Having tried to do something approximately similar with nothing more complex than an Excel spreadsheet, trust me when I say the Handgun Search and Compare engine over at Genitron is a pretty slick piece of software indeed. It is still a little lacking in certain specifics (basically if the manufacturers do not make the information easy to find on their sites, this one does not seem to have it either), and the ranking data is purely subjective (as the author makes explicitly clear in his disclaimer), but if you ever needed a way to compare various firearms across various manufacturers and styles, this is a darned good starting place.
If nothing else, he has a great historical pistols page, which leads me to wonder if the Bergmann No 5 plans (or maybe the 9mm Bergman Bayard) could be modified to serve as the basis for my Moses Brothers Self-Defense Engine Frontier Model B idea…
(Courtesy of The Wandering Minstrel.)
Ah, a Gyrojet. Gil Hamilton would be proud.
Oooh I could see someone with a CNC machine and CAD just taking the plans for the workign parts of the Bergmann and making them fit inside Mals pistol. Certainly some things would be a bit fiddly, and need testing to work out, but dammit I want one.
Sounds appealing.
@ Fill Yer Hands: Yet another in a long line of “want, but could never even conceive of affording”.
@ jpo: You and me both! Not sure what the status of the patents are, but I am sure the deviation necessary to make it look like Mal’s pistol would be enough to avoid that… the only question is licensing from Fox / Universal Pictures. And, of course, someone to actually do it. Supposedly a range down the road was thinking about trying it out, but I have not heard back from them.
@ Beaumont:
. Sadly, the buy-in has not been tremendous of late, and designing new firearms is not exactly a cheap proposition.