...I'm never going to get a suppressor?
I want it to be a combination house / vehicle carbine. Distances would be across-the-room to maybe 50 yards.
I have no experience with the 10.5". I have an 11.5" barrel. After coming from 16" and pinned 14.5" barrels, I was pretty happy with how relatively compact it is. Now I find myself looking at the barrel and wondering if I shouldn't get an inch chopped off (cuz
more compact and therefore even better for a house / vehicle carbine!
)
Like I said, I have no experience with a 10.5" barrel, so I've been browsing the internet. This is what I've come away with (and some of it might be incorrect):
PROS:
- A 10.5" barrel is, well, shorter. More convenient to store and easier to maneuver in tight quarters... like a house or a vehicle.
- There is very little velocity loss dropping from 11.5" to 10.5". Probably about 60 FPS.
CONS:
- More blast. More than you would expect for a barrel just 1" shorter.
- You start getting toward the edge of unreliability. Unless the barrel is overgassed, you need to worry more about ammunition pressure level and cold weather.
- A 10.5" is rougher on parts due to the higher pressure / shorter dwell time vs that of the 11.5".
Reliability is more important to me than having the shorter barrel, so that would seem to indicate the 11.5" barrel. However, I read a post by a vendor where they said that they had dropped their 11.5" barrel offering because the 10.5" barrel outsold it 100:1 (probably an exaggeration, but still). I have a hard time believing that if the 10.5" barrel was so unpleasant or hard on parts I wouldn't have seen more complaints about the 10.5" length. On the other hand, I've read somewhere that supposedly John Noveske considered a barrel of around 12" (or was it 12.5"?) to be the ideal all-around length for a carbine for various technical reasons.
So... do I get my 11.5" chopped to 10.5" or do I leave well enough alone and convince myself that I (uncharacteristically) got it right the first time?
Help me, AR-15 pistol forum, you're my only hope.