The Firearm Blog has a great post with some pictures of the latest prototype of the CAA Alfa. These were taken by Konstantin Lazarev, who’s got some more photos on his Facebook page. It is unclear whether this is a functional prototype, but at least it’s not 3D printed like the last one we saw.

As before, I’m a little skeptical about this gun. “AK in a shell” has been tried by many folks, and none of them have found much success. Couple this with CAA’s lack of gun design history (the RONI doesn’t count) and being late to market compared to the IWI ACE 3X… I suspect LE and US civilian sales are what they’re counting on to make this worthwhile.

The “AK in a shell” concept is rather flawed anyways. The AK receiver and trunions basically MUST be steel due to the way the gun functions. Once you’ve gone down that route, the extra plastic is just extra weight. In my opinion, IWI had the right idea by reducing weight in all the other places, and making strategic ergonomic changes.