Since China’s new assault rifle appeared at the National Day military parade last year, which is likely named QBZ-191 or QBZ-19, it hasn’t been reported for a long time, but recently a video on the development team of the new rifle was released on the Chinese internet, and the standard-issue version of this new rifle is finally unveiled.
In this video, different versions of the QBZ-191 rifle make a quite complete family. Last year at the military parade we saw only one new version of it, and the overall length of the new gun is similar to QBZ-95. As a bullpup style assault rifle, QBZ-95 has the advantage of a long barrel, while the length of the barrel of the new rifle for the Chinese army seems similar to the 14.5-inch barrel of the US M4 carbine.
Most of the soldiers holding new guns during the military parade are mechanized infantry or special operations forces, which have high requirements for small-sized rifles, as short-barreled rifles are suitable for close combat and frequent loading and unloading. According to military analyst Junwu, the shorter barrel on the parade should be the short version of China’s new assault rifle.
In the above-mentioned video titled ” Models at the Central Enterprise”, there was a test image of a long-barrel version of QBZ-191. In addition, there was a long barrel rifle in an article published by “Light Weapons” magazine.
The long barrel can provide a longer acceleration distance for the warhead, so that the bullet has a higher initial velocity, naturally it will also have greater energy, longer range, and greater penetration.
The long barrel is likely to be the standard-issue version of the new assault rifle of China’s QBZ-191, and it is likely to be used by Chinese field forces that are not sensitive to the size of the rifle.
In addition, a screenshot from the video shows that the development team was testing a new gun with a bipod in the 5,000-meter plateau, which has an even longer barrel than the standard-issue version of QBZ-191.
It can also be found from the picture that this model with a bipod barrel is much longer than the standard-issue version of the rifle, and the handguard part is fully distributed with a large number of heat dissipation holes, to allow quickly cooling of the barrel after continuous shooting. So Junwu thinks that this gun is the machine gun version of the new rifle, and it could be used in the future to replace type 95 machine gun.
Furthermore, a large-size optical pointing system is found in the video in the hands of the test team, which should be the sniper version of QBZ-191 – according to later information, this could be officially called “QBU-191 5.8mm precision rifle“.
To sum up, QBZ-191 assault rifle should have 4 versions: shortened version, standard-issue version, light machine gun version and sniper version, which form a rifle family with different uses.
Besides, according to the “Light Weapons” magazine, the new QBZ-191 assault rifle is likely to adopt modular design, and some parts can be shared between the four rifle versions.
Nothing about the cartridge ???