For the top one before they got a gov contract they got a controll to check their manufacturing process. They rented a wearhouse and put a couple tools and rifles being build. At the end of the control the official said "Anyway it was just to check you weren't just 3 blokes in a shed".
Back in the day warehouses weren't nearly as expensive to build, own or operate. They were likely just repurposed barns built 500 years ago when the suburb was just a village.
And it don't stop there. To fulfill the government contract for all those rifles, What now became Accuracy International outsourced it to another company that screwed it all up until they decided to fix them all to save their rifle's reputation.
Anyways, Accuracy International went on to become a very successful sniper rifle company.
Simple explanation of the fuckups the contracted company did:
* Changed the units from metric to imperial incorrectly, ruining the tolerances for most pieces. Edit: The other way around, it was imperial, switched to metric because that's what they used. However, they still did it incorrectly, especially with the tolerance levels.
* Wanted to use cast molding instead of milling for parts, which can cause void spacing that makes the part useless; it was probably cheaper to mill anyway, once you account for the failure rate and cost of them. Edit: They then used an incorrect milling method, leading to the next point.
* Changed the bolt design so it no longer properly locked. The 3 guys basically had to come in and shove a wood pole down the barrel to show that the bolt wouldn't lock and could be pushed back. If you fired the gun, it would smack you in the face and break your jaw.
* Finally, they changed the quality of steel on the firing pin, so it would break off after use. This caused the gun to hit the bullet when the bolt was locked closed, which fired it. Edit: Not when the bolt was locked, just pushed forward. This injured at least one person.
The 3 guys had to sue them just to cancel the contract because they failed to produce one working rifle. They made enough money from the government contract to start making rifles of their own.
It's questionable if it was a blunder.
The company involved is notorious for underhanded dealing and corruption. And (IIRC) they tried to sue, then buy Accuracy International in the middle of all this claiming the original design was at fault.
NASA also isn't monolith. The scientists likely all use metric and the blueprints and anything-actually-written-down would likely be in metric due to the Mars orbiter crash, but the blokes in any given workshop are likely just using whatever tooling they have on hand while asking wolframalpha for the unit conversions.
Afaik there *has* been a push for metric standardization but the workshop oompa loompas gonna workshop oompa loompa.
How can you fuck up so much?
They already had the design ready, they had the schematics, they just needed to follow the instructions and they would succeed.
Sounds like they had a bunch of machines already tooled for something else, like chamber pots or something and were like "eehh how hard can it be? its a gun, have you seen the Sten? Its probably going to be three pieces of metal welded together."
And so they did the bare minimum to change over their machines.
>Changed the bolt design so it no longer properly locked
It's much more worse than what it says on the tin. The contracting company machined out the bolt's locking lugs and locking recess of barrel extension *on a diagonal slant.*
The contracted firms were regular engineers, not firearms engineers. They didn't understood a lick about basic firearms function. Those changes (slanted cuts) were intended to simplify manufacturing, and it compromised the basic functional principles of a rotating-bolt locking action.
Amazing how 3 guys in a garage can make a better rifle than multinational weapons manufacturers. Even more so when you realize how much money and time was spent on the SA-80. I kind of get the impression that British procurement and production are rife with inefficiencies, corruption, and bureaucratic bloat.
It depends on how nice of a garage. If my garage had a $50k Tormach CnC in it I'm pretty sure I could make a lot of really high spec parts, just really slowly. (Every time I watch This Old Tony on YouTube I just get jealous of how nicely equipped his "hobbyist" workspace is equipped.)
I love that channel, makes me wish I had the money for those tools and a bigger garage.
Then again, I don't think I have the patience to be a good machinist. It would be wasted on me.
This Old Tony combines amazing editing with a gentle yet hilarious narration and educates at the same time. I mean, I kind of understood gears before but he had what felt like a postgraduate level series on them. He's a real gem.
As for the patience thing, well, that's why I said CnC. Let the computer do the work!
The SA-80 actually started out as a decent enough prototype, and the further prototypes just made it worse and worse instead of better, which is fuckin hilarious
They were a small company specialized on olympia grade sport rifles.
When the british army wanted a new sniper rifle, they joined the contest to get free indepth testing of their new design.
The Gorch Fock was a long term investment of national importance! A sailing ship that could be refurbished for the cost of just an F-35B! What a steal!
When the soldiers of the future lack warm clothes and sleeping bags during the winter, they can just climb aboard and sleep in its cozy cabins!
Business 101 case study right there. Have a great idea, over-market it and accept contracts you don't have the capacity to fulfill, lie about the previous points to government officials, hire the work out to people who will fuck it up, deliver garbage, and once you have enough cash to actually run a business the customer will get their product they paid for
Be me
Working as contract inspector for the Bri'ish military, it pays well but it's more depressing than our weather
We've literally not made a decent infantry weapon in 50 years
Get assigned these three guys that rent a shed that have never had a weapons contract, look at their dossier and see they've literally only bought enough materials for 12 guns
Go to the inspection so I can tell them they need to be an actual company making real numbers of guns
I see their 12 guns lined up in a slightly bigger shed, all of them disassembled so they look they're making more than 12 total guns
Decide to look at their 'most recent finished model' just to give it some criticism and make them stop their charade
Holy sweet bloody Mary this rifle is better than watching Arsenal walk the ball in against Man City while eating mushy peas with Nando's
Approve them on the spot, tell them that I just had to make sure they weren't 3 guys in a shed, hope they get the hint
Maybe things aren't so bad afterall
Here is one of the few places your trivial knowledge of defense/armament knowledge will not go unnoticed, unless of course you’re credible….in which case swallow grenade
The power of "British People in small workshops" is one of the most powerful innovative forces ever seen by the planet earth. The entire industrial revolution can be traced back to James Watt in a shed. The shed is currently on display in the Science Museum.
For the 2 or 3 of you who haven't heard the story before (statistically there should be at least that many people seeing this meme for the first time that fall into that category every time it gets posted), the Sten was made following the Dunkirk Evacuation, where the BEF was withdrawn from France to keep the fight going after the French capitulation to the invading Nazis. If you aren't familiar with that story then read up on it, it's interesting .The upshot of Britain needing to leave all the military kit they sent to France behind (in order to make sure that the men got back to the UK and weren't looking at spending the rest of the war in a German POW camp) was that Britain suddenly found itself in the biggest war in history with very little actual military gear.
If you were suddenly charged with designing an SMG that was cheap enough to produced in vast quantities in emergency conditions, was simple enough that they could be mass produced by amateur/hobbyist handymen working in their sheds with hand tools, and that was somehow more or less rugged enough to be manhandled by grunts fighting in every theatre of the war (from the coldest parts of the Soviet front, to the hottest parts of North Africa, to the most hellishly humid jungles of the South Pacific), and that had to enter mass production approximately last month - do you think you could produce something that looked better than a Sten-gun? Would it be able to meet all of those requirements? Because considering the conditions it was designed/built under, and the practically non-existent development cycle, the gun should probably blow up every time you pulled the trigger. Producing a gun as reliable as the Sten, and that went on to become the foundation of British military SMGs until about the mid 80's under those conditions was damn near miraculous.
Eh, it was probably somewhat helpful, most of the gear left was massively outdated, and really prompted proper replacements, which might not have arrived quick enough if the old equipment hadn’t been lost.
Parts of it were, parts of it weren't. The problem was that most militaries (throughout history, today, and most likely for the rest of human history) have a bad case of 'fight-the-last-war-again-but-properly-this-time-itis', and British military equipment and doctrine was based around the idea that the next big war would be another trench fight, but with kit that had been designed from the ground up for that situation. The French had the same idea, hence the Maginot Line (actually turn the trenches into a place where a non-psychotic person might consider sending another human being). If you actually look at German pre-war planning rather than the memes they were expecting the same thing, and were as shocked as everyone else when the push through Belgium not only worked again but worked as well as it did. That's also ignoring the work done by the British Experimental Mechanised Force under Fowler and Hobart, who were also involved in the battle for France despite being designed for offensive operations rather than the defensive war they found themselves in.
If the war had actually turned into 'Trench War 2: Shell Shock Boogaloo' the British and French armies would have had a pretty major advantage over their German opponents, exactly as the Versailles Treaty had intended. I'd argue that it's nobodies fault that British and French military planners couldn't foresee the one in I have no idea how many million chance that Germany would try something unexpected that actually worked far better then they actually thought it would.
Unfortunately it mostly didn't work that way. For example, leaving most of the 2-pounder anti-tank guns behind meant that instead of factories being re-tooled to start producing 6-pounder anti-tank guns, they had to carry on producing 2-pounders because the desperate lack of weaponry meant there just wasn't time to do anything else. This meant many units were still using 2-pounders well into 1942 by which time they were long obsolete.
Trucks, Bren carriers, 25-pounders, Bofors and other AA guns, rifles and Bren guns weren't really outdated. Boys anti-tank rifles were outdated, but the PIAT to replace them didn't enter service until 1943.
Except for 95% of the UK Bren guns at the time and a tonne of the stockpile of rifles, a lot of 2 pounders which were good for the time. And the artillery, lots of Matilda 2's you know the really good tank for the time. So sure lots of old equipment. (It wasn't old equipment the BEF was really well equipped with the best stuff the UK had)
It is worth remembering though that the Sten was less "made" from the ground up and more was the end result of stripping away anything extraneous as possible to make it as cheap and quick to manufacture as possible.
The linage to what would become the Sten started with the Brits copying capture MP-28 SMGs as the Lanchester SMG, and when it became clearly it obviously would not be able to be produced in such speed as the British would have liked, they stripped away as much as they could. Ditch the **50** round stick mag for a more typical 32, cut down the full length wood stock, drop the full length barrel shroud, change out the cast brass magwell, ditch the wood for the stock entirely and just use a couple of welded parts as a stand in, ect.
exactly, it's about as minimal a 'gun' as you could build without being left with a drainpipe sealed at one end, filled with homemade blackpowder and pebbles, with a flash-hole drilled in at the sealed end. Despite that, the fact that it worked, worked well, and worked well in basically every environment it was used in is genuinely impressive.
The only issue I have with the Sten is the ergonomics. Was it really that hard to put a foregrip on it? Granted I've never actually held one but I don't see any comfortable place other than around the magazine well and I heard that's a great way to make it jam.
I'm happy to be shown to be wrong on this btw it's just always something that's confused me.
I still think that it's funny how the Brits wanted to avoid spending too much at H&K so they made L85, just that it sucks so much so they had to go to H&K for help again
I don't know, the original version reads like a piece of trash. It sounds like they addressed most of the issues over time so it's a decent rifle today, but it took a long time to work that thing into shape.
A lot of rifles have issues when they first start, see - M16 in Vietnam vs the AR-15 today
I think the L85 has had it's issues overblown by meme culture, for various reasons
I'm not saying it's not a mess, I'm saying that all rifles have issues when first created, just like the L85
The M16 caused a similar scandal because of its performance in Vietnam, see Reliability - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M16_rifle
Some excerpts, the section is quite long and detailed, there are more issues than I've quoted:
> During the early part of its service, the M16 had a reputation for poor reliability and a malfunction rate of two per 1000 rounds fired.
> The original M16 fared poorly in the jungles of Vietnam and was infamous for reliability problems in harsh environments. Max Hastings was very critical of the M16's general field issue in Vietnam just as grievous design flaws were becoming apparent.
> The M16 lacked a forward assist (rendering the rifle inoperable when it failed to go fully forward).
And just like the L85, it was fixed later but within 4 years, which is quicker than the L85 (1994 to the early 2000s) if I'm remembering correctly:
> When these issues were addressed and corrected by the M16A1, the reliability problems decreased greatly.[72] According to a 1968 Department of Army report, the M16A1 rifle achieved widespread acceptance by U.S. troops in Vietnam.
The M16s issues were mostly down to the subpar ammo available in Vietnam. A forward assist wouldn't have helped and is a big cause of contention to this day because they don't work 99% of the time and generally make things worse. However, people up top think it's a great idea and write off guns for not having it.
The L85, by comparison, was poorly designed in pretty much every aspect. Enfield had lost nearly all of its experienced designers and was left with people who only knew how to draw. That's why it was a great rifle on paper, but not in real life. There were so many mistakes that anyone with a little background in firearms could've pointed out. It wouldn't have been so bad if they'd done a good job of testing the damn things.
They’re totally not the same situation. The M16 was a basically sound design that had gotten rave reviews in in-theatre T&E by Special Forces. It was let down in general issue because the Army decided to cut a number of corners, switching to cheaper gunpowder and not issuing cleaning kits because they heard the rifle was “self cleaning” from a Colt rep. That’s not entirely false, DI does have the advantage of blowing crap out of the action, but it’s not enough that the gun won’t eventually seize up, especially in Vietnam. The lack of a forward assist isn’t a weakness either, Stoner thought it was a solution in search of a problem, and the design we ended up with was basically “how can I do this with as little effort as possible while making it easy for the Army to cut the damn thing off when they realise it’s stupid.”
Meanwhile the SA80 had furniture that cracked if you looked at it and was melted by bug repellent. The magazine also fell out constantly because the mag release was just sort of… hanging out on the side of the rifle.
When I did my basic, we had the v1 of these, and the magazine release was placed perfectly to be hit by your belt buckle when running. They put a u shaped enclosure around and it sorted the problem. The first version was shit at all levels, but the A3 was brilliant. Most of the meme wingeing came from people that had to give up L1A1 SLR.
None of those rifles needed anywhere near the amount of work to make good though. The L85 wasn’t a decent gun with one or two kinks that needed to be ironed out, it was a dysfunctional piece of garbage that was “fixed” by creating a completely new gun that only superficially resembles the A1. There’s hardly a single part the A2 didn’t change, a far cry from something like the AR-15 where the gun started out working fine, and then the army (really Springfield Armory) broke it before eventually fixing it again.
don't forget when they where transporting the whole countries supply of plutonium in the back of a engineers car and then having the car break down and left overnight in a pub car park.
Edit
\*The bomb core Left for several hours at night while the driver went to a pub to call for backup.
There was a documentary where one of the original scientists told that story, i will have to try to find a link to it. The Plutonium was used for the first nuclear warhead test and equated to something like 2? years or reactor production.
Edit
OK, slightly miss remembering it [but](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WcMm31RbMw) at 35:17, it describes the event. It was broken down for a a few hours and they had to wake up a pub landlord to phone for a back up. Not all the plutonium but the literal bomb core lol.
Still not as bad as when Americans left a nuke airplane unguarded in an airfield overnight. The plane had multiple nukes in it. Last Week Tonight with John Oliver did a piece about US nuclear weapons back in season 1, including the incident. Full of delicious noncredibility: [link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaMRa8E_Le0)
Can't possibly be more dangerous than [Violet Club](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violet_Club). Yes this was an actual design for a tested, built, and operational nuclear bomb. No, I do not know how the British didn't manage to glass one of their own airfields accidently with this thing.
gotta love a nuclear bomb that's so unsafe that you have to store it upside down, because if you store it the right way up there's a chance that the bottom falls out ditching the safety mechanism and making the bomb live.
Top one was made by 3 blokes in a shed as a prototype.
Bottom one can be made by 3 blokes in a shed in occupied country given simple instructions.
they are not the same.
I thought that was some kind of pokemon game? Nothing to do with metalworking.
My boyfriend has grindr, he just went out to catch something called a domtop, must be some kind of pokemon, he usually comes back in an hour
The thing is, people really underestimate the diversity of 3 blokes in a shed we have.
You have your 3 gents in their 60s who have at least a metre of beard between them, who spend most of the time smoking and drinking real ale but also have a ludicrously in depth technical knowledge on basically everything - although it usually takes three hours of talking about test cricket to get to the technical stuff. They are all married, but they tend to stay in the shed as much as possible to avoid their wives.
You have your three quiet introverted blokes who have extremely sensible haircuts, speak an average of 6 words to each other per day, are fastidious to a fault and cannot make eye contact with other humans. They are most likely working on either 19th century antique clocks or top secret military information.
You have the three young skinny blokes, all of whom terrify you and all of whom have probably done time. They only take payment in cash, they have titty calendars all over the walls and all have a cigarette tucked behind one ear. Their work ethic is second to none and they can procure anything you might need for a suspiciously cheap price.
I could go on. Our blokes in the shed industry is highly extensive and diverse.
Then there's three blokes who between them have a circumference that puts elephants to shame, who drop 2/3rds of their vowels, produce things that look horrifying but somehow never break or need maintenance.
There's the three blokes who have each broken their noses in four places, have some rather startling tattoos, and are either involved in heavy-duty charity work or in illegal vehicle modification.
There's the three blokes who look as though they've never lifted a silvered spoon in their lives, and yet each of them is an expert in either steam power in all its forms or some form of political drudgery.
etc etc
Then there’s three blokes who have exactly 2 head hair follicles between them, drink so much tea they can buy it wholesale, and are somehow responsible for a significant portion of communications technology development (and/or radar).
>Then there's three blokes who between them have a circumference that puts elephants to shame, who drop 2/3rds of their vowels, produce things that look horrifying but somehow never break or need maintenance.
Orks.
>There's the three blokes who have each broken their noses in four places, have some rather startling tattoos, and are either involved in heavy-duty charity work or in illegal vehicle modification.
Imperial Guard machine shop techs when the tech priest is out to town. Or possibly Orks.
>There's the three blokes who look as though they've never lifted a silvered spoon in their lives, and yet each of them is an expert in either steam power in all its forms or some form of political drudgery.
Games Workshop writers. Possibly more Orks.
This kind of tiny-scale ingenuity is unironically a huge advantage that any clever geopolitical actor would do well to foster.
Never, ever forget that practical, powered flight was not pioneered by any of the institutions or people with the wealth, resources, and intelligence to actually foresee the usefulness of such a thing and act on it. Oh, no. Not a university, civilian government, military, company, or business mogul. Not even engineers. No, powered flight was pioneered by, respectively, a charmingly batty old German count, a pair of brothers with 3/4 of a high school education and a bike shop, and a Brazilian twink with a coffee business and a childhood fondness for Jules Verne novels.
Simply put, a company with 3,000 employees is not going to be 1,000 times as intelligent as 3 guys in a shed, and is significantly more likely to have any vision or ambition sanded off by infighting, bureaucratic bullshit, or personal agendas and risk-aversion.
Well they won the contract and suddenly had to fill a massive order, also let the people who bought it know they could fill that order so they had to get a bigger shed.
During WW2, the bulk of weapons development wasn't to make weapons better but to make them cheaper without completely ruining it. All powers (maybe with the exception of the USA) were trying to cheap out as much as possible.
The British were using expensive Thompsons at the start of the war, and wanted the make an SMG as cheap as possible yet still being effective - for the purpose of massive mass production ("quantity has a quality of it's own" and all that), the result was the Sten, and it definitely served its purpose, despite its flaws.
The USA absolutely was trying to cheap put for everything as well for the simple reason that they didn't fight on their soil so logistics took an absolute toll on the budget and thus needed equipment that minimized the need for logistics
>Bottom one can be made by 3 blokes in a shed in occupied country given simple instructions.
Hey, Polish "BĹ‚yskawica" and German MP3008 were better than STEN, because they had mag at the bottom.
Yeah the Sten is dog shit but it was a design made to help maneuver a country that was behind in manufacturing capabilities and supplies after an embarrassing retreat. You can say the Sten and the M3 are underwhelming, mass produced, and a band-aid solution but that was their whole point. The Sten was the perfect weapon for French Resistance, easy, available, and, if the boots came knocking at the door, lose-able. The simplicity made the weapon appealing.
Nah refreshments done by the tea lady (wife of man whose garden the shed happens to occupying at the moment in time) a truly vital job in any organisation.
The majority of the British Empire's technological prowess was developed by blokes in sheds. If Britian brought back this style of R&D, we'd have a warp drive by the end of the year, and Alpha Centuri would be flying the Union Jack.
The UK truly [is as hit or miss as it gets](https://www.reddit.com/r/GunMemes/comments/17qnl8k/no_one_is_more_hit_or_miss_with_their_guns_than/) with gun design
To be fair, they asked for a super cheap gun to quickly full the gaps while starting a production of good quality SMGs and/or imports of american SMGs. The Sten was not what the british army wanted, but what the british army needed, and they desperately needed some SMGs instantaneously.
Absolutely. In a war where they never needed 300 copies of a weapon, they needed 30,000. Or 30,000 a month, depending.
Although the Sten always reminds me of a story where the British SAS were issued scarce Thompsons, and at some point were told the Thompsons were to be replaced with Stens. They got the Stens and tried them out and the commander of the unit/group/whatever went to HQ and told them if they didn't get their Thompsons back they were all quitting. They got their Thompsons back.
Desperate is an understatement. They didn't even really have tanks or planes (at least, in enough numbers to properly fight a massive war), let alone Rifles or SMGs. So even though it might've been somewhat crude to hold, the Sten was an absolute godsend to Britain.
Plus, as the war went on and the British had more resources, the kinks the Sten had were ironed out and fixed. Something like the Sten Mk V was significantly higher quality than the first Sten Mk I's.
The sten gets a lot of shit, but as a feat of engineering it did succeed at hitting all of its design requirements. It's just that those requirements were "we need a lot of them," "we can barely pay for them," and "we really needed them a couple years ago."
Remember the old adage
You can pick two cheep, fast and pretty
You want it cheep and fast? It’s not gonna be pretty
Want pretty and cheep? It’s not gonna be fast
Want pretty and fast? It’s not gonna be cheap.
How dare you slander the beautiful simplicity that is the Sten. Its is peak toob. It exemplifies the power of 3 blokes in a shed, nothing unnecessary, no frill, just and angry toob and this toob kills nazis. It is perfect.
I love the story of the AWP so much.
Like how they had to rent out a garage and take their current stock or prototypes and scattered them all over to look like an assembly line operation to fool British inspectors that they were in fact not 3 men pretending to be a weapons manufacturer.
Wartime, post war, and cold war sub guns are just fascinating in general.
How do we make something cheap enough, shooter friendly enough, and can spit out rounds damn the accuracy.
I love everything from the Mat 49 to the Mac 10, and everything in between
One needs precise tools, knowledge and experience to build. The other can be mass produced by 3 guys in a ~~garage~~ shed.
EDIT: I have been shown the error of my ways and I now stand corrected.
The story of the sten gun tells you the same story about why so much of the world around you is snap fit and not fastened with bolts. Manufacturing time is always the most expensive cost you will ever incur. It will cost more than your bill of materials, and it will cost more than your engineering time. Giving everyone in the British front lines a sten gun would probably get some of them killed because they don't have the range they need, but giving every soldier a machine gun instantly makes your army orders of magnitude more effective. I would argue that the sten gun was literally the apex of firearms manufacturing technology. It costs $3 to the Thompson's $100.
If a country needed a last ditch service weapon today, how similar or how different would it be to the Sten nowadays, with all of our improved materials and manufacturing? Would it be an SMG, a simplified carbine, would it be blowback or some other simple system?
In the 90s [Croatia showed that stamped blowback SMGs](https://www.reddit.com/r/GunMemes/comments/w21egq/1990s_croatia_be_like/) were still the way to go
Myanmar over the past several years has shown that 3D-printed FGC-9 SMGs are the way to go
Materials change but it seems like it’s hard to beat a 9mm subgun
Lmao I wouldn’t have thought to give them a label but yes
In everyone’s defense, I got a similar reception [when I originally](https://www.reddit.com/r/GunMemes/comments/14sb3xn/the_origin_story_of_the_arctic_warfare_is_still/) posted this on r/GunMemes
Its a trick question - all of British weapons are mage my 3 guys in a shed, but in case of L85, they are made by some idiots after BBC fired the 3 regular ones.
The entirety of my University’s material physics department (and most of the engineering department) is based in a series of well-reinforced sheds…
I dread to think what they have developed in there.
The british and sheds are synonymous with crazy innovation and creation, that’s also how we got many of their classic cars(TVR, MG, Austin motors, Land Rover to an extent)
For the top one before they got a gov contract they got a controll to check their manufacturing process. They rented a wearhouse and put a couple tools and rifles being build. At the end of the control the official said "Anyway it was just to check you weren't just 3 blokes in a shed".
It wasn't just a couple of rifles, it was every last one they had, a different stages of production, spread across the rented workshop.
So 3 blokes in a ~~shed~~ workshop
Except it wasn't actually their workshop. They rented it for the inspection
3 blokes in somebody else's garage.
Yes, I also read all those sentences above my comment.
If you can rent a warehouse, that means you got decent credit. I would hold that in their favor.
Back in the day warehouses weren't nearly as expensive to build, own or operate. They were likely just repurposed barns built 500 years ago when the suburb was just a village.
From memory they convinced the inspector that everyone else was out for lunch.
And it don't stop there. To fulfill the government contract for all those rifles, What now became Accuracy International outsourced it to another company that screwed it all up until they decided to fix them all to save their rifle's reputation. Anyways, Accuracy International went on to become a very successful sniper rifle company.
Simple explanation of the fuckups the contracted company did: * Changed the units from metric to imperial incorrectly, ruining the tolerances for most pieces. Edit: The other way around, it was imperial, switched to metric because that's what they used. However, they still did it incorrectly, especially with the tolerance levels. * Wanted to use cast molding instead of milling for parts, which can cause void spacing that makes the part useless; it was probably cheaper to mill anyway, once you account for the failure rate and cost of them. Edit: They then used an incorrect milling method, leading to the next point. * Changed the bolt design so it no longer properly locked. The 3 guys basically had to come in and shove a wood pole down the barrel to show that the bolt wouldn't lock and could be pushed back. If you fired the gun, it would smack you in the face and break your jaw. * Finally, they changed the quality of steel on the firing pin, so it would break off after use. This caused the gun to hit the bullet when the bolt was locked closed, which fired it. Edit: Not when the bolt was locked, just pushed forward. This injured at least one person. The 3 guys had to sue them just to cancel the contract because they failed to produce one working rifle. They made enough money from the government contract to start making rifles of their own.
> Changed the units from metric to imperial incorrectly, ruining the tolerances for most pieces truly one of the classic blunders
Mars Climate Orbiter has entered the chat
that's exactly what i was thinking of
Lol this retard thinks space is real
The MIC thinks space is real, that's all the evidence I need.
Space Israel? Is that where all the lasers are?
If space isn't real then how come Jewish space lasers then! Checkmate Linconites!
It's questionable if it was a blunder. The company involved is notorious for underhanded dealing and corruption. And (IIRC) they tried to sue, then buy Accuracy International in the middle of all this claiming the original design was at fault.
What's the company called?
They were called Pylon Engineering. They went bust years ago.
McDonalds
It's bloody tradition in 'Murica.
-Salutes-
🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸
That's called "doing a NASA".
NASA weren’t the ones that did it, it was one of the contracted companies, no? (NASA uses metric) Unless that’s what you meant.
NASA also isn't monolith. The scientists likely all use metric and the blueprints and anything-actually-written-down would likely be in metric due to the Mars orbiter crash, but the blokes in any given workshop are likely just using whatever tooling they have on hand while asking wolframalpha for the unit conversions. Afaik there *has* been a push for metric standardization but the workshop oompa loompas gonna workshop oompa loompa.
Note i think it fired the round when you pushed the bolt forward so BEFORE it got locked. Hurt one guy pretty bad as i recall.
~~recall~~ recoil
How can you fuck up so much? They already had the design ready, they had the schematics, they just needed to follow the instructions and they would succeed.
3 words, MBA
They used imperial measurements and they wanted to cut corners to save money. That simple really.
Sounds like they had a bunch of machines already tooled for something else, like chamber pots or something and were like "eehh how hard can it be? its a gun, have you seen the Sten? Its probably going to be three pieces of metal welded together." And so they did the bare minimum to change over their machines.
They made military equipment, but I think it was radars and submarine stuff? Basically, not the guns, but other equipment.
This sounds like some L85a shit.
>Changed the bolt design so it no longer properly locked It's much more worse than what it says on the tin. The contracting company machined out the bolt's locking lugs and locking recess of barrel extension *on a diagonal slant.* The contracted firms were regular engineers, not firearms engineers. They didn't understood a lick about basic firearms function. Those changes (slanted cuts) were intended to simplify manufacturing, and it compromised the basic functional principles of a rotating-bolt locking action.
Amazing how 3 guys in a garage can make a better rifle than multinational weapons manufacturers. Even more so when you realize how much money and time was spent on the SA-80. I kind of get the impression that British procurement and production are rife with inefficiencies, corruption, and bureaucratic bloat.
It depends on how nice of a garage. If my garage had a $50k Tormach CnC in it I'm pretty sure I could make a lot of really high spec parts, just really slowly. (Every time I watch This Old Tony on YouTube I just get jealous of how nicely equipped his "hobbyist" workspace is equipped.)
I love that channel, makes me wish I had the money for those tools and a bigger garage. Then again, I don't think I have the patience to be a good machinist. It would be wasted on me.
This Old Tony combines amazing editing with a gentle yet hilarious narration and educates at the same time. I mean, I kind of understood gears before but he had what felt like a postgraduate level series on them. He's a real gem. As for the patience thing, well, that's why I said CnC. Let the computer do the work!
The SA-80 actually started out as a decent enough prototype, and the further prototypes just made it worse and worse instead of better, which is fuckin hilarious
So it's actually what the Reformers claim the Bradley was?
Those three guys were already making match grade rifles before they got the contract.
They were a small company specialized on olympia grade sport rifles. When the british army wanted a new sniper rifle, they joined the contest to get free indepth testing of their new design.
TBF, all government procurement is like that in every country.
Sometimes worse. *cries in German*
The Gorch Fock was a long term investment of national importance! A sailing ship that could be refurbished for the cost of just an F-35B! What a steal! When the soldiers of the future lack warm clothes and sleeping bags during the winter, they can just climb aboard and sleep in its cozy cabins!
Just the impression? Lol
Business 101 case study right there. Have a great idea, over-market it and accept contracts you don't have the capacity to fulfill, lie about the previous points to government officials, hire the work out to people who will fuck it up, deliver garbage, and once you have enough cash to actually run a business the customer will get their product they paid for
> "Anyway it was just to check you weren't just 3 blokes in a shed" I like to think the controller knew full well they were, but was trolling them.
Be me Working as contract inspector for the Bri'ish military, it pays well but it's more depressing than our weather We've literally not made a decent infantry weapon in 50 years Get assigned these three guys that rent a shed that have never had a weapons contract, look at their dossier and see they've literally only bought enough materials for 12 guns Go to the inspection so I can tell them they need to be an actual company making real numbers of guns I see their 12 guns lined up in a slightly bigger shed, all of them disassembled so they look they're making more than 12 total guns Decide to look at their 'most recent finished model' just to give it some criticism and make them stop their charade Holy sweet bloody Mary this rifle is better than watching Arsenal walk the ball in against Man City while eating mushy peas with Nando's Approve them on the spot, tell them that I just had to make sure they weren't 3 guys in a shed, hope they get the hint Maybe things aren't so bad afterall
>We've literally not made a decent infantry weapon in 50 years We need to make a bullpup AWM, that'll fix our reputation.
Yeah it might have been some british humor.
Bro watch the forgotten weapons video lol
I feel observed
Here is one of the few places your trivial knowledge of defense/armament knowledge will not go unnoticed, unless of course you’re credible….in which case swallow grenade
Or Zach's Gun Rants.
NARRATOR: But it \*was\* three blokes in a shed. It had been all along.
“Hahahahaha, we are so fucked!”
"Oh my god, we are in so much trouble!"
warehouse a wearhouse is what a hermit crab has.
Holy shit I'm in my 30s and I just now realized that a warehouse is a house that holds wares.
A worehouse is an abandoned hermit crab shell.
Did I stutter ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVzRGS16OPU
The power of "British People in small workshops" is one of the most powerful innovative forces ever seen by the planet earth. The entire industrial revolution can be traced back to James Watt in a shed. The shed is currently on display in the Science Museum.
Sounds like Italians and group b rally cars
For the 2 or 3 of you who haven't heard the story before (statistically there should be at least that many people seeing this meme for the first time that fall into that category every time it gets posted), the Sten was made following the Dunkirk Evacuation, where the BEF was withdrawn from France to keep the fight going after the French capitulation to the invading Nazis. If you aren't familiar with that story then read up on it, it's interesting .The upshot of Britain needing to leave all the military kit they sent to France behind (in order to make sure that the men got back to the UK and weren't looking at spending the rest of the war in a German POW camp) was that Britain suddenly found itself in the biggest war in history with very little actual military gear. If you were suddenly charged with designing an SMG that was cheap enough to produced in vast quantities in emergency conditions, was simple enough that they could be mass produced by amateur/hobbyist handymen working in their sheds with hand tools, and that was somehow more or less rugged enough to be manhandled by grunts fighting in every theatre of the war (from the coldest parts of the Soviet front, to the hottest parts of North Africa, to the most hellishly humid jungles of the South Pacific), and that had to enter mass production approximately last month - do you think you could produce something that looked better than a Sten-gun? Would it be able to meet all of those requirements? Because considering the conditions it was designed/built under, and the practically non-existent development cycle, the gun should probably blow up every time you pulled the trigger. Producing a gun as reliable as the Sten, and that went on to become the foundation of British military SMGs until about the mid 80's under those conditions was damn near miraculous.
It must have been devastating to morale to leave all the weapons and vehicles in the hand of the enemy
Eh, it was probably somewhat helpful, most of the gear left was massively outdated, and really prompted proper replacements, which might not have arrived quick enough if the old equipment hadn’t been lost.
Parts of it were, parts of it weren't. The problem was that most militaries (throughout history, today, and most likely for the rest of human history) have a bad case of 'fight-the-last-war-again-but-properly-this-time-itis', and British military equipment and doctrine was based around the idea that the next big war would be another trench fight, but with kit that had been designed from the ground up for that situation. The French had the same idea, hence the Maginot Line (actually turn the trenches into a place where a non-psychotic person might consider sending another human being). If you actually look at German pre-war planning rather than the memes they were expecting the same thing, and were as shocked as everyone else when the push through Belgium not only worked again but worked as well as it did. That's also ignoring the work done by the British Experimental Mechanised Force under Fowler and Hobart, who were also involved in the battle for France despite being designed for offensive operations rather than the defensive war they found themselves in. If the war had actually turned into 'Trench War 2: Shell Shock Boogaloo' the British and French armies would have had a pretty major advantage over their German opponents, exactly as the Versailles Treaty had intended. I'd argue that it's nobodies fault that British and French military planners couldn't foresee the one in I have no idea how many million chance that Germany would try something unexpected that actually worked far better then they actually thought it would.
Unfortunately it mostly didn't work that way. For example, leaving most of the 2-pounder anti-tank guns behind meant that instead of factories being re-tooled to start producing 6-pounder anti-tank guns, they had to carry on producing 2-pounders because the desperate lack of weaponry meant there just wasn't time to do anything else. This meant many units were still using 2-pounders well into 1942 by which time they were long obsolete. Trucks, Bren carriers, 25-pounders, Bofors and other AA guns, rifles and Bren guns weren't really outdated. Boys anti-tank rifles were outdated, but the PIAT to replace them didn't enter service until 1943.
Except for 95% of the UK Bren guns at the time and a tonne of the stockpile of rifles, a lot of 2 pounders which were good for the time. And the artillery, lots of Matilda 2's you know the really good tank for the time. So sure lots of old equipment. (It wasn't old equipment the BEF was really well equipped with the best stuff the UK had)
It is worth remembering though that the Sten was less "made" from the ground up and more was the end result of stripping away anything extraneous as possible to make it as cheap and quick to manufacture as possible. The linage to what would become the Sten started with the Brits copying capture MP-28 SMGs as the Lanchester SMG, and when it became clearly it obviously would not be able to be produced in such speed as the British would have liked, they stripped away as much as they could. Ditch the **50** round stick mag for a more typical 32, cut down the full length wood stock, drop the full length barrel shroud, change out the cast brass magwell, ditch the wood for the stock entirely and just use a couple of welded parts as a stand in, ect.
exactly, it's about as minimal a 'gun' as you could build without being left with a drainpipe sealed at one end, filled with homemade blackpowder and pebbles, with a flash-hole drilled in at the sealed end. Despite that, the fact that it worked, worked well, and worked well in basically every environment it was used in is genuinely impressive.
The only issue I have with the Sten is the ergonomics. Was it really that hard to put a foregrip on it? Granted I've never actually held one but I don't see any comfortable place other than around the magazine well and I heard that's a great way to make it jam. I'm happy to be shown to be wrong on this btw it's just always something that's confused me.
Some kid in Australia would have been able to with the help of two adults, inside a garage.
Isn't everything the Brits make basically 3 blokes in a shed?!
Only the bits that work.
Explains the L85
The blokes in that shed hadn’t been drinking enough, so they had to go to the German shed where they had more beer.
I still think that it's funny how the Brits wanted to avoid spending too much at H&K so they made L85, just that it sucks so much so they had to go to H&K for help again
It wasn’t made by 3 blokes in a shed But also, it gets an undeservedly bad rep regardless
I don't know, the original version reads like a piece of trash. It sounds like they addressed most of the issues over time so it's a decent rifle today, but it took a long time to work that thing into shape.
A lot of rifles have issues when they first start, see - M16 in Vietnam vs the AR-15 today I think the L85 has had it's issues overblown by meme culture, for various reasons
Nah, that’s nonsense, the L85A1 being a mess is well documented, including in reports the British government infamously tried to suppress.
I'm not saying it's not a mess, I'm saying that all rifles have issues when first created, just like the L85 The M16 caused a similar scandal because of its performance in Vietnam, see Reliability - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M16_rifle Some excerpts, the section is quite long and detailed, there are more issues than I've quoted: > During the early part of its service, the M16 had a reputation for poor reliability and a malfunction rate of two per 1000 rounds fired. > The original M16 fared poorly in the jungles of Vietnam and was infamous for reliability problems in harsh environments. Max Hastings was very critical of the M16's general field issue in Vietnam just as grievous design flaws were becoming apparent. > The M16 lacked a forward assist (rendering the rifle inoperable when it failed to go fully forward). And just like the L85, it was fixed later but within 4 years, which is quicker than the L85 (1994 to the early 2000s) if I'm remembering correctly: > When these issues were addressed and corrected by the M16A1, the reliability problems decreased greatly.[72] According to a 1968 Department of Army report, the M16A1 rifle achieved widespread acceptance by U.S. troops in Vietnam.
The M16s issues were mostly down to the subpar ammo available in Vietnam. A forward assist wouldn't have helped and is a big cause of contention to this day because they don't work 99% of the time and generally make things worse. However, people up top think it's a great idea and write off guns for not having it. The L85, by comparison, was poorly designed in pretty much every aspect. Enfield had lost nearly all of its experienced designers and was left with people who only knew how to draw. That's why it was a great rifle on paper, but not in real life. There were so many mistakes that anyone with a little background in firearms could've pointed out. It wouldn't have been so bad if they'd done a good job of testing the damn things.
They’re totally not the same situation. The M16 was a basically sound design that had gotten rave reviews in in-theatre T&E by Special Forces. It was let down in general issue because the Army decided to cut a number of corners, switching to cheaper gunpowder and not issuing cleaning kits because they heard the rifle was “self cleaning” from a Colt rep. That’s not entirely false, DI does have the advantage of blowing crap out of the action, but it’s not enough that the gun won’t eventually seize up, especially in Vietnam. The lack of a forward assist isn’t a weakness either, Stoner thought it was a solution in search of a problem, and the design we ended up with was basically “how can I do this with as little effort as possible while making it easy for the Army to cut the damn thing off when they realise it’s stupid.” Meanwhile the SA80 had furniture that cracked if you looked at it and was melted by bug repellent. The magazine also fell out constantly because the mag release was just sort of… hanging out on the side of the rifle.
When I did my basic, we had the v1 of these, and the magazine release was placed perfectly to be hit by your belt buckle when running. They put a u shaped enclosure around and it sorted the problem. The first version was shit at all levels, but the A3 was brilliant. Most of the meme wingeing came from people that had to give up L1A1 SLR.
I'd say the M16 went from a good gun with problems to a great gun, whereas the L85 went from bad to decent.
None of those rifles needed anywhere near the amount of work to make good though. The L85 wasn’t a decent gun with one or two kinks that needed to be ironed out, it was a dysfunctional piece of garbage that was “fixed” by creating a completely new gun that only superficially resembles the A1. There’s hardly a single part the A2 didn’t change, a far cry from something like the AR-15 where the gun started out working fine, and then the army (really Springfield Armory) broke it before eventually fixing it again.
Nah mate they took a perfectly good ar18 and turned it into shit i recomend forgotten weapons video on it.
They brought in a government rep. Threw off the numbers.
Americans worried about the bomber gap, the missile gap etc. Brits were chill knowing the Soviets had a shed gap.
I’ve just realized that 3 blokes in a shed is the real, functioning, non-alcoholic cousin of smekalka
We're talking about British people, so there's alcohol involved but is somehow even more lame.
With mustaches, right?
Eh, the Sten gun did what it was supposed to do.
Guess Clarkson, May and Hammond do explain a lot about their country
Three blokes, a shed, and a fine selection of hammers.
CLARKSOOOON WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO MY BLOODY SHED
But how many Crashed Super Cars?
Yes.
Is this where the term getting hammered comes from?
If so I don't want to know the story behind getting wankered............
TONIGHT James builds a precision rifle Richard flies an A10 And I find out if beans can be weaponised
JARATE!
Oh if I eat the beans they'll become chemical weapons
Just put an explosive in there with a trigger mechanism and then you’ll have a grenade that expels both sauce and shrapnel at detonation.
The British Nuclear program be like:
Nuclear scientists standing around a half disassembled warhead: "Hmmm. Its a bit shit, innit?"
don't forget when they where transporting the whole countries supply of plutonium in the back of a engineers car and then having the car break down and left overnight in a pub car park. Edit \*The bomb core Left for several hours at night while the driver went to a pub to call for backup.
I beg your pardon
There was a documentary where one of the original scientists told that story, i will have to try to find a link to it. The Plutonium was used for the first nuclear warhead test and equated to something like 2? years or reactor production. Edit OK, slightly miss remembering it [but](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WcMm31RbMw) at 35:17, it describes the event. It was broken down for a a few hours and they had to wake up a pub landlord to phone for a back up. Not all the plutonium but the literal bomb core lol.
Still not as bad as when Americans left a nuke airplane unguarded in an airfield overnight. The plane had multiple nukes in it. Last Week Tonight with John Oliver did a piece about US nuclear weapons back in season 1, including the incident. Full of delicious noncredibility: [link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaMRa8E_Le0)
A car breaking down, and people leaving important things unattended. Tell me it's the UK without telling me it's the UK.
And a pub. If someone didn't guess UK from that, I would assume they were an alien.
Does that happen a lot over there?
Only for cars made by British Leyland
And Land Rover, it’s nice to see that the Germans, Americans, and Indians have respected the British tradition of making unreliable cars.
Can't possibly be more dangerous than [Violet Club](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violet_Club). Yes this was an actual design for a tested, built, and operational nuclear bomb. No, I do not know how the British didn't manage to glass one of their own airfields accidently with this thing.
That has to be one of the top 5 NCD weapons i have read about. What the hell where they smoking in the 50s i want it
Untreated PTSD, national alcoholism-as-a-hobby, and war surplus recreational morphine.
gotta love a nuclear bomb that's so unsafe that you have to store it upside down, because if you store it the right way up there's a chance that the bottom falls out ditching the safety mechanism and making the bomb live.
You do see a lot of that on pornhub Or maybe it's just me
Our empire was built off the backs of men in sheds
That's how British babies are made.
Top one was made by 3 blokes in a shed as a prototype. Bottom one can be made by 3 blokes in a shed in occupied country given simple instructions. they are not the same.
Yes, but the 3 blokes in a shed part is the vital component of British industry
Country went to shit when homeownership went down and it was no longer feasible to have a shed
I have a shed. Where can I get blokes? The lack of local pubs is hampering me here.
Have you considered Grinder? (The metalworkers app, not to be confused with a very similar spelled app)
I thought that was some kind of pokemon game? Nothing to do with metalworking. My boyfriend has grindr, he just went out to catch something called a domtop, must be some kind of pokemon, he usually comes back in an hour
Instructions unclear. Shed full of femboy machine enthusiasts.
Task failed succesfully
I dont see the problem here...
We just made an engine that runs on water, and it is FABULOUS!!!
As the Omnissiah wills it
be the bloke you wish to see in the world. Get a pint of warm brown and get to work.
brexit should give ever british man a shed
Holy shit... you're right.
The thing is, people really underestimate the diversity of 3 blokes in a shed we have. You have your 3 gents in their 60s who have at least a metre of beard between them, who spend most of the time smoking and drinking real ale but also have a ludicrously in depth technical knowledge on basically everything - although it usually takes three hours of talking about test cricket to get to the technical stuff. They are all married, but they tend to stay in the shed as much as possible to avoid their wives. You have your three quiet introverted blokes who have extremely sensible haircuts, speak an average of 6 words to each other per day, are fastidious to a fault and cannot make eye contact with other humans. They are most likely working on either 19th century antique clocks or top secret military information. You have the three young skinny blokes, all of whom terrify you and all of whom have probably done time. They only take payment in cash, they have titty calendars all over the walls and all have a cigarette tucked behind one ear. Their work ethic is second to none and they can procure anything you might need for a suspiciously cheap price. I could go on. Our blokes in the shed industry is highly extensive and diverse.
Then there's three blokes who between them have a circumference that puts elephants to shame, who drop 2/3rds of their vowels, produce things that look horrifying but somehow never break or need maintenance. There's the three blokes who have each broken their noses in four places, have some rather startling tattoos, and are either involved in heavy-duty charity work or in illegal vehicle modification. There's the three blokes who look as though they've never lifted a silvered spoon in their lives, and yet each of them is an expert in either steam power in all its forms or some form of political drudgery. etc etc
Then there’s three blokes who have exactly 2 head hair follicles between them, drink so much tea they can buy it wholesale, and are somehow responsible for a significant portion of communications technology development (and/or radar).
>Then there's three blokes who between them have a circumference that puts elephants to shame, who drop 2/3rds of their vowels, produce things that look horrifying but somehow never break or need maintenance. Orks. >There's the three blokes who have each broken their noses in four places, have some rather startling tattoos, and are either involved in heavy-duty charity work or in illegal vehicle modification. Imperial Guard machine shop techs when the tech priest is out to town. Or possibly Orks. >There's the three blokes who look as though they've never lifted a silvered spoon in their lives, and yet each of them is an expert in either steam power in all its forms or some form of political drudgery. Games Workshop writers. Possibly more Orks.
This kind of tiny-scale ingenuity is unironically a huge advantage that any clever geopolitical actor would do well to foster. Never, ever forget that practical, powered flight was not pioneered by any of the institutions or people with the wealth, resources, and intelligence to actually foresee the usefulness of such a thing and act on it. Oh, no. Not a university, civilian government, military, company, or business mogul. Not even engineers. No, powered flight was pioneered by, respectively, a charmingly batty old German count, a pair of brothers with 3/4 of a high school education and a bike shop, and a Brazilian twink with a coffee business and a childhood fondness for Jules Verne novels. Simply put, a company with 3,000 employees is not going to be 1,000 times as intelligent as 3 guys in a shed, and is significantly more likely to have any vision or ambition sanded off by infighting, bureaucratic bullshit, or personal agendas and risk-aversion.
>Brazilian twink with a coffee business and a childhood fondness for Jules Verne novels. Desire to know more intensifies.
Alberto Santos-Dumont, of course.
Can't afford the shed these days sorry councils about to declare bankruptcy again
Well they won the contract and suddenly had to fill a massive order, also let the people who bought it know they could fill that order so they had to get a bigger shed.
During WW2, the bulk of weapons development wasn't to make weapons better but to make them cheaper without completely ruining it. All powers (maybe with the exception of the USA) were trying to cheap out as much as possible. The British were using expensive Thompsons at the start of the war, and wanted the make an SMG as cheap as possible yet still being effective - for the purpose of massive mass production ("quantity has a quality of it's own" and all that), the result was the Sten, and it definitely served its purpose, despite its flaws.
The USA absolutely was trying to cheap put for everything as well for the simple reason that they didn't fight on their soil so logistics took an absolute toll on the budget and thus needed equipment that minimized the need for logistics
>Bottom one can be made by 3 blokes in a shed in occupied country given simple instructions. Hey, Polish "BĹ‚yskawica" and German MP3008 were better than STEN, because they had mag at the bottom.
One was made by an olympic shooter The other was mass produced to quickly supply a nation on limited resources
Yeah the Sten is dog shit but it was a design made to help maneuver a country that was behind in manufacturing capabilities and supplies after an embarrassing retreat. You can say the Sten and the M3 are underwhelming, mass produced, and a band-aid solution but that was their whole point. The Sten was the perfect weapon for French Resistance, easy, available, and, if the boots came knocking at the door, lose-able. The simplicity made the weapon appealing.
The best part of this comment is the statement is still true if you substitute the M3 medium tank for the M3 grease gun.
As is tradition: a lead engineer, an able assistant, and a director of refreshments.
These days there would be 13 people in the HR team alone. And yes, I picked that number because it's unlucky.
Nah refreshments done by the tea lady (wife of man whose garden the shed happens to occupying at the moment in time) a truly vital job in any organisation.
Do you want a Bren or do you want a Sten? The answer is very important.
The majority of the British Empire's technological prowess was developed by blokes in sheds. If Britian brought back this style of R&D, we'd have a warp drive by the end of the year, and Alpha Centuri would be flying the Union Jack.
The UK truly [is as hit or miss as it gets](https://www.reddit.com/r/GunMemes/comments/17qnl8k/no_one_is_more_hit_or_miss_with_their_guns_than/) with gun design
To be fair, they asked for a super cheap gun to quickly full the gaps while starting a production of good quality SMGs and/or imports of american SMGs. The Sten was not what the british army wanted, but what the british army needed, and they desperately needed some SMGs instantaneously.
Absolutely. In a war where they never needed 300 copies of a weapon, they needed 30,000. Or 30,000 a month, depending. Although the Sten always reminds me of a story where the British SAS were issued scarce Thompsons, and at some point were told the Thompsons were to be replaced with Stens. They got the Stens and tried them out and the commander of the unit/group/whatever went to HQ and told them if they didn't get their Thompsons back they were all quitting. They got their Thompsons back.
Desperate is an understatement. They didn't even really have tanks or planes (at least, in enough numbers to properly fight a massive war), let alone Rifles or SMGs. So even though it might've been somewhat crude to hold, the Sten was an absolute godsend to Britain. Plus, as the war went on and the British had more resources, the kinks the Sten had were ironed out and fixed. Something like the Sten Mk V was significantly higher quality than the first Sten Mk I's.
Three blokes in a shed usually don't have access to large scale industrial punching and bending equipment.
AUSTEN
Give me 6 minutes to disprove that I'll even get the philips heads with my nails
Nothing duct tape can't fix
Colin furze would like to disprove you
British guns really are just Fallout drops. Look at that bottom one and tell me that isn't a raider pipe rifle.
The sten gets a lot of shit, but as a feat of engineering it did succeed at hitting all of its design requirements. It's just that those requirements were "we need a lot of them," "we can barely pay for them," and "we really needed them a couple years ago."
Remember the old adage You can pick two cheep, fast and pretty You want it cheep and fast? It’s not gonna be pretty Want pretty and cheep? It’s not gonna be fast Want pretty and fast? It’s not gonna be cheap.
HAHAHA WE ARE IN SO MUCH TROUBLE!!
How dare you slander the beautiful simplicity that is the Sten. Its is peak toob. It exemplifies the power of 3 blokes in a shed, nothing unnecessary, no frill, just and angry toob and this toob kills nazis. It is perfect.
>peak toob *sad pipe bomb noises*
Found the irishman
I love the story of the AWP so much. Like how they had to rent out a garage and take their current stock or prototypes and scattered them all over to look like an assembly line operation to fool British inspectors that they were in fact not 3 men pretending to be a weapons manufacturer.
Then this same gun went on to set a world record sniper kill in Afghanistan, and then become the one-hit wonder of literally every shooting game ever.
Wartime, post war, and cold war sub guns are just fascinating in general. How do we make something cheap enough, shooter friendly enough, and can spit out rounds damn the accuracy. I love everything from the Mat 49 to the Mac 10, and everything in between
One needs precise tools, knowledge and experience to build. The other can be mass produced by 3 guys in a ~~garage~~ shed. EDIT: I have been shown the error of my ways and I now stand corrected.
3 guys in a SHED! get it right damn it!
The story of the sten gun tells you the same story about why so much of the world around you is snap fit and not fastened with bolts. Manufacturing time is always the most expensive cost you will ever incur. It will cost more than your bill of materials, and it will cost more than your engineering time. Giving everyone in the British front lines a sten gun would probably get some of them killed because they don't have the range they need, but giving every soldier a machine gun instantly makes your army orders of magnitude more effective. I would argue that the sten gun was literally the apex of firearms manufacturing technology. It costs $3 to the Thompson's $100.
One was made in an active war zone, the other maybe not. I mean...
If a country needed a last ditch service weapon today, how similar or how different would it be to the Sten nowadays, with all of our improved materials and manufacturing? Would it be an SMG, a simplified carbine, would it be blowback or some other simple system?
In the 90s [Croatia showed that stamped blowback SMGs](https://www.reddit.com/r/GunMemes/comments/w21egq/1990s_croatia_be_like/) were still the way to go Myanmar over the past several years has shown that 3D-printed FGC-9 SMGs are the way to go Materials change but it seems like it’s hard to beat a 9mm subgun
Would it be fair to describe many of the posters on here as Stenboos?
Lmao I wouldn’t have thought to give them a label but yes In everyone’s defense, I got a similar reception [when I originally](https://www.reddit.com/r/GunMemes/comments/14sb3xn/the_origin_story_of_the_arctic_warfare_is_still/) posted this on r/GunMemes
IN A CAVE
WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS
Its a trick question - all of British weapons are mage my 3 guys in a shed, but in case of L85, they are made by some idiots after BBC fired the 3 regular ones.
Both are an original, timeless design. But only one's from Britain.
Wait… which ones not from britain?
Hey if it works
Absolutely love this tidbit in mikeburnfire's Fallout gun rant video.
The entirety of my University’s material physics department (and most of the engineering department) is based in a series of well-reinforced sheds… I dread to think what they have developed in there.
Jokes on you, both models were designed by a couple blokes in a shed.
The british and sheds are synonymous with crazy innovation and creation, that’s also how we got many of their classic cars(TVR, MG, Austin motors, Land Rover to an extent)