Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we're getting to take a look
at a gun that I've wanted to look at for quite some time.
This is an FN P90 PDW, Personal Defence Weapon.
I will point out that this is in fact
a registered post-sample machine gun.
This is an actual P90, not a semi-auto
civilianised PS90.
So ... the way you can really distinguish that from there is the short little barrel.
Now the P90 was developed, as I said, as a personal defence weapon in conjunction with a pistol,
both chambered for a cartridge that was intended to be able to penetrate body armour.
... This went into development in the mid/late 1980s at FN,
and it actually predates the official NATO request for this system.
So it's unclear to me if FN had some foresight that this was going to be coming from NATO,
or if it was something that they saw a need for independently and started to develop.
Ultimately what really got this gun going was the NATO request for this style of firearm.
Anyway, when I say that this was intended to be able to perforate body armour,
that is specifically Russian military body armour.
The concern in NATO at the time, and presumably in Belgium a few years earlier in the '80s,
was the Russians are going to attack Western Europe.
And they're going to drop all sorts of paratroopers behind European lines.
And the ... Russian paratroops are all going to be wearing body armour
that is titanium plate and some Kevlar, and a 9mm pistol round won't be able to penetrate it.
And so you're going to have all of the behind the lines, rear echelon, NATO troops,
the truck drivers, the supply clerks, the administrative guys,
who are all equipped with 9mm pistols, or perhaps submachine guns,
are going to be unable to do squat against this flotilla of Russian paratroops.
So what we'll do instead is we'll come up with a requirement for a
very compact, handy, self-defence weapon
using a cartridge that can penetrate that body armour.
And so the way you do that ... if you want to keep a small, lightweight, and controllable gun,
you increase armour penetration by making the projectile small in diameter,
and high velocity, and give it ... a hardened core.
And the trade-off here is it will be able to go through a hard surface like body armour,
but it's going to be pretty limited in the amount of damage that it will actually do
to a target after it goes through that armour. That's the trade-off.
The cartridge will be less effective on an un-armoured target than standard 9mm ammo,
but it will be more effective on armour.
So like I said, FN put this gun into development in I think it was 1986.
It was launched formally in 1990, just a year after NATO formally requested
this sort of armour-penetrating capable PDW style of weapon.
That NATO request came in 1989.
Of course the thing that really jumps out about the P90
is it's a very unusual distinctive looking firearm, with a very unusual, creative, magazine system.
With a 50 round magazine that lies parallel along the top of the gun.
So let's take a closer look at this, let's take a closer look at the cartridge,
and talk about what is new, and what is just kind of hiding inside the P90.
For all of the swoopy high-tech futuristic look of the P90,
especially in 1990 when it was released onto the market,
this is actually mechanically a pretty darn simple gun.
This is in fact simple blowback, there is no locking system.
It really doesn't need a locking system because it's a very small cartridge.
The most mechanically interesting part of this to me, of course, is the magazine.
So our magazine catch is right here, there's two of them, one on each side.
Pull those two back, and we can then lift the magazine up and out of the gun.
It is a translucent polymer mag so you can very easily see through it,
you can see how many rounds are in it.
Just for comparison's sake, that is 5.56 NATO,
that is 5.7x28mm.
Now when this cartridge was originally designed it was designed
by a couple of engineers at FN, one Jean-Paul Denis and Marc Neuforge.
And unlike a lot of cartridges being developed today,
they didn't adapt this from anything else that existed.
The 5.7x28 is a completely unique cartridge, it doesn't have any parent case.
It has a couple of interesting characteristics to it.
The case itself is perfectly straight walled, the rim is just slightly rebated.
And the cartridge case is actually covered with a very thin polymer layer
to aid in basically lubrication, in extraction and in feeding in the magazines.
Typically a cartridge will have a very slight taper to it.
That is in fact the case with 5.56, which you may or may not be able to actually see with the bare eye.
But that taper ... eases extraction, because as soon as the cartridge moves back just a little bit
now, because it's tapered, the cartridge case is no longer in direct contact with the chamber.
Well, on a perfectly straight-walled case like the 5.7 that doesn't happen.
So they have a chemical lubricant on the case that takes the place of that taper.
I suspect the lack of taper was in order to be able to stack 50 of these up, like so,
in the magazine without needing any curvature.
Now when these are in the gun the cartridges are pointing out to the side,
and they feed through a very interesting rotary mechanism here.
(Load a couple of rounds in so you can see this.)
So there's our top round, and that's in the position that's going to feed into the gun.
So normally the magazine sits like this,
and the bolt's going to come in, push that straight into the chamber.
However, when I push the next round in you can see that that first one rotates 90 degrees.
And now ... well, let's put a few in so you can see in the magazine body.
So there they are lined up in the magazine.
And then you have this basically turntable
that takes the cartridge and rotates it 90 degrees like that.
This is based on a patent by a gentleman named Hill who developed this in the 1950s.
FN took a look at it in the '60s, opted not to build Hill's style of gun.
But they kept it in mind, and his patents are referenced in the FN patents for this magazine.
This magazine, by the way, was designed in 1989 as part of the gun development.
And ... the patent on it is registered to another FN engineer by the name of René Predazzer.
(I think I'm pronouncing that right.)
So, if you're interested in the origins of this system, I have a video on a Hill system
where this came from, so I'll link that at the end of this video.
You can check it out, it's pretty interesting.
Anyway, once we have the cartridge rotated into position,
then it's just an easy matter of pushing it straight into a chamber.
So we will come back to the mechanics in a moment, but for now the ergonomics.
This has two grips like this very close to each other, your thumb is in fact in the trigger guard.
The safety lever is located down here.
It is a three position selector, "S" for safe, "1" for semi-auto, and "A" for full-auto.
And it's got these little knurled or serrated cuts on it
so that you can easily manipulate it, whether you're shooting it left handed
or right handed.
And then of course there's also a chunky built-in hand stop.
This is integral to the main body of the gun so it can't crack off or anything.
Which is rather important because your front hand is very close to the muzzle there
owing to this having a rather stubby barrel.
Now it's not actually that short of a barrel because this is a bullpup style of firearm,
so the barrel comes all the way back to here.
... I should have looked up the exact number, it is about a 12 inch barrel. [10.4 inches.]
The civilian ones with a 16 inch barrel come out to about there.
Anyway, because of the short overall configuration of the gun,
they don't have [primary] iron sights because the sight radius would be very, very short.
Instead they have a variety of different optics mounted on this sort of buttress assembly up here.
This particular one is the USG version, which has a non-illuminated reticle.
But there's red dot versions, there are versions like reflex sight versions, and others.
This also has some Picatinny rail on it so that lights or lasers could be mounted.
And you know what? I kind of like this optic, it's a nice visible, dark, black reticle.
A large outer ring, you've got your sort of 3 bars in there,
and then a centre ring with a very small centre dot.
Should be something fairly easy to shoot with.
But again, this is specifically the USG version,
I'm not going to try to cover all of the other variations.
Rounding up the last of our controls we have the charging handle, which is also ambidextrous.
I should mention, it should be maybe obvious at this point, all of the controls are ambidextrous.
This ejects out the bottom back here.
So very nice for compact quarters, great for left-handed people like me.
Your charging handle simply opens the bolt up back there.
It is non-reciprocating, so it stays forward when you're shooting, doesn't get in the way.
Disassembly is very easy. We have a big ol' button right here,
push that and you can pull the front assembly off the gun.
So this is the barrel, we have our charging handle.
This is the ... spring to reciprocate the charging handle.
And the optic mounted here, the optic is ... fixed to the barrel itself.
So you don't have any sort of zeroing issues as a result of disassembly.
We can then drop the bolt assembly out the front of the gun.
Dual recoil springs.
This is, like I said, a simple blowback gun.
So what keeps this locked is just the mass of this bolt.
It is also hammer fired, so there's our firing pin back here.
And with an eye towards the full-auto operation, FN included a bolt bounce.
They call this a rate of fire stabiliser.
What this extra little weight does is actually counteract bolt bounce.
So with an unlocked gun you have a hard metal part here,
and a hard metal part on the barrel, and when the bolt comes forward
and hits the barrel it has a tendency to bounce back slightly.
This can interrupt the rate of fire, it can also potentially cause malfunctions.
This happened on the M16 at one point during its development before it was remedied.
The issue being if the hammer is dropping just as the bolt bounces back out of battery
the hammer may not strike with enough force to set off the cartridge.
Or it might not hit the firing pin at all and causes a stoppage.
So this acts basically like a dead blow hammer.
Other than that, we don't really have anything fancy on here,
other than various contours to make it properly fit the gun.
So there's an extractor at the top.
There's a plunger ejector at the bottom, and that's pretty much it.
The rear tail on this guy holds the butt plate of the gun in.
So once the bolt is out we can slide the butt plate up and off.
There's a little hole that fits ... on there.
And then we have a fire control group here in the back.
This has a little lever in it, right there, lift that lever up against spring tension,
and we can pull the fire control group out.
This looks very much like a Steyr AUG fire control group.
It is all polymer, hammer fired right there.
So we have an auto-sear here, and then our actual trigger is this piece.
When I pull this backwards, it releases the hammer to go up.
So the way this works in the gun,
we have our trigger here,
which is connected to this looped metal rod,
which is going to come all the way back
there we go, you can just see it, the two ends right there.
Those two ends, there and there,
sit here and here in ... this part of the fire control group.
So ... at first the bolt has to go into battery, which trips that.
Then the hammer can be released when the trigger goes back.
So if you're in full-auto and you're just holding the trigger back,
what actually fires the gun is this, the auto-sear.
So the hammer is locked back until the bolt is back in battery,
at which point it trips the auto-sear, and lets the hammer up with the correct timing.
So that's how that all works.
And the rest of the frame here is basically just a polymer shell.
We've got a few moving bits like the safety and the trigger bits in there,
but the rest of this is just a whole series of screws that hold the two halves of this together.
Ultimately it would take 13 years before NATO actually held a trial on this RFP that they put out.
Largely, I think, because for a long time the P90 was the only firearm
that was submitted that met the criteria.
Of course the other contender that we are all familiar with today is H&K's MP7.
That came out in 2002, and it was in 2002 that NATO actually held trials
comparing the two guns head to head.
Ultimately they found, not surprisingly, the MP7's 4.6mm cartridge
was more effective at armour penetration.
FN's 5.7mm cartridge ... had better terminal effectiveness
after, or if it didn't have to, penetrate armour.
The test came down on the side of the P90, although not by a lot.
And the disagreement within the testing committee
resulted in nothing being formally officially adopted by NATO.
So what we have instead are widespread adoptions by generally smallish sorts of organisations
of both guns, but of course we're talking about the P90 here.
The P90 has been widely adopted by a lot of police forces. The US secret service uses it.
What's interesting to me is that it's a gun that was developed to arm truck drivers and supply clerks.
And there's only really one country that has used it for that purpose,
and that is Belgium where it was designed where they did buy them for exactly that reason.
Virtually everybody else, purchasers of the P90 have been either police departments,
or ... a military sense they've been special operations teams, small forces, highly trained.
... I find it really interesting, and I'm not entirely sure what judgement to make about this,
but I find it very interesting that they are purchasing ... guns
that are not intended to be front-line combat guns.
And I think of course that has a lot to do with the fact that they are handy,
they are controllable, they are very light to carry.
And there's something to be said about a burst firing, 50 round capacity, tiny submachine gun.
So, it's been very interesting to take a look at this mechanically.
I would love to do some shooting with it, so in fact we are going to do exactly that.
And tomorrow we are going to be taking this out on the range,
so that I can actually get some trigger time on it.
So join me again tomorrow for that.
A big thanks to Woody's Weapons and Sienna Armoury
for providing me access to this full-auto post-sample P90.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.