Author: Grumpy
Oh, boy, was the Cold War a wild time! Man, the early development of Special Operations forces led to some truly weird developments. SEALs and Spetznaz troopers, in particular, proved that a small team of seaborne commandos could be hell on Naval infrastructure. As such, these seaborne commandos would need specialized weaponry to fight like legitimate frogmen. This led to the development of the underwater firearm concept.
Underwater firearm? Are you serious?
As a heart attack. In the 1970s, there was a vision of teams of frogmen fighting each other underwater as if a Mack Bolan novel came to life. If it were to come true, normal firearms wouldn’t do the trick in frogmen firefights. So, militaries had to develop an underwater firearm, or at least come up with some underwater knife fighting techniques.
So they developed a few different variants of the underwater firearm idea, and I’ve gathered them here today. Plenty of ideas might have been patented, but I only include the underwater firearms that were developed and actually produced. Here are the five we know about. Who knows what others state governments have kept as a secret.
Related: The strangest Spec-Ops firearms in SOCOM’s armory
Mk1 Underwater Defense Gun
The development of the first underwater firearm comes from the United States in the form of the Mk1 Underwater Defense Gun. The Mk1 entered service in 1970, and the Naval Special Warfare center desired to keep it as secret as possible. It became a sign-out-only weapon that required troops to do paperwork to take the weapon out of the armory.
The Mk1 utilized a pepperbox style design, and this means you have individual barrels that rotate and fire. The double-action trigger rotated the cylinder and fired the weapon. As an underwater firearm, the weapon couldn’t use standard ammunition. In place of your normal projectile, they used metal darts.
These 4.25-inch tungsten metal darts had four fins to ensure rotation and looked like a miniature arrow. The effective range of the weapon was only 10 meters, and the darts moved at about 730 feet per second.
Related: Before the Navy SEALs came the Underwater Demolition Teams
HK P11
The Mk1’s replacement came in 1976, and the German firm Heckler and Koch created it. The P11 offered NATO shooters from a variety of nations their first underwater firearm, despite being old hat for the United States by then. The P11 used a five-shot pepperbox design, and each barrel held a 7.62x36mm dart.
Each barrel is completely sealed, and when fired, the seal is broken. All five barrels form a cluster, and clusters can be reloaded by the factory or discarded entirely in combat. The 7.62x36mm darts featured a 15-meter effective range, which outperformed the older Mk1 by a full third.
The P11 used an electric firing system with a battery located in the pistol grip of the gun. It’s a truly fascinating weapon that might still be in service with NATO frogmen today.
Related: How the Navy SEALs’ forefathers came of age in Korea
SPP-1
The SPP-1 came out of Russia and represented The Russian entry into the world of underwater firearms. This four-shot, pepperbox-style pistol fired a .18mm dart that was roughly 4.5 inches long. This big double action only pistol started its service in 1975 and apparently remains in service to this day.
The SPP-1 shows some Russian ingenuity, as the weapon is much less bulky than western variants of the underwater firearm. The SPP-1 launched darts at about 790 feet per second and had an effective range of 17 meters or so. The Russian pistol seems to outperform the Western models, but it’s tough to say since the ballistic measurements are tough to calculate underwater, and Moscow’s reputation for offering up legitimate performance data on their weapons isn’t particularly good.
Does the larger dart size of the Western P11 outperform the smaller dart of the SPP-1? Tough to say without some serious testing underwater.
Related: 3 more things movies always get wrong about a fight
APS Amphibious Rifle
The Russians didn’t stop with the SPP-1. They also wanted an underwater rifle, and the man who designed the SPP-1 would go on to design the APS Amphibious rifle as well. The APS offered a rifle-sized platform, but it’s technically not a rifle, since the barrel isn’t rifled. I guess the term long gun probably describes it best.
Regardless of nomenclature, the APS Amphibious rifle offered an effective range of 30 meters. That’s a fair bit more than the pistols offered by on either side of the Iron Curtain. Plus, the weapon used a specialized magazine that allowed the APS to hold 26 rounds of the special underwater projectiles.
The weapon fired a 5.66mm steel dart and could fire in fully automatic. The downside to a rifle like this, however, comes from its size. Its bigger, heavier design makes it harder to maneuver underwater, especially with its large and awkward magazine.
Related: Quiet Special Purpose Revolver: The tunnel rat’s lost sidearm
ADS Amphibious Rifle
The ADS Amphibious rifle is the evolution of the APS. Unlike the APS, the ADS actaully is a rifle, as it utilizes a rifled bore. The ADS came to be because the APS worked well underwater, but sucked above the surface. The options were to carry two guns (and that must’ve been a pain when dealing when swimming, dealing with all your scuba gear, and fighting) or to create a new platform that could function in either medium.
The ADS promised to do both very simply, with users having to simply swap magazines as they went from above the surface to below or vice versa. Below water, the ADS used a 5.45x39mm PSP round. Above water, the weapon uses standard 5.45x39mm ammunition. The range underwater was roughly 25 meters and the weapon offered select-fire operation.
The ADS Amphibious rifle uses a bullpup design. This mitigates length and size and makes the weapon easier to use underwater, and those benefits translate well above water as well. The ADS came to be in 2013 and shows that the Russians remained very concerned with frogmen firefights right into the 21st century.
Related: Is the service rifle of the future a bullpup?
The threat of the Underwater Firearm
The underwater firearm doesn’t necessarily kill by penetrating deeply into a guy’s chest. Sure it can, but it seems like the real advantage in frogmen firefights would be targeting gear. Ripping apart masks, breathing tubes and harnesses, protective wetsuits, helmets, and targeting the thin, often plastic windows of mini-subs are all ways these weapons could render swimmers combat ineffective with quickness and ease.
Has one of these frogmen firefights ever actually happened? If so, it’s not documented or discussed freely. However, the idea fascinates me. An underwater firearm seems a little silly these days, but they’ve clearly stuck around for quite some time, and that means the nations that operate these platforms must see a good reason.
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The Kentucky Rifle
For the full story on the Walther Arms PDP F-Series, see Walther PDP F-Series: A Win For Women.
The Walther PDP F-Series is a 9 mm duty pistol intended for serious use—competition, personal protection, law enforcement—for women, and it has well-thought-out features and ergonomics intended to meet their needs. So, how did Walther approach it? In short, with input from serious women shooters and engineers at every step of the development and design process.
Setting out to adapt its Performance Duty Pistol (PDP) to female shooters resulted in Walther creating a completely new frame. Although it has the lines of the PDP, especially through the slide, the rear of the F-Series frame is completely different, dimensionally, in its trigger reach and even in its striker-fired operation. This isn’t just a new backstrap and a marketing campaign—it’s a new gun.
With the PDP, Walther created one of the top (and most accurate) duty handguns made anywhere by anyone. You can read about what Field Editor Justin Dyal thought in “Best In Class? Walther’s New PDP”, and you can look up the two NRA Golden Bullseye awards it has notched. So, Walther wisely started with that solid foundation and kept the PDP Compact’s excellent 15-round magazine as well.
When asked about what makes the F-Series different, Carl Walther GmbH President and CEO Bernhard Knöbel said, “Number one is the trigger reach. Circumference is important, but shape is more important. It has a grip that has a little bit of a humpback that forces the female hand into the frame and closes the gap underneath. That makes the biggest difference, I think. Then there’s ‘rackability’ of the slide. From shooters who handle the F-Series for the first time, you hear, ‘Wow.’ That’s the biggest compliment you can get.”
Those not in the competition-shooting arena might not know that Walther builds target handguns, such as the GSP used in Olympic rapid fire, as well as LP500 airguns used at a very high level. Each of those guns must be custom-fitted, so Walther measures the hands of each shooter and builds them one at a time. It developed a database of thousands of women’s hands that aided in the creation of the F-Series. But the company also received input from some of the top women shooters and trainers in the United States, including Gabby Franco and Tatiana Whitlock. The latter told me how modified frames were shipped back and forth between here and Germany. Material was added or removed each time to get the frame dimensions just right. It’s north of $100,000 to have a new frame mold created. That, ladies and gentlemen, is called an investment.
So how did they do it? Walther concentrated on three areas. The first was trigger reach, followed by contouring the grip to better fit the smaller—and not as wide—hands of most women, and finally, as Knöbel called it, “rackability,”
Compared to a standard PDP (r.), the F-Series has had its grip circumference reduced a full inch, although there is more material at the beavertail. The sides are thinner throughout. The trigger blade has been moved rearward more than 1/4″. In addition to its ergonomic considerations, the PDP F-Series features mechanical changes, including an all-new, two-piece striker assembly that aids in reducing cocking effort by at least 20 percent.
Compared to a PDP Compact, the circumference of the F-Series grip was reduced from 7 7⁄8″ to 6 7⁄8″. Gone are the subtle swells for the fingers of the PDP—jettisoned to get the grip more svelte. The sides of the frame were slimmed from 1.187″ to 1.151″. Also, the beavertail of the grip frame was re-designed to better fit female hands. It has more material because women’s hands, typically, aren’t as bulky at the web. This allow a woman’s hand to get a proper high grip, keeping the gun anchored. The difference might seem mathematically small, but when combined with reduced trigger distance, it is like night and day. By reducing the frame’s fore-and-aft dimension, it allows smaller-handed shooters to better reach the reversible magazine release on the grip frame, too.
The F-Series employs a new two-piece striker design, differing from the original PDP and providing a factory-stated 20 percent reduction in force required to rack the slide. My own measurements averaged a 22 percent reduction compared to a standard PDP Compact. There was also a noticeable difference between the two guns when it came to depressing the bilateral 2″-long slide locks, with the F-Series being decidedly easier to release. This is still a recoil-operated gun, one that digested 400 rounds through two different models, but the amount of effort required to rack the slide and release the slide lock is greatly reduced by not having to overcome the weight of the striker spring as part of the cocking cycle.
The trigger’s shape was re-designed and moved backward 0.29″ where the finger engages its face. It pivots at the same point as the PDP, but has been re-contoured to be easier to reach with small hands. It has a blade safety in its front face, and it broke crisply at a 4-lb., 12-oz., average with a short positive reset. A coil trigger-return spring moves the trigger back into firing position with a positive click. Depressing the trigger moves the trigger bar in the frame’s inside right side, pushing up a tab to clear the passive firing pin safety then releasing the striker to go forward and strike the primer of a chambered round.
The optics-ready F-Series has six deep serrations cut in the slide called “SuperTerrain” by Walther. While the grip has been completely reworked, the front of the frame is fully compatible with PDP holsters. Sights are a fully adjustable rear with a replaceable post front.
Barrel lengths are either 4″ or 3.5″, and the former was used for accuracy testing. The steel guide rod is surrounded by dual recoil springs on the 3.5″, while a flat-wire coil spring is used on the 4″.
When it comes to the metal parts, particularly the slide and barrel, they are machined on CNC machines by Walther in Ulm, Germany, Tenifer-treated and then blued over the Tenifer.
Some commented that the F-Series guns, like all PDPs, are visually top-heavy. In the hand, it does not feel so. That is due to the three, deep cocking serrations on the slide’s rear and three forward of the ejection port, called “SuperTerrain” by Walther. They are 0.196″ wide, taper downward, are well radiused and are very effective in gripping the slide. Those serrations extend up into the cover plate for the mounting of an MRD with Walther’s Gen2 optics cut. One plate of the owner’s choice will be supplied via after-purchase voucher.
Although the slides and barrels are machined in Germany, the gun is assembled with the remaining U.S.-made parts at Walther Arms in Fort Smith, Ark.—on a line next to where the PPK and PPK/S are made. In fact, the idea for the F-Series began in Fort Smith—welcome news, no doubt, to the estimated 40 percent of new shooters who are women.
When I visited Carl Walther in Germany last year, I was made aware of the commitment Walther made, under the leadership of Knöbel, to develop a new pistol that really was designed for women. I think Walther on both sides of the Atlantic succeeded. That said, my man card may be in jeopardy as I am neither a woman, nor do I have particularly small hands, but I found myself preferring the F-Series to the PDP Compact in the hand, with only the shortened trigger reach requiring some adjustment. I have no idea what that says about me. And I’m not alone. One decidedly male, 280-lb. staffer liked the F-Series so much that he bought one—for himself. Question his masculinity at your own peril.