Weapons in the uk - in a t2k scenario

[Rainbow Six]

I don't know the origins of it, but an L is used to denote British Army weapons (apparently it stands for Land Service) and is used for everything from pistols to 165mm guns. As others have stated it can get confusing for the same combination of numbers and letters can refer to different weapons, so it's used in conjunction with a description, e.g. L1A1 Self Loading Rifle. A higher number does not automatically mean that weapon is newer - e.g. the L118 light gun came into service long before the L85 assault rifle or the L105 pistol (I suppose it's the same as the US, with the M4 being newer than the M16).

Wiki has a listing of the more common L numbers

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...apon_L_numbers

[StainlessSteelCynic]

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.

[Ironside]

What about the L85 in the V1 timeline? When was the change in production to RSAF Nottingham? [This happened in 1988.]

I know there were a number of L1A1s in store but I don't know how many and there was the problem of the destruction of many spares in the 1983 depot fire.

[StainlessSteelCynic]

Keeping in mind I don't know a lot about the 1st Ed. timeline but I vaguely recall tensions build up around 1986... I think the SA80 series would be one of those talked about but rarely seen weapons and the L1A1 would be the dominant British infantry rifle.

[Rainbow Six]

V1 Timeline is basically a continuation of the Cold War with no fall of the Soviet Union / communism, so essentially the Real Life timeline from the early / mid 1980's continued onwards into the 90's.

As such the L85A1 would have come into service as it did IRL from 1985 onwards. However, with the Cold War ongoing it's possible that a higher priority might have been given to identifying / correcting any flaws that came to light after it entered service. Defence budgets would not have been slashed as significantly as they were IRL so the money / resource might have been there to make an earlier than real life introduction of the A2 model a reality.

It's also equally possible that no corrective action was taken and when the s**t hit the fan at the end of 1996 the British Army were still using the A1 model with all its flaws (actual or otherwise). Even if the L85 was found to be lacking I'm not sure how practical it would have been to haul large stocks of SLR's out of storage and reequip the entire BAOR at that point though, so the majority of units might have had to do the best they could with the L85 at least until the nuclear exchanges.

Personally I'm inclined to go with the former scenario but either is possible