Hi guys, thanks for tuning into another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today, thanks to the
generosity of the French Ministry of the Interior,
we have a pair of super-rare prototype
FAMAS Commandos to take a look at.
The FAMAS was never actually issued in a
short-barrelled variant, and it's rather unusual among military bullpup rifles in that regard.
The L85 they made a short-barrelled version, the Steyr AUG they made a short-barrelled version,
the FAMAS they never did, except for prototypes like these.
So the idea of most bullpup rifles was to combine the functionality of
the infantry rifle and the submachine gun in a single package.
And the hope, the intention, was that you'd end up with a gun that had
the ballistic capabilities of the rifle but in a submachine gun size.
And if you do that right, you have a gun that's the same size as your submachine gun,
therefore you don't need to make something shorter, because the submachine gun was short enough.
Now for the French that was true. They were perfectly happy with the FAMAS in its standard length.
However, they did go ahead and offer, Saint-Étienne which became GIAT,
offered these guns for international ... military and security sale.
And so they introduced a bunch of other variations on them to try and encourage sales.
And one of those was to cut the thing down.
So what we have here are two different versions of the gun with about an 11.25 inch barrel,
plus a little bit of a flash hider. That's like a 285mm barrel.
Not quite half, but close to half the length of a standard FAMAS barrel.
So, we're going to take a quick look at these up close, because not only are they prototype short-barrel versions,
they are also G2 versions, meaning that they feed from AR-15 magazines.
So here is our experimental short-barrelled rifle compared to a standard (or mostly standard,
this is actually also a prototype but it has a standard configuration to it), a standard G2 rifle.
So the standard G2 had a barrel length of just under 19 inches,
you can see that it is substantially longer than this guy.
And in order to make the gun this short, they also had to cut the ... upper and lower hand guards down.
They got rid of the bipod legs because of course with a little submachine gun style version like this
you don't need a bipod on it. There's no benefit to that, and there's no room for it either.
So, being prototypes they're experimenting with more than just barrel length.
You can see two different configurations of hand guards here.
This is basically the standard G2 style, open so that you can operate it with mittens.
And then it has a hand stop here at the front. So you would hold this like that,
and that'll protect your hand, keep you from getting your hand in front of the muzzle.
This guy is the exact same barrel length. A slightly different design of the upper handguard here
because instead of having a hand stock, they built a vertical front grip into this one.
So you still have the whole handguard to use this with mittens, but now you've got a vertical grip instead of a horizontal one.
In addition, there are some interesting experimentation going on with these rifles in regards to their sights.
So this one has basically a standard FAMAS rear sight with a couple of apertures that you can open and close.
A precision aperture there and the larger kind of standard aperture.
And you can open them ... both up for a ghost ring, but then they have
instead of the standard narrow blade, they have a ringed front post here that you would line up.
So this makes for a faster, if somewhat less precise, sight picture than a standard rifle.
But the exact sort of thing that you would have for a submachine gun style of weapon.
This one, however, has a totally different style of sight.
On this one you've got just a shallow V ramp for a rear sight,
and just a really fragile looking peg for a front sight.
So that gives this interesting sight picture.
It's actually better than I expected it would be when I first took a look at it.
I'm not sure it's my preference, it's a little tricky
to get a good quick sight picture. ... This pin and the notch back here kind of tend to blend together.
I think my preference would be for a sort of the ghost ring style, like we've got on this one.
Gives you a sight picture like that.
This is kind of what that sight picture actually looks like to the human eye instead of the camera.
... That's not quite what it looks like from where the camera is,
but I think I'd prefer this style to the more open one.
A quick look at the markings here. This has a standard G2 marking, except it has an A series serial number.
The standard G2s were M prefix, and the As indicate prototype rifles or special production rifles,
where M was the Navy contract.
So this is the 408th they made. It was less than 1,000, ... it was 700 or 800 A series rifles.
And those would comprise all different configurations. Some very short prototypes like this,
some going out the other direction to sniper long-barrelled versions, and everything in between.
Now the one mechanically interesting difference between this and the standard G2
is that the bolt carrier has been lightened. And this was done on both of these short-barrelled prototypes.
And the reason for this is that the shorter barrel actually robs some energy from the system.
Because the bullet is not achieving as high of a velocity and it's leaving the barrel quicker,
you have less gas pressure and less time that that gas pressure is acting on the bolt.
And because this is a delayed blowback system, that has a direct impact on the gun's ability to function.
So if we push this pin we can pull off
the buttstock.
And then we can
pop this out.
So here is our short-barrelled bolt carrier, and here is a standard bolt carrier assembly.
So they actually took out a fair amount of material there.
So these were never, as I said, sold commercially. They tried, but they didn't ever get any contracts for them.
They were never issued by the French military. And these are a couple of the few existing prototypes.
So it's pretty cool to take a look at them and see things like
the different versions of sights that they were experimenting with and that sort of thing.
It'd be super-cool to have one, but the next best thing
is being able to take a look at it here today, bring it to you guys.
A big thanks to the Ministry of the Interior for the opportunity. Hopefully you enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.
[ sub by sk cn2 ]