The Knight's Armament Company 6×35mm PDW is an experimental personal defense weapon designed by Knight's Armament Company, firing a new 6mm cartridge optimized for short barrel weapons. A variant chambered in.300 AAC Blackout also available. As with all personal defense weapons, the KAC PDW is intended to be compact and lightweight, but have a longer useful range.
Design
The KAC PDW combines new and off the shelf components in its design. The lower receiver, holding the magazine and trigger assembly, is essentially a shortened M16 rifle lower receiver, which makes the basic operating controls familiar to many potential users. The cartridge, upper receiver, and operating mechanism are all new designs by KAC. The KAC PDW uses a completely side-folding stock, unlike the M16 and M4 designs which have their main operating spring in a tube in the stock, and therefore can only partially telescope, and not fold sideways at all. The KAC PDW is over 10 inches shorter and more than 1 pound lighter than the currently serviced M4 carbine, a carbine in service with every branch of the US Military, and the barrel has been lightened with a new dimpling process. The KAC PDW has two gas pistons tapping hot gas from the barrel to operate its mechanism, located on the top left and right sides of the bolt carrier. The single mainspring is located on top, between the two gas pistons.
Ammunition
The KAC PDW fires a 6×35 mm cartridge, a full centimeter shorter than the western military standard 5.56×45mm NATO round. The 6mm bullet is slightly wider, and the standard 6×35mm bullet slightly heavier, than the standard 5.56mm bullet. Fired from a 10-inch barrel, KAC claims that the 6×35mm cartridge reaches a muzzle velocity of, slightly faster than the muzzle velocity of a 5.56 mm cartridge fired from a similarly short barrel. The larger diameter, shorter 6 mm cartridge is optimized for these shorter barrel lengths, and would perform less efficiently from rifle-length barrels. The round's muzzle energy is versus for a 5.56 mm bullet, again from the same 10" standard barrel. There is a discrepancy between the velocity claimed by Knight's for 5.56 mm SS109 NATO ammunition fired from a Colt Commando barrel and other M16 manufacturers' stated muzzle velocities. In any case the energies and velocities are roughly comparable.
