The Viper Mk I was an experimental submachine gun developed in the UK for use by military policemen in post-WW@ occupation West Germany. It was a simplified Sten gun (full-auto only, without the semiauto option normally included in the Sten trigger mechanism) put into a wooden housing.
It was intended to be carried slung over one shouldered fired under the arm with just one hand. To this end, it had neither sights nor trigger guard. The whole concept seems pretty questionable, and while multiple different Viper submachine guns were designed to fill this role, none were ever adopted.
Ian’s video [9:54]
I can’t watch videos at the moment, but I presume with military police the idea would be base guards dealing with intruders. The idea of a small, full auto gun does have a logic in that kind of way.
I don’t see any practical advantage this had over a Sten or Sterling though. In a pre-optics world, the technique of point fire was valid but to design a service gun that has no iron sights and only allows point shooting is beyond questionable. Similarly making it one handed might have had an idea to make it more pointable, which is arguably valid, but then it full auto only with that one hand.
Overall just a mismash of ideas, which is why I suppose it never succeeded.
The only real use i see for this is to indiscriminately fire at a crowd. Hence my comment.
The weapon is poorly designed but I doubt that wildly firing into crowds was the intent. I was trying to raise the discussion a little bit by thinking through what the the thought process could have been at the time rather than stating that it’s dumb and moving on.