@leespringfield1903 @GabeLakmann @nugger They DID have it pretty much finished in 2003, I think. By the time the marines bought it in bulk it was already pretty aged on the commercial market. Not bad to have a pic rail for those guys, since it works and it’s durable, it just retained heat more than you’d expect for a piston, and it ended up feeling just as heavy as a 20” despite being a carbine.
I just hate it, HK refuses to ever learn a lesson from anyone but their own internal company men. Fixed, heavy sights when everyone else is cutting weight there? Ew. The american competition are moving to negative space rails with lots of cuts to alleviate weight and let the barrel cool better? Gross, we know better than that, we’ll design our OWN version of your freely licensed, open-source spec so all your accessories can’t interface with our rail! And we’ll minimize machine ops too, so it STILL comes out heavier and hotter than yours!
But people love them because governments like buying it, so they’re always in video games. Our dads like them because they were in movies as the cool MP5/P7 duo of 80’s action movies and balaclava’d SOF teams everywhere