Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at HK's Grey Room in Ashburn, Virginia
taking a look at some of their interesting prototype pistols.
And today we're taking a look at the HK,
well, they would call this the P7A13, or the XM9.
Now XM9 was a pistol trial
and so there were a bunch of potential XM9 pistols,
and this was HK's entry into the competition.
This series of trials actually began in, like, 1977.
And for that first round of trials HK actually submitted two pistols.
And this was, I should say, trials for the US military to adopt a new 9mm pistol to replace the 1911.
So 9mm pistol, HK in 1977, they actually entered two guns,
they entered their P9S and they entered their VP70, both of which failed.
If for no other reason than they simply didn't meet the requirements.
The guns had to have a 10 round magazine capacity, which the P9 didn't.
And the VP70 for fairly obvious reasons failed the accuracy tests because as a
... semi-automatic handgun, it has a just truly atrocious trigger
Now nothing ended up being really viewed as completely successful in that early testing,
and so there were two later ... iterations of the testing program that were done under the name now XM9.
So HK started developing this in 1981,
and for the first series of XM9 trials what they submitted was actually the P7A10.
That was basically a standard P7 pistol with a couple of changes to meet the technical requirements of the trial.
For one thing it had to have a 10 round magazine capacity and the P7 had an eight round mag.
So they extended the magazine well below the grip panels, and they gave it an extended 10 round single stack magazine.
And then the guns also had to have a high mounted magazine release.
The P7 had a heel mounted European-style release, so HK actually...
Well, with their A10s, that still had the heel release and they just submitted it that way.
After this trial also came back without any suitable guns there was a third series of testing held. And in that one
given the additional development time, (by this point we are at like 1983-84),
HK had been able to develop their gun a little further.
So instead of having this magazine well extension, now they had a widened frame
and they actually had a 13 round double stack magazine with the gun.
In addition they had developed a magazine release lever that sat right behind the trigger guard.
So nice and up high where we would expect a magazine button.
And I have here one of the prototype trials XM9s, so let's take a look at that.
HK ended up making a total of just over 30 pistols for this whole trials program.
And their serial numbers range from 27,841 through to 27,873.
And we can see that this one falls right at the very beginning of that number range.
Note that this is the zip code of their Arlington office, not a serial number. That's the serial number over there.
Now we also have an XM9 mark on the right hand grip panel. Note that instead of the normal sort of textured stippling,
these grip panels have horizontal ridges in them. This is the only time HK would do that for a P7 grip.
Flip it over to the other side, we have the designation P7A13, and 13 indicates the magazine capacity.
"A", I presume, would be army.
As for the other features, what's really interesting is that it is in fact the US Army procurement trials
that led to all of the new features that would be released commercially as the P7M13.
So the magazine release moved from the heel up to this lever.
Pop that, it pops the magazine out. Not a button,
presumably when the Army wrote the requirements for the pistol they were anticipating a button,
but what they specified was that it had to be a high mounted ambidextrous magazine release.
And HK's solution meets those requirements just fine, and is an interesting development,
an interesting different idea than just a push button.
So that was introduced. The heatshield, the little plastic heat guard here at the top of the trigger guard,
was introduced for the XM9 trials.
As was the double stack ... widened magazine well.
So what we have here is a standard commercial M13 and it is mechanically, in every other way,
identical to this XM9. But not because HK submitted the M13 to the trials, rather
they developed this gun for army trials. And when it failed to win army trials
they then released it commercially, where it proved to be a reasonably successful pistol.
Ultimately, of course, this wouldn't be accepted as the new US military pistol.
That would go to the Beretta M92 which was adopted as the M9 pistol.
... Ultimately it really didn't matter in hindsight how good the P7 was in any of the testing.
It didn't matter if it passed everything absolutely perfectly, because this was too expensive of a pistol to actually end up being chosen.
To put it in context, in 1984 the Beretta cost on their M9 pistol was $178.50 to the Army.
Well, two years later in '86 the dealer pricing on a P7M13, basically exactly identical to this gun, was $499.
So HK would have had to find a way to reduce their prices by more than like 60 percent
in order to actually be competitive for this trial.
Because military arms trials are not about strictly quality of the guns,
they're about a balance of quality and cost and logistics.
And doesn't matter if the gun's the greatest thing ever, if it's that much more expensive
than something else that is deemed perfectly adequate, it's not going to win.
And so that was the end of HK's P7 design in American military testing.
Thanks to HK for allowing me access to their XM9 trials pistol to show to you. Hopefully you enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.