Talk:Recoil operation

Illustration

Some sort of illustration of the general way the recoil action works would be quite helpful.

I'm on it. My artistic talents are less than good, but I can work up some simple block diagrams showing the basics of short, long, and inertia operation. scot 16:03, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

Rotating barrel

The rotating barrel lock as used in the Steyr TMP, Grand Power K100 and several other designs is considered a short recoil system of operation. It should be included if someone can find the time. Koalorka (talk) 15:51, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Yes, it also ignored roller-locking. There are also a few others that use sliding blocks or levers, but none on a production arm I'm aware of. I've added the rotating barrel. --Nukes4Tots (talk) 16:02, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

How are Blowback and Recoil different?

--24.6.228.145 (talk) 01:11, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Seconded, this is still an issue affecting both articles. The introductory sections of the 2 articles sound as if they're describing the same action. Wootery (talk) 20:50, 25 January 2024 (UTC)

List

I think a list of Recoil-operated weapons would be helpful. Attys (talk) 18:47, 28 May 2011 (UTC)

Article may require overhaul, rewrite

The entry for the recoil operation (a mechanism for driving a self-loading firearm which makes use of the recoil force generated upon firing to put the weapon’s parts in motion), while technically detailed, suffers from a number of glaring flaws. Among the most serious of these flaws has been tagged at the top of the page for over three years now: the article cites essentially no sources. The only reference cited in the entire piece is a US patent for a “Bolt Assembly with a Rotating Locking Bolt Head and a Floating Bolt Element for Automatic Firearms”, the relevance of which to the statement which references it is not entirely clear. The article also links to one website which features an animation of a recoil-operated firearm and also to a .wmv file download with another animation, although which of the three types of recoil operation are demonstrated in these animations is not made clear. At best there is one external reference for each type of mechanism described in the article, and even then it’s very unclear where most of the technical information in the article is actually coming from – the author(s) apparently expect readers to take them at their word that this information is accurate, which is not sufficient for a Wikipedia entry.

The organizational structure of the article is sound, if simplistic: the first section of the article explains the basic principles of the mechanism common to all of its variations, and the following sections explain the specifics of each of three variations. For a number of reasons, however, this structure is not implemented in a way that clearly communicates information to the reader. The article is packed thick with technical nomenclature (a “feature” which is unfortunately common in firearms-related articles on Wikipedia), making it very difficult to understand for those not already very familiar with the way that firearms operate. As an example, the very first sentence in the article states that “Recoil operation is an operating mechanism used in locked-breech, autoloading firearms.” This sentence is meaningless to anyone who does not already know what it means for a firearm to be “autoloading” or to have a “locked breach” or what an “operating mechanism” is in this context. The sentence does not contain links that would allow an uninitiated reader to quickly familiarize him or herself with these concepts, and this is far from the only time this sort of jargon is employed in the article. The effect is to ensure that the only people who will be able to understand the article are those who are already familiar with its content, rendering it useless as a tool of instruction.

In addition, the organization of information within the sections described above is haphazard. For example, the article mentions that the “short recoil operation” is by far the most common form of this mechanism, yet it is placed second when describing the different varieties of recoil operation, behind the “long recoil operation” which the article notes is obsolete and had only ever been used in very specific applications while it was relevant. Each section explains the movement of the action twice, once at the beginning of the section and once at the end of the section (in list form of the different stages involved in operation), and for two of the three sections listed the only material between these two explanations is purely trivial, such as a list of some specific firearm models which make use of the action. The third section is far more substantive than the two which precede it but its prose is so covered in technical jargon that it is essentially incomprehensible. Information which would likely be of interest to the casual reader (such as the advantages and disadvantages of the various variations, or details of concepts introduced but never explained, like many further variations on the short recoil operation) are missing entirely, and other such information (like why the “inertia operation” is called as such) is buried in the middle of the text body, when it should be very close to the beginning of the relevant section.

There are numerous illustrations but their usefulness is questionable at best. The vast majority of them take the form of “block diagrams” which are difficult to understand (upon first viewing the article I had some difficulty even determining which way the diagram was oriented) and do not provide any information not already contained in the text body. There is only one illustration which is not of this variety: a photograph of a barrel from a pistol which makes note of the “locking lugs” and “tilting link” present on it. Like the block diagrams, this photograph provides more questions than answers – what a “locking lug” is or what it does is never explained, and the explanation for the function of the “tilting link” (present only in the caption for the photograph) is unclear. In other words, there may as well not be any illustrations in the article at all, because they do not add to the comprehensibility of the article, and may actually detract from it.

Alleviating the glaring flaws in this article will likely require a thorough overhaul of its content, if not a complete re-write. The text must be liberated from its unreadably-technical shackles and made understandable to people who do not have a background in firearms, as after all people who do have a background in firearms will not have much need for this article. Trivial facts must be removed from the article’s body and replaced with useful information, particularly information which explains why the different variations on the recoil operation exist in the first place. Sources must be found for the information in the article, and illustrations must be provided which actually add to the usability of the article, rather than crudely restating the article’s content in graphical form. Useful illustrations in descriptions of any complex mechanical system are not optional, and so it will not do to simply remove the extant ones from the article. The current article is longer and more detailed than a stub, but it’s not clear whether it is significantly more useful than a stub. HIST406-11-dfox0115 (talk) 15:49, 4 October 2011 (UTC)

Requesting that this page be merged into Action (firearms)

This article is redundant and should be merged into Action (firearms)Digitallymade (talk) 12:07, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose the merge. This is a good topic in its own right. Action (firearms)#Recoil operation is a short section with a Main template pointing here. That's the way to go. Andrewa (talk) 17:21, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

History

This article badly needs a History section, referring in particular to the Maxim gun. The information is in the article but is not easily found. Andrewa (talk) 17:24, 27 September 2018 (UTC)