Just for the record I don’t know a lot about guns or hunting. This is just a thought experiment based on my experience with a hunting video game but now I’m curious if the concept could maybe be actually good.
So in “theHunter: Call of the Wild” there’s a revolver modeled after the Taurus Judge that’s chambered for .45 Colt as well as .410. It’s pretty interesting but not all that useful in practice since it lacks range and power. To my knowledge the actual Judge isn’t marketed as a hunting sidearm but rather as a self defense weapon.
So I got thinking how it could be improved upon and came up with what you see in the sketch. Kind of a bullpup design to give you more barrel length while retaining pocketability, weaver rail for sights, and a grip for better accuracy.
Would this just break and burn your hands or is there a way this could work? And would it even be an improvement? One drawback I’m seeing is that you couldn’t fire multiple shots in single action unless you fan it cowboy-style but I’m not sure how relevant that is for irl hunting. I feel like as long as the trigger isn’t impossibly hard to pull double action with birdshot could be viable for duck hunting and in most other scenarios you’d probably take one shot at a time anyway.
So yeah, thoughts?
The immediate issues I see are:
The bulpup arrangement gives it a moment arm that would bend your wrist rather than push into the palm of your hand on recoil.
Even if your wrist is fine, the hot gasses escaping the cylinder would be directed straight into your forefinger and thumb with every shot.
Finally, a break action or flip-out reload would now use space occupied by your hand around the grip. Not to mention a break would require the trigger and hammer mechanisms to be on opposite halves adding complexity and potential reliability issues.
Okay so what if it was designed to fire from the lower most cylinder and lower the barrel to change the way the recoil behaves. Maybe a pistol brace could help too but then that adds more length which counters the point of the bullpup
Then add a simple shield to deflect gasses from the user’s hand.
Figuring out bullpup triggers have always been tricky though
I am a hunter. Pistols suck for hunting in general, even as a sidearm.
A sidearm is only useful for defense against aggressive animals, and killing wounded or trapped game.
A pistol is just too weak and too hard to aim.
A modern hunting rifle can be both strong enough as a primary gun and short enough to use in underbrush, is much easier to aim, has more stopping power, more ammo capacity and is faster to fire than a pistol.A pistol is just too weak
Not to “ackshually” you but there are people who hunt deer and elk (and probably other large animals) with magnum revolvers. See the .460 S&W magnum which my uncle has taken many deer with using a revolver chambered in it
Weren’t all the Magnum rounds developed with hunting in mind?
Some people still hunt with bow and arrow, too. That doesn’t mean it’s a good hunting weapon compared to other options available today.
People do that as a challenge, to increase the difficulty in order to satisfy their own ego.
But it also increases the chance that the animal will be wounded instead of killed quickly, and will suffer unnecessarily.
IMO if you use anything but the best available tool for the job, you’re being irresponsible and showing that your own desire to brag or challenge yourself is more important to you than the animal’s suffering.Just to be clear, I am not advocating for hunting with handguns (magnum or otherwise). I was simply pointing out that people do it and that effective round exist for that purpose
Not to mention that the difference in length for a bullpup handgun is likely negligible, compared to a regular handgun. Contrast that with a rifle, where the action is far away from the shooter’s shoulder and could be moved much closer without needing to re-engineer the firing mechanisms much.
I think if you’re going to bullpup anything, and it must be a handgun caliber, you’re better served by bullpup-ing a PCC rather than a handgun.
A few years ago, a company called zenk made a bullpup revolver, in 357. No idea how well it sold, and haven’t heard anything since. Haven’t gone looking tbh.
The problem with a bullpup design on revolver is the cylinder gap. That’s not something you want blowing hot gasses right at your hand. I don’t doubt that it’s possible to mitigate that to some degree or another, but afaik, you can’t eliminate it because the cylinder has to rotate, and that requires some kind of gap.
No reason it couldn’t be double action afaik, but that afaik is from someone with zero gunsmith ability. Never learned anything more than what it takes to maintain a firearm.
But the zenk wasn’t the first attempt ever. There have been a few attempts going back into the 1800s.
My thought is that at handgun ranges, the extra barrel length isn’t exactly a high priority, and that’s really all a bullpup design brings to the table (again, afaik, and that ain’t far).
Any hunting situation you’d use a handgun, you don’t need that long of a barrel to get the job done with reasonable accuracy and velocity. If you’re finishing a game animal that didn’t die from your initial shot, well, you’re right there at it. If you run across a critter that wants to mess with you, and you’re needing to shoot it, you want speed more than anything else because if it’s that close, you don’t want to fuck around. So the bullpup design isn’t going to help in that scenario compared to a more standard wheelgun design.
Again, I’m not exactly a smith, and I’ve never been super into hunting beyond having enough time at it to have basic skills. But I’ve been fireside at many a rambling debate about such things as a handgun backup in the woods. General consensus qas always that it’s a damn good idea, and you want to pick something that can handle what you might actually need to use it on, but that’s where agreements tended to devolve into “horseshit, Dink, you’d want a insert firearm, not that damn hogleg” or something similar.
Point being that while you could make any given design work for a hunting sidearm, it’s more about being able to get it pointed at the target fast and not needing to empty the damn thing you prevent sasquatch from shitting down your neck.
Realistically, you’d want to gear up for bear, maybe a mountain lion or coyote. I’ve never heard of anything else (other than humans) going after a human’s kill. Even those, it’s damn rare overall.
As for actual pistol/handgun hunting, that’s a fairly specialized hobby. I don’t see many enthusiasts jumping on board to an unproven design, but you might find plenty that would range test to get things going.
Again, I’m a filthy casual when it comes to hunting, so take all that with a grain of salt. Hell, I haven’t hunted anything other than a toilet in damn near twenty years, and don’t expect to ever need to again. Sp make it a really big grain of salt
The Zenk RZMk-357?
A bullpup revolver is a cursed idea for several reasons (that could maybe be iterated & worked through, but no major manufacturer has)
My first thought is immediately “why would someone want to use a revolver for hunting?”
You mentioned pocketability, but if you’re hunting you would want your weapon in hand already, and preferably a long gun for better accuracy.
Handgun hunting is actually a thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handgun_hunting
Not a very common thing, but it happens. Hell, if supply lines broke down enough that I was starving, I totally would never take a .22lr with a can hidden in my jacket to scare up a few squirrels or rabbits to eat because that would be illegal in my area…
But yeah people just use regular (and sometimes long barreled) wheel/semi handguns for that, there’s a reason the revolver’s form factor hasn’t really changed much in like ~150yr or however long.
Depends on where you are and what you are worried about. Coming across a bear or mountain lion in a concealed close quarters area is what scares me. I have had that happen with a bear in a thicket. I was very lucky it ran when spooked because I only had a useless .22 on me. Later that day, a buddy let me shoot his .454. That is what I want for a side arm with a bear. I would have been lucky to draw and get one or two shots before it got to me. I want the biggest meanest slug of a bullet in that situation. For a rifle, I only really care about a solid bolt action. A small magazine is nice to know I have, but I am not taking bad shots. With a handgun, I want as many shots as I can hold reliably. I have no nostalgia for revolvers.
Machining is fun, but something like a gun takes a lot of skills and time invested.
Looks like other have covered the issues with a bull pup revolver well enough, don’t think I have anything to add there
Handgun hunting is a thing, I don’t really understand the appeal myself, but AFAIK .45 colt is a reasonably popular choice in that field, and with the right ammo and a reasonably short range can even be used for bear
.410 out of a revolver is probably pretty useless for hunting though. Since the barrel is rifled, that shot is going to start spinning and make it spread out a lot faster and farther than out of a smoothbore barrel, you don’t have that much shot in a .410 shell to begin with so there’s gonna be a whole lot of space between them when it gets to your target. You’re gonna need a big target at close range and a lot of luck to make sure that shot is hitting somewhere vital, and at that point you’re probably better off trying to hit it with a regular rifle or handgun.
Sure, if you’re hunting for whabbits.
Great breakdowns in the comments already.
One thing I’m not hearing as a problem from others: ergonomics. From your design, that hammer looks all but impossible to cock one handed. Someone mentioned it could be double action, but its been my experience that firing single action (even with double action revolvers) is just better for accuracy and recoil handling.
That said, I don’t do a lot of revolvers, so I may be misjudging how viable this is on that single point.
Still, it kinda looks cool in a retro-steampunk kinda way. I doubt it’d have the utility for real world use, but I’m sure someone would buy it for “cool gun” reasons (read as the worst reason I expect we’ve all suffered from).
