The Carbine

This has been another stop / go story. I have to be corrected where possible please. Heres how I see it. The first Carbine was to give Tank crews a small weapon that was easily stowable. The first attempt was and always is, turned down by the MOD as being too expensive. It was identical to the SA80 except that the barrel was shorter and the gas/sight block is moved to almost touching the receiver. An extention was added to affix a hand grip.

Notice they had already started saving money by using an LSW rear grip.

After this was deemed too expensive the next version was an SA80 with the barrel sawn off, the flash hider reattached and an LSW foregrip fitted. Ours came from the Nottingham factory and is shown below.

Meanwhile, lots of other things happened and the Carbine was being converted from old LSWs at one stage as Gulf War 1 was in full swing. During the conversion from Challenger 1 to Challenger 2 with aircon the space where the Carbine was to be stowed suddenly disappeared. On conversion to A2 the L22 A2 became the norm.

L22 A2. Notice the neat rail extention for the down grip. The SUSAT has a different eyepiece too.