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The Silent Revolvers Without Silencers
This piece looks far from silent. It looks like a regular snub-nose you’d see in a mafia movie… but all you can hear is the hammer drop. How? That’s a great question!
Well, everyone knows that revolvers are hard to silence. Even when they’re using lightly loaded ammunition, the gap between the cylinder and the barrel releases lots of gas very loudly. That’s hard to hide no matter what the circumstance is, and the ways that we’ve devised so far are clumsy and expensive.
That’s not to say it’s impossible.
There have been threaded revolvers that accept silencers, and even silencers designed to be clamped on to the common unthreaded models. Many gunsmiths will optimize a revolver to be silenced on request! Even I’ve been approached with this request many a time. A skilled gunsmith can modify a revolver’s barrel to bring it closer to the cylinder, shortening the cylinder gap and thereby the gas released as well!
Thread the muzzle and you can have a pretty effective suppressed revolver.
Pictured to the right is a .22 pocket revolver modified in the way I just described, beautifully pulled off by the gunsmith Bob Bailey. According to him, its about as quiet as a .22 rifle with standard ammo unsuppressed. From my experience that is pretty darn good for a revolver with a 1 inch barrel.
Done to death, but still cool. Nagant revolvers, everyone knows about ’em. They’ve been in every almost every game from Red Orchestra 2 to Hunt: Showdown, in movies, on youtube, and patents have existed since the 1920’s for Nagant silencers.
Read on to find out how all this works…
Remember that cylinder gap issue mentioned before? When the Nagant revolver is cocked, the cylinder moves forward to minimize that gap. Additionally the extra long brass, as seen in the photo above, expands to cover up what’s left of the cylinder gap! A foreshadowing for the most awesome current-gen “future-tech” that I’ve seen in a long time. Covered later in this article!
This feature was actually intended to increase the bullet’s velocity. While it does accomplish that goal… it makes this revolver incredibly efficient to suppress as well. Multiple Russian manufacturers have made silencers intended to clamp onto an unthreaded Nagant barrel. In the States we just have the barrels threaded to accept commercial silencers.
All right, I’ll get to the good part.
This one doesn’t look too special… but trust me. It is.
As early as the 1950s the United States developed a type of silent cartridge for pistols and rifles that does not require a silencer. I have documents from the early 1960s detailing experiments from a government-owned company called the Frankford Arsenal developing this ammunition. Guess what they specialize in? The development and manufacturing of ammunition.
We also have the results of their experiments with suppressed small arms and all the different factors that dictate the gun’s sound signature! Did you know that the amount of air resting in the gun’s barrel makes a huge difference in shot volume? I didn’t either. Nobody but them seems to. Find out why HERE on page 13 (27 in PDF reader).
Don’t worry, these docs have since been totally declassified, plus this little secret was leaked by 1980. This ammunition works via a “captive piston” design. Between the bullet and the powder is a piston which is launched forward by the gunpowder, and is stopped sharply by a shoulder inside the case! This is ingeniously amazing!
It’s quite expensive and complex to produce, but this results in an incredibly quiet shot. This is the shit that should be in the movies. All the gas put off by the gunpowder is trapped inside the cartridge case itself for as long as possible.
In the picture above is a large-frame Model 29 Smith & Wesson revolver, originally chambered for .44 Magnum, modified by AAI Corp to accept a captive piston cartridge. Its dubbed the QSPR (Quiet Special Purpose Revolver), supposedly intended to preserve tunnel clearers’ ears in Vietnam. The exact details of the ammo pictured are unclear. Its safe to assume the projectile is very heavy and very slow.
Their load of choice was a plastic sabot containing tungsten round balls, intended to fragment on target without the need of high velocities like a standard solid projectile.
This revolver has had many changes to optimize it for such an unusual cartridge…
The cartridge cases have to be much thicker than usual and made out of machined steel to be able to contain that captive piston. The chambers must be reamed out to accept a case that is as thick as possible (note the chambers pictured above, the walls are incredibly thin).
You may have noticed the ridiculously short barrel. Not only is it short but its smooth bore and over-sized! The rifling has been reamed out! Since the bullet is no longer pushed by anything as soon as it leaves the case, it can begin to lose velocity while still within the barrel. Trying to push through tight rifling would result in a squib very often.
Given the CQB and clandestine op implications of the weapon, accuracy isn’t a big deal anyway. There’s another reason that the barrel is over-sized that you wouldn’t expect. In Frankford Arsenal’s testing of silenced weapons they found that the air in front of the bullet makes a considerable amount of noise when forced out of the barrel when the firearm is discharged. Making the bore over-sized allows the projectile to flow through the air instead of forcing all the air out.
Here’s an illustration from one of Frankford Arsenal’s declassified experiments (Linked previously). You can understand the concept pretty well from object C.
The bullet is pushed by piston, which is then trapped by the “band” at the end of the case, trapping the gas inside. Look closely and notice that they experimented with stainless steel cases, uranium bullets, and even self-destructing magnesium pistons. That uranium projectile actually seems to be designed for use in a rifled barrel as well.
Frankford Arsenal even applied this to rifle cartridges with some success. For example, they applied this concept to a .30-06 load titled the XM76. Their load for .38 cal revolvers was called the XM202.
Their .38 cal XM202 catridge fired a 125 grain projectile flying at 400 feet per second. That has only HALF the kinetic energy of a standard .22lr round! That load is strictly for close range shots.
The current usage of captive-piston ammunition by the West is unknown. Some claim it was dropped entirely… some say it still holds a place in the most secretive black ops used by those-who-should-not-be-named (The CIA, Delta Force, and the SEALs).
It is not available on civilian markets due to unclear legality and prohibitively expensive ammunition production costs. I would not be surprised if this cartridge type really was dropped. It’s expensive and quite underpowered.
The fact of the matter though… the battlefield applications of a near-silent shot are endless…
As late as 1965, Russia picked up on this clever trick with the Soviet S4M…
They began designing captive piston cartridges, beginning with the S4M double barrel derringer. The “7.62x63mm PZ” cartridge was designed to fire the same projectile used in the AK47’s 7.62×39 cartridge. The barrels were even rifled.
A major design aspect of this cartridge and firearm was to leave ballistic evidence on the victim that would be identical to a shot from an AK-47 from a long distance. This cruel trick would give a huge advantage to an operator that needs to cover his tracks, and it was assumed this tactic would be frowned upon politically.
This PR nightmare was a very closely guarded secret, only known to the west around the 1990s. I know its not a revolver, I will get to that soon.
Beginning production around 1980, the PPS pistol was the Soviet’s semi-automatic evolution of the captive-piston weapon.
The pistol itself uses a unique system. I’m not sure if it would be considered a blowback system or a recoil-operated system. There’s nothing locking the bolt in place, but there’s no gas being released either. Either way it is incredibly effective.
The shots are completely silent just like the previous examples! The only noise heard is the action cycling. I’ve heard anecdotes from ex Spetsnaz soldiers that in the 1980s this weapon was still a closely guarded secret. So secret in fact that every spent cartridge case was required to be logged and kept after training to prevent spies from leaking their design.
The PPS is actually still in use today, but it is likely not being produced. One has been spotted recently in use by Russian special forces in Syria. I’m sure it has some reliability issues as well as a louder noise from its semi-automatic mechanism when compared to it’s derringer counterparts.
The OTs-38 Stechkin Silent Revolver solves those issues.
Firing a round with this revolver is just as quiet as dry-firing the weapon and the revolver is immune to certain reliability issues inherent to automatic pistols.
Notice how the barrel is underneath where you would expect a barrel to normally be. In it’s place is an integral laser sight. This piece began production in 2001 and is still in use today. How awesome is that?!
Here is the “7.62x41mm SP-4” cartridge, shared by both the Stechkin Silent Revolver and the PSS silent pistol. It has been cut it half to show its components clearly.
I hope that this article has been informative for you guys. We’ve gone over east and west on an awesome cold-war era technology that even most history buffs don’t know about! I had a lot of fun researching and writing this article, and I really hope that you do too!
If you’re interested in pistol accessories so that you can shoot like those operators we talked about before… you should check out my compensator for the Beretta 92 series here!
As a final note, I have a challenge for all of you. I challenge all of you to find something I missed about this technology and comment it. If you do, I promise I’ll add it into the article after I do my own verification and research! That’s what it takes to be a true ironmonger…