Dear Guys,
Thanks for the compliments. Much appreciated. I wish to clarify my "accuracy" over open sights statement. This is what I mean. Generally the accuracy of a weapon is greater if the distance between the front and rear sight is larger.
Why?
Rifles are direct-fire weapons. You see the target, point-and-shoot. The image size of the front sight is larger if it is closer to the rear sight. This is because it takes up more of your field-of-view. Thus it will appear both wider/thicker if up-close than farther away. The consequence of this is it appears thicker when placed on the target, so you have more room for lateral (side-to-side) error.
It the heat of combat (which fortunately I've never really experienced - I'm from the artillery and a bad shot to boot!) accurate sight placement is thus less than if the front sight were a little farther away (where it would appear to be finer/thinner). So therefore, the closer together your sights, the less the inherent accuracy. See the point?
Of course there are two possible fixes.
The first is to make the front sight finer/thinner, the limitation being strength and ruggedness, too fine or thin and it might break.
The second is to make the rear aperture smaller, reducing the alignment error. The problem with that, is the resultant smaller sight picture, you can't see much of anything around the target, making quick placement on target (registration) more difficult.
Generally its all about compromise. No one solution is perfect. The conventional layout just allows you to keep the sights farther apart than the bullpup design. But the bullpup design has advantages of it's own. The designer has to decide for himself which of these is most important.
Best Regards,
Dusky Lim