Full Auto Friday: Sterling Stormtrooper edition (VIDEOS)

By Chris Eger

Best known as the base for the Star Wars Stormtrooper’s BlasTech E-11 Blaster, the Sterling SMG actually has a long and interesting history of its own accord.
Springing from the mind of George William Patchett, the chief designer at the Sterling Armaments Company, the compact sub gun was designed during WWII to replace heavy and expensive to produce Lanchester SMG and Tommy gun as well as the simple yet seriously unsafe STEN gun. It was handy, at 6 pounds in weight and 18.9-inches overall with its stock folded. Its 7.7-inch barrel was fairly accurate for a room-broom, putting a five shot group into a notebook paper-sized target at 100-yards.

It used a blowback action and fired from an open bolt at a controllable 500 rounds per minute cyclic rate. Plastic furniture kept it lighter than the Thompson and Lanchester while the use of steel stampings made it easy to mass-produce like the STEN. The weapon was chambered for the standard 9x19mm Parabellum round, and fed from either the straight box STEN magazine or a curved banana clip of Sterling’s design. The Army liked it and Sterling produced a small batch for field-testing before the end of the war in 1945.

The peacetime military

Source: Guns.com