Thanks for the input.

I have a Steyr H5 SA rifle, so i'm quite familiar with the Airgun side of the argument (not least it raged on these forums for over a year).

I do own a Patriot .32, and it's an exceptional pistol. Only downside is the company shut down a few years back so they're hard to come by and spares etc are turning to gold dust. Needless to say the semi auto development never happened.
Took a year of searching before I finally got hold of one.

The design of the Patriot is the inspiration behind this idea - combining the features of the Patriot with a top slide mechanism as seen in the Fosbery design would allow for a semi automatic version which is recoil operated and providing the overall weight of the slide assembly was kept low it should have pretty negligible recoil. The Patriot recoil is already very light so with a bit of careful design the slide movement should be able to perfectly absorb almost all recoil.
Only reason i lean towards a cylinder over the Patriot harmonica is that once you self index you introduce both a sideways weight shift which may affect accuracy and the issue of the recoiling slide potentially unseating the loaded chambers not yet covered by the breach area.

Powder fouling is a concern with self indexing, but the Patriot can fire 20 shots on Blue-Dot before it needs a quick wipe down - I'm led to believe Vhit N310 is cleaner burning and will give the same load characteristics, I have some on order to test with.


The real question here is if such a design could be UK Legal, if so I'll continue on the design path and see what I can come up with.