#i figure only like paratroopers will have retracting stocks

[tlaquetzqui]

Turns out I might not need to base my setting’s main rifle on the SVU bullpup Dragunov. Modern guns can shoot battle-rifle rounds from ridiculously short barrels—there are 7.62×51 NATO rifles with 13-inch ones—and that’s only going to get better as technology improves. And reducing the barrel of the latest version of the SVD (the original non-bullpup Dragunov) to 13 inches (from 21.1) results in a rifle that’s only 934 millimeters long—only 2 cm longer than the US military’s new XM7.

And then if you put a stock shaped like the one on Kalashnikov’s in-development SVK (no relation, I think SV just stands for the Russian equivalent of “DMR”), which is 45 millimeters shorter than the collapsing stock on the SVDM, you get a total length of 889 millimeters—a whole inch shorter than the XM7, and the same length as the heavy-barreled version of the Steyr AUG.