The L numbers came out of a formal agreement between four major English speaking Western nations, the UK, the USA, Canada and Australia.
I can't find the specifics but the agreement dealt with ground forces equipment and to a lesser extent, commonality of ground forces gear.
Ground forces equipment manufactured or adapted for service by the various countries would be given an alphanumeric label with a single letter prefix to identify its origin as follows: -
the UK - L prefix
the USA - M prefix
Canada - C prefix
Australia - F prefix
Various items adopted for service that were procured from one of the other countries generally tended to keep its original designation although this was not by any means guaranteed.
In Australia, you could easily see these alphanumeric labels in action in the Infantry, particularly in regards to our GPMG. We had a US machinegun with a British tripod using a Canadian ancillary sight and we fed it with Australian ammunition.
So you had the M60 GPMG on the L4 tripod using the C2 sight with F (something or other) ammunition.
As far as I have been able to find, the X prefix was decided upon for experimental items although the only definite cases I have seen have been from the USA and Australia so this may very well have been informal.
The various nations use this alphanumeric label also to track changes in a given item. The most obvious case of this can be seen with the AR-15 series of rifles, it started in US Army service as the M16, then updated to the M16A1, M16A2, -A3 and -A4.
So for the UK, the modification and adoption of the FN FAL saw it given the designation L1A1, Australia adopted the L1A1 without any significant changes so it retained its L1A1 designation. I believe Canada made some minor changes to the sights and thus designated their version the C1A1.
When Australia did make a change to the L1A1 rifle, there were two variants. For the first, changing the design to a support weapon required the use of a heavier barrel, a new rear sight and the fitting of a bipod. This resulted in the Automatic Rifle, 7.62mm L2A1.
For the second, it was decided that the change was not significant enough to warrant a totally new designation. The change involved shortening the barrel length and the butt length to allow ease of use for Papua New Guinean troops who were generally shorter than the Europeans the rifle was originally designed for.
This shortening of the L1A1 resulted in a hybrid designation, it's known as the L1A1-F1.
At one point we locally manufactured a somewhat modified version of the M72 LAW rocket under the designation M72A2-F1.
Bare in mind that the labelling procedure goes something like this: Self Loading Rifle, 7.62mm, L1A1; Automatic Rifle, 7.62mm, L2A1 and so on
Things get really crazy when the various labelling committees lack imagination (or perhaps, interest?) so different items are given the same designation.
For example, in Australia during the 1960s-80s period we had the following: -
submachinegun, 9mm, F1
truck, cargo, 5ton, general service, F1
radio set, PRC-F1
grenade, fragmentaion, F1
So you can have situations like one guy in my first unit who was a driver and typically issued an SMG as a personal weapon. He was a range sentry for one exercise and was given a radio for that job. He was driving the F1 truck, carrying the F1 SMG and given the F1 radio for comms.
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