came out of their high-end Signature package,
so it has a flared magazine well on it.
There is a more standard, slightly less expensive version
that doesn't include that for those who don't want it.
The magazine by the way, it's a 16 round ...
well, I've got 17 round base plates, that's what came with the gun.
What I like about this is it is clearly designed with the idea that
extended capacity base plates can be done, and can be done easily.
Like the ... whole system is designed with ... future extended base plates in mind.
So that's a good thing.
Now what's immediately evident about this pistol is that this is not a Browning style gun.
And one of the major benefits of Laugo's system here
is that their slide is operating here kind of in the middle of the gun.
We have the frame below it, and we have this top strap above,
and the top strap is fixed to the frame and does not move.
And so that is what your sights are mounted on.
Now, I have the red dot set up here.
... Their Signature package includes two top straps, one with a red dot, and one with iron sights.
Honestly, if I have one complaint about this at this point, it's that
I think really the red dot totally ruins the lines of this gun.
I ... will be really curious to see what happens in the coming years.
If you took something like the technology of a Leupold DeltaPoint Micro red dot
that normally is supposed to hang off the back of the slide,
I think that could integrate very nicely into this top strap.
And that would be a really interesting alternative
to a red dot that really has a very high profile out the top of the gun.
So anyway, let's go ahead and take it apart because that's a pretty quick and easy process.
There is one pin here in the front, it is a captive pin.
Pull that out, and then ... oops ... you push the top strap forward.
And you're probably supposed to hold on to it a little better so it doesn't completely fall off. ...
This is held in place by the pin in the front, ... there is
this hook right here on the top of the barrel,
which hooks onto that pin.
And then this hook down in the back
that locks onto that pin.
Next step is to pull off the slide, and all I have to do is pull it slightly back,
and it just lifts right up and off the gun.
So that's the slide, notice we've got a little tiny breech block area right there.
And then we have a recoil spring and a gas piston there.
The Alien is mechanically closest to something like an H&K P7.
There are a number of other gas-delayed guns out there,
the P7 is the best and the most common of them.
Where the P7 had the gas port on the bottom of the barrel however, the Alien has it on the top.
And the way this works is opposite of a gas piston you would expect in a rifle.
So when the gun is at rest ...
... the gas assembly sits up here on top.
And when the slide goes back, the gas piston here actually reciprocates into the piston chamber.
Now there is a port in the chamber right here, right basically in front of the case mouth.
So that as soon as the pistol fires,
gas bleeds from the barrel up into this piston chamber here.
Which puts a lot of pressure on the gas piston here, which pushes it forward.
That force is transmitted into the slide through this lug at the front,
and it holds the slide closed as long as there is pressure in this chamber.
Or at least it slows down the opening of the slide.
The idea being once the bullet has left the muzzle,
this pressure all vents back out through the barrel, there's nothing left.
The slide has started moving by that point, and its inertia will
continue it moving backward enough to fully cycle.
So in theory, if you have particularly hot ammunition it will generate more gas pressure,
which will in turn hold the slide closed more forcefully than if you had weaker ammunition.
And the system sort of self-regulates.
Now in the HK P7, of course this is located underneath the barrel.
And there are some issues with the P7 of the trigger and trigger guard area
getting really hot really quickly, because this is a component that will get hot.
Well, it's a component that isn't there in a typical Browning pistol,
and it gets hot because, well, it's trapping and holding
a lot of very hot expanding gas from each cartridge that's firing.
What Laugo has done is put that on the top.
So if anything's going to get hot, it's going to be the top area of the gun.
And in practice this does not appear to actually cause handling problems with the gun.
It gets warm, but it doesn't inhibit use in the way that the P7
you can't really just go dumping magazines through a P7,
because it will get too hot to hold faster than you might expect.
Now point number two is the height of the barrel.
Because all of the working parts are above the bore line here,
the barrel is able to be set very low in the pistol.
In fact, if we look at this from the back,
you can see that the bore lines up like here, which is right in line with your hand.
This has a very high grip, aka a very low bore axis.
Which means the impact of this slide, when it moves all the way rearward,
Bam! When it hits right there it's going to tend to push into the hand,
but it's going to tend not to kick the muzzle up so much.
That improves control, and helps you stay on target for faster follow-up shots.
That's number two good thing.
Number three good thing is the trigger.
This is actually not a striker-fired pistol, this is a hammer-fired pistol.
So there is a safety lever on the front of the trigger.
So if you don't actually pull that intermediate lever, the pistol can't fire.
It's a very simple lever, all it does is mechanically block the trigger from moving backwards.
When I pull it in, now you can see it frees up the ... trigger to actually move.
And all that's actually doing is lifting up that little pin, right there.
That pin transfers through the slide.
So you can see the pin right there, and it comes out the top, right there.
Down, and back up.
And then that pin pushes on this, which is the actual sear.
So that's the hammer, that's the sear.
When the sear goes up it releases the hammer, which swings down from the top
to impact our spring-loaded firing pin, right there, and fire the pistol.
Note that there's a really clever safety that's just inherently built into this system.
You always want a way to ensure that the pistol won't fire if the slide's not all the way in battery,
because of course then the cartridge can rupture, and it looks like the gun explodes.
Normally you would have some sort of trigger disconnect,
so that the trigger can't be pulled if the slide's not in the right place.
And that can be a fairly complicated system.
Here, by nature of having this vertical transfer pin,
well, if the slide's not fully in battery that pin doesn't line up with either the sear here,
or the trigger down here, no extra special steps required.
That's very clever, and very efficient of them.
The hammer spring is located on the hammer strut back here.
And when it's fully cocked, it has a little tail that sticks out the back of the top strap.
And that acts as a cocked indicator, so that will tell you the status of the hammer.
That's cocked, and when I drop the hammer it disappears, that's the un-cocked or fired position.
So by nature of having this hammer-fired system, the Laugo is able to have a really good trigger pull.
... It acts like a two-stage trigger, you've got a little bit of take-up
where you just take the slack out of these three linked components.
But once the slack's gone, it is a very nice crisp release and a very nice short reset.
A couple of other little things I can point out: we have a slide lock and a slide release here on the side.
This is just an up and down lever, it's got a little wire spring right there that puts tension on it.
It is pushed up by the follower of the magazine when the magazine is empty,
so the gun does lock open when it's empty.
We have our ejector built in right there.
We have a spring-loaded buffer here on the back of the frame
to absorb ... some of the impact of the slide when it comes to a stop.
You can see it's pinned in place there.
That's a nice helpful feature that you generally don't get on modern pistols.
In terms of construction, the slide of course is steel.
The rails here, the top of the frame is steel.
But this ... grip / magazine well / trigger guard is an aluminium component
that can be removed. I'm going to leave it on because it's kind of pinned in place.
But in theory that can be removed, and that offers a lot of different options
that will probably be available from Laugo, or from third party companies,
as the pistol develops in the market.
It's got some pretty aggressive checkering on the grip panels, which are also replaceable.
It makes for a very nice solid grip on the gun.
Go ahead and reassemble this,
drop that in place.
The slide drops on. I'll go ahead and put the iron sight top strap on it,
because I just think this looks really good.
That sort of snaps in. The front pin holds it in place.
That three point of contact locking system makes for a good solid returnable zero on your sights.
And really I think the iron sights there complement the looks of the gun
much better than the red dot.
I like using the red dot, but the iron sights just look a whole lot better.
So, there's your cycling.
There's your trigger press.
And a nice short reset.
I did skip over the markings here, they're all in 9x19, 9mm Parabellum.
They're made by Laugo Arms Czechoslovakia.
Lucansky I believe is actually Slovakian in heritage.
It is of course a company in the Czech Republic,
but the company name is "Laugo Arms Czechoslovakia".
And then they're imported there by Lancer.
Nice, cool Alien script on the left side of the slide, and that's pretty much it for markings.
Patent pending.
Alright, this may all sound like me waxing pretty poetic about a pistol,
and everyone's certainly heard people talk up the newest, latest and greatest hotness.
I really think that Laugo is onto something here.
I'm really encouraged by the fact that this isn't their first ball game, that they've been doing this.
I think looking at the pistol you can see their experience
in how simple many of the parts are.
And I think the real proof of the pudding is that the thing actually does work,
like the hype is actually pretty much real.
So we are going to take this guy out to the range tomorrow.
If you are interested in how this actually performs,
and how those mechanical changes translate into on the range performance
then definitely stick around, check out tomorrow's video.
Thanks for watching.