Frag Out! Magazine
Issue link: https://fragout.uberflip.com/i/1308154
BOR sniper rifles which were adopted by Polish Armed Forces are bull-pups. The bull-pup project was finally aban- doned and the ZMT engineers decid- ed to take another route, the more classic AR-15 layout which is now regarded as an industry standard. The SKW project was taken over by Roman Uznanski and Ragal Szela. It was 100% internally funded but in the meantime Polish MOD decided to launch a program to find the replace- ment for old Dragunov SVD semi-au- tomatic sniper rifles in 7.62x54R. The SKW was initially a .338 chambered so it was decided to scale it down to .308. Due to the potential military con- tract, the smaller version took priority. It also appears that the rifle is partic- ularly easy to scale up or down and to change the caliber. This allows for more variants and calibers. The outcome was two new rifles un- veiled during the MSPO 2018 show. In 2019 there were some changes implemented, let's take a brief look at them. Since the project has been running since 2017 there were some more developments from the time we had published a story about SKW. In Au- gust 2020 we were appointed for some live fire demo of the latest vari- ant of the SKW, now also called the Modular Weapon System. SKW-308 is now known as MWS-25 and the bigger brother, the SKW-338 is now MWS-38. But not only the names were changed. The version we showcased in Frag Out! Magazine #24 was the "2nd Gen- eration". The new rifles are now "3rd Generation". The engineers are im- plementing changes according to the feedback from the potential end-us- ers and are closely working with the military and sport long range shoot- ers community for diverse feedback. In this story we are going to focus on the MWS-25 because only the .308 rifle was available at the time of demo. S ome historical background first. The SKW program has its roots somewhere in 2010-2011 when the OBR SM (since 2012 part of ZM Tarnów aka ZMT) launched the .338 Lapua Magnum bull-pup semi-automatic sniper rifle. The pro- totype of the rifle was unveiled during the MSPO 2012 defense show. The bull-pup design was somehow trade- mark of ZMT sniper rifles – TOR and www.fragoutmag.com